I wrote yesterday about why “common sense” isn’t sufficient to address most of our questions. Today I want to elaborate on that, using one of the articles that has shaped my thinking for thirty years: “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. (Horst was one of my teachers at Berkeley, a true mad scientist of design process.) The article puts forth the idea that there are problems that can be solved, and problems that can be temporarily resolved. They developed the idea of “tame” problems, which have rules and definitive outcomes, and set that against the idea of “wicked” problems. The original formulation of wicked problems has ten characteristics; I’ve combined them somewhat.
- Frame Diversity: there’s no definitive way to frame the problem. Every problem can be seen to be just a symptom of another problem. Different people will reasonably disagree about what the problem even IS, and why it matters, and to whom. The choice of evidence we bring to the table will reflect our own definition of the problem, and our judgment of whether or not we’re doing “better” than we had been.
- Leverage Diversity: every player has a different body of knowledge that leads them to take different kinds of actions. Let’s think about a “good city.” Some professionals will work toward that economically, some aesthetically, some socially, based on what they know how to do. Us amateurs will work toward that through persuading neighbors, threatening neighbors, running for office, cleaning up our yard, putting bars on our windows, or a thousand other means of action. The way we think about the problem depends in part on the tools we have for the task.
- Perpetual Motion: there’s no point at which the problem is done, because it exists in an ongoing system. Every action we take changes the problem. And every instance is a little (or a lot) different than the others, so learning from experience is limited.
- Important Ramifications: every attempt changes people’s lives—in both the short and long term, in ways that are immediate and decades away. To use Rittel and Webber’s lovely formulation, “the designer has no right to be wrong.” Just as importantly, we have no right to ignore the problem, which is its own action with its own ramifications. Everything we do, or don’t do, matters.
In the fifty years since publication, some other folks have added more characteristics, and I’ve thought of a couple myself.
- Urgency Diversity: every day without a solution brings us further toward bad outcomes. But we have some comfort and familiarity with how things work now, and we’re resistant to change.
- Information Diversity: we all work from limited information. Leaders can be out of touch with customers or citizens, and customers don’t have any idea how complicated the work of the business is. We all read different things, have different educational history, are part of different social networks. And because of the economic importance of the work, there’s motivation to lie
- No One Can Save Us. There’s no external force who can come in and fix things. All of us who create the problem every day are the ones who have to clean it up. And of course, we all disagree about what we can do or why we shouldn’t.
I did a talk on this idea about ten years ago at a college symposium. Afterward, one of the attendees told me that this approach seemed nihilistic—”I guess we all just throw up our hands and let things happen.” Given that he was a research chemist, his response was no surprise: he’d built a career dealing with tame problems that respond to known rules, that can be subdivided into subtasks and then reassembled, that have precise instrumentation, that have singular outcomes that do or don’t conform to expectations. The experimental method is based on the reduction of confounding variables, and wicked problems are nothing but confounding variables.
Henry Ford didn’t know that his horseless carriage would change city planning worldwide. A handful of engineers communicating on ARPANET didn’t foresee TikTok or 4chan. Wicked problems are inherently ecological; when we pretend they’re tame, we screw up a TON of other things.
More tomorrow.
Herb Childress 