Wicked Problems

How do you solve a problem like crime, poverty or climate change? The answer, like the problem itself, is elusive and amorphous. These are not "tame problems," but "wicked problems" -- conundrums that defy even the powerful problem-solving powers of scientific ingenuity. Join Robert and Christian for a proper Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop works
dot com. The next order of business, if it pleases

(00:23):
your Highness, is the issue of continued vandalism of the
castle's east wall more graffiti. Well, what does it say
this time? The details are not important, your majesty, but
suffice to say that that the work criticized certain royal
policies as well as the the Royal beard, the royal
the royal beard. Well, I never well, what are we

(00:45):
doing to combat the problem. We solve the west wall
graffiti issue, yes, my lord, but but we're working to
implement a constant God presence anti vandalism spikes and erratic
paint scheme is aline. Well it worked here before, it'll
work this. I'm well, yes, my Lloyd, but these solutions
merely prevent the physical vandalism of a particular stretch of

(01:08):
the wall at any given time. This is but a
tame or a benign problem, you know, Uh, the overall
issue of vandalism with the Kingdom. It's a it's a
wicked problem, a problem sorcery. Fetch the witch. I'm to general, No, no, no, no,
my Lloyd. Not so escery, not pervasiveness, complexity. We're talking
about a public policy issue here, one with roots and economics, law, religion,

(01:30):
and other areas. We can't simply pull up the weed,
because the roots are tangled throughout the soil, and indeed,
treating one underlying cause is likely to disrupt other areas
of royal interest, alienate supporters, or force us to face
unflattering facts about ourselves. The royal beard is above reproach. Certainly,
my lord, Certainly, a finer beard has never been grown

(01:53):
in God's creation, no question there. But what is in
question is the very nature of the problem. Is it
the mere physical act of vandalism? Is it the perception
of the crown, poverty, a lack of religion or education.
This is a wicked problem. Yes, my would the wickedest.

(02:15):
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamp and my name is Christian Seger. And as
you can guess from our little audio play at the
beginning there, we are talking today about wicked problems. Yeah,

(02:38):
this is a fascinating sort of overview topic. Um that,
and I wasn't really familiar with this terminology Yeah, I
wasn't either. I actually stumbled across this a couple of
days ago. In particular, I was one of the resources
that we're going to talk about today about mains sort
of political science approach to wicked problems popped up on

(03:00):
my radar and I read that and I thought, Wow,
this is a really interesting way for us to sort
of approach science for the show. And it's it's a
way that we don't usually talk about science, right, like
science podcasts usually have, like such a reverence for the
institution of science. Science is the great problem solved, or
it's the thing upon which we have built everything we
hold dear, It is the it is humanity's backbone in

(03:24):
a way. In a lot of ways, science is treated
in the same way as religion is by some people, right,
Like I know plenty of people who aren't religious, but
they turned to science as having the answers and and
and it's definitive for them, right. Uh. And this is
a really interesting way to approach that because it gets
into the deeper complexities of using science as a way

(03:45):
to solve the world's problems. Yeah, And it gets into yeah,
it basically deals with our inability or certainly are difficulties
with tackling complex problems, complex issues, um, throughout our our culture. Yeah, exactly.
So we're gonna try to approach you know, we're gonna

(04:06):
tell you what a wicked problem is, first of all.
But the way that we're going to try to approach
it here is sort of on this scale. There are
macro wicked problems which we're gonna talk about, which are
sort of like our large scale societal ills, I guess.
And then we're gonna talk about it in a relation
to science and the science community. And then we're gonna
bring it down to the human level and talk about it, uh,

(04:27):
you know in the way that it's most applied in theory,
which is in the workplace. Uh. And it's the model
of wicked problems is used, uh basically as like a
management technique. And you should probably should probably also take
a moment to discuss its ties to Boston area dialect. Yeah,
so okay, this is worth mentioning. And we played around

(04:47):
a little bit of the audio play I'm from New
England originally. Uh, And you know, most people probably don't
notice that because I tried not to affect my accent
on the air, but Whenever the word wicked is the
into something, it might seep out a little bit here there,
so you might hear me losing some rs here there,
or changing the way I pronounced things. As we're going through,

(05:09):
I'm gonna try to try to hold it together. Well.
I I admit that when I was reading the material,
I would about this, and reading some of the papers,
I would come to the phrase wicked problems, and I
would often hear hear it spoken in my head in
the voice of Julianne Moore's character and thirty Rock, which
he played the Boston She did a great job with that. Yeah,

(05:31):
it's it's either Julianne Moore or like uh, Mark Wahlberg
in The Departed, like doing his his best Dorchester accent. Okay, so,
wicked problem? What is it? You're probably wondering what the
heck are we talking about? We sort of introduced you
to the basic idea throughout that little uh the play
that we enacted. But here's the breakdown. A wicked problem

(05:53):
is a social or cultural problem that's difficult to solve
because of incomplete or contra dictory knowledge uh and usually
the number of people that are involved in the interconnected
nature of this problem is part of other problems, right,
so they're all connected. Uh, and often it's just written
off as too cumbersome to be something to bother with.

(06:15):
So this is gonna seem familiar to all of you
as especially uh citizens in the United States as we
are in the middle of a crazy the presidential cycle. Uh,
and all of these things are coming up and are
frequently being talked about with you know, in my opinion,
very little concrete answers because they're wicked problems, right yeah.
I mean it's basically a standard aspect of politics. Nobody's

(06:36):
getting up there and stumping and campaigning and saying, uh
on the on the topic of poverty. This is a
complex issue and we probably will not be able to
solve it. We're gonna throw our best minds at it.
But every time we try and fix it, we're probably
going to change the problem. Nobody's saying that. People are
saying I have a plan I have or I'm gonna
throw some really uh you know, classy people at it

(07:00):
to fix it. Uh. Nobody nobody is is campaigning um
on a platform of wicked problem. But I think like
the more mature approach and probably for some candidates maybe
once they're in office. The approach is, hey, look like
these are problems that are so big we will never
solve them, right, but we we can if we can

(07:21):
sort of understand them on a larger level like that
and use that framework, then we can approach them in
a different way that's healthier and maybe can make them better.
Maybe not solve them, but make them better. So we're
talking about poverty, sustainability, equality, health wellness, racism, are failing
education systems, terrorism, you name it. All that stuff falls

(07:41):
under sort of the rubric of wicked problems or multi
headed snake monsters in the swamp. Go back to our
hydro episode, because even the hydra, of course, the idea
of being that you every time you chop up ahead
two or more grown its place. Even Hercules, son of
a god, took on this task, and the best he
could do was limited to one undying head and just

(08:03):
sort of hide head under a rock, which is perhaps
a telling metaphor for like, even the best attempts to
tackle a wicked problem, all you can really do is
like clear cut and barry and and hope that people
forget that this was a problem. I guess I think
the hydro metaphor is gonna work well throughout this is
you know, I'm not quite sure what order we're gonna

(08:23):
release season, but yeah, so, Uh we also talked to
this week about hydros on a different episode, and hydras
are a great example for it, because you you can't
solve the hydro problem, right, you could at least the
mythic one. Yeah, you cut off one head, two more
heads grow to replace it, right, and so you But
I think maybe like the angle of wicked problems is

(08:45):
knowing what the two heads are that are going to
grow to replace it. Yeah, we're trying, yea, trying to
figure it out, or certainly just being being conscious of
the fact that complex problems are complex, that that the
that many of the issues that are are not going
to be easily tackled, and you're not gonna be able

(09:05):
to solve them with a quick application of this policy
or that policy. Uh, it's all you, That's why they
are wicked. And not to mention, you know, the theoretical
applications within the workplace. You know, I'm assuming most of
you out there listening have jobs or have had a job,
and know the frustrations that go along with that, and

(09:26):
really you can use the wicked problem model at that
level too, and I find uh that it gives like
a little bit of a sense of freedom and relief
when you think about it that way, the frustration of
employment issues. Yeah, and I think it's also important to
remember that the wicked problem is in contrast to a
tame or benign problem. The tamer benign problem is often

(09:47):
just a simple, uh, mathematical problem, you know, like, what's
what's two plus two? Well, there's an answer to that,
and it's four. Um an engineering problem. What's the how
do we build this thing so that it doesn't collapse?
There's an answer, it can achieved. You have a you
know what the mission is when you go into try
and solve it, and then you solve it. Um. We

(10:07):
love questions like that, and it's easy to look to
wicked problems and and try to solve them like that,
to want them to be solved like that. I've I've
read you know, that's one of the reasons that the
zombie um motif is so popular the zombie apocalypse, because
in the zombie apocalypse, all problems become tame or benign.

(10:29):
Zombie comes what do you do you shoot it in
the head, you can cut its head off, you kill it. Right,
those are relatively easy to solve problems, and it makes
the relevance of the wicked problems go away, right Yeah,
Like you know, your better zombie h fiction has wicked
problems in it as well. I feel like you look
at like Walking Dad, they're attempting to to to graft

(10:51):
in wicked problems into the narrative. But at heart, the
very sort of video game or Donna the Dead level,
it's all about tame benign problems. I was talking to
a friend about this yesterday as I was researching it
and saying, like, this is pretty fascinating stuff. You ever
heard of this? And he hadn't, But he said, uh,
well you know, and he may be like kind of
a broaden the scale of it, but he didn't look
at the research. He said, Well, life's a wicked problem,

(11:13):
isn't it. Like when you come down to it, the
human body is a wicked problem because no matter what
we do uh to the human body, no matter how
well we exercise, no matter what we eat that's healthy,
something's always gonna pop up that we can't control. Right, Yeah,
I mean that the self the mind is a wicked
problems problem. I think back to you know, the old

(11:33):
sound of music track. How do you solve a problem
like Maria? It's kind of a goofy reference point, but
how do you how do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you solve a problem like like the individual,
like the self? Like that is a a complex situation,
is not just you know, an A plus B equals
see equation going on there. We spend our whole lives

(11:56):
trying to solve this unsolvable problem. Yeah, and so the
interesting thing out the wicked problem, I guess paradigm are
as a as a Slavo says, peredigma is is that
you know, that's the key to it is that is
learning to approach it that way and to say, okay,
well that's an that's unsolvable, right, That's not a thing

(12:16):
that can be fixed by its very nature. But there's
ways to mitigate it, there's ways to approach it differently,
and having that very position put you in a better position,
I guess to approach it. Right. So one major proposal
that keeps coming up, and in fact, uh, if you
google wicked problems, one of the first things that comes
up is a website for a book called Wicked Problems

(12:38):
that's by a design educational facility in Austin, Texas, and
the whole books available for free. Actually you can read
it online on the web where you can buy it
and print. But they basically say, look like, the way
to approach this is through strategic design, and it's a
combination of using empathy, abductive reasoning, and rapid prototyping. Those

(12:58):
are the ways that they sort of think about. You know,
let's let's approach these first of all acknowledge that they're
a wicked problem, but then you approach it afterwards. And so,
you know, just as a reminder, because I had to
remind myself. Abductive reasoning is that it is the opposite
of deductive logic. Right, where there's a premise that leads
to a conclusion with a solution, right, there's two premises

(13:20):
lead to a conclusion in staid, Abductive is that the
premise doesn't guarantee any solution, and in fact you have
to work from inference and it's the most simple solution
that's inferred that usually leads to some kind of uh,
not a solution in this case, betterment, I guess that
that makes sense in terms of what we're talking about here,
because one of the big problems is just even defining

(13:40):
what the problem is. You know, you look at something
like like poverty. Someone says, hey, we have a problem.
There's poverty, and you say, well, what is the problem?
Is it that people are poor because of the job situation?
Is is it more cultural? Uh? Is it? Does it
have to do with our laws? Does it have to
do with enforcement of said laws? You know that there's
some of one of those things like try to solve

(14:02):
the laws, and maybe it makes another thing worse, right, Like, um,
I'm trying to think of an example, but I keep
coming back to like the interconnectedness of hunger and poverty.
And then like I saw a really good in one
of the articles about wicked problems. It was a really
good example of why poverty is such a wicked problem.
Like we think of it like, oh, we'll solve that.
We've got this problem of poverty connected to people being hungry,

(14:26):
But at the same time, we've got a problem of
obesity in our society as well, And how are those
things connected? You know, Yeah, I've been thinking about this
food thing a lot recently, because I'm currently watching Michael
Pollan's latest documentary series on Is on Netflix, and it
has to do with cooking and where cooking comes from
and then how the industrialization of food preparation preparation has

(14:47):
changed everything. Um. So you you you see this situation
where like one side is trying to make things easier,
trying to correct problems, but that ends up creating other
problems as well. Yeah. See, so it's it's actually really
interesting how easily this can be applied. I go back
to when I was in grad school. I had a
professor who basically referred to stuff like this as like

(15:08):
the model fits type analysis. Right. So you've got this
model and you put it on top of something you're
like does it fit? Okay, but then you've got to
go beyond that and sort of synthesize them, you know what,
what you've learned from it, and analyze and go further. Um,
but let's start at the beginning. So where did this
idea come from? Like or the origin of wicked problems? Right? Like?

(15:30):
It just didn't it? Well, we've certainly had them forever.
But but in terms of thinking about that exactly. Yeah, Well,
the origination of the term is generally attributed to a
pair of Berkeley professors in the nineteen seventies, Horst W. J. Riddle,
Professor of the Science of Design the University of California,
Berkeley and Melvin M. Weber, Professor of City Planning, Berkeley. Uh.

(15:53):
And then occasionally you see people giving credit to philosopher
and system science and see West Churchman largely for popular
popularizing or modernizing it. But but basically it comes down
to Riddle and Webber in particular. Riddle and web Webber
really dove into the topic in the nine paper Dilemmas

(16:13):
in a General Theory of Planning, published a published in
Policy Sciences. Yeah, I uh for this episode. I went
through and read that, and there were certainly many things
that were relevant to the discussion we're gonna have today,
But it was so grounded in the American politics of
the early seventies that there's a lot of stuff that
was like WHOA, okay, but it was interesting too write

(16:36):
to be able to look back at. Well, it kind
of gets down to one of one of the things
that will discuss that they point out about wicked problems,
if it every wicked problem is different, to the point
that if you're talking about wicked problems like just in
the shadow of a particular area, if you're thinking if
you're talking about wicked problems generally, but really in the
back of the mind, we're thinking about a specific wicked
problem that colors your your definition of what a wicked

(16:59):
problem is. Now, I do want to read part of
a quote here from them where they really get into
the whole idea of why why they choose the word wicked,
which tends to inspire of evil yea or or Bostonian inflection.
They said that they show they referred to the problems
as wicked. Quote not because these properties are themselves ethically deplorable.

(17:22):
We use the term wicked in a meaning akin to
that of malignant, in a contrast to benign or vicious
like a circle, or tricky like a leprechn um. I
love that we're able to always bring back monsters into it. Yeah,
they and more of a it's a it's a fairy
folk with it's an unnatural creature, So I think it

(17:44):
counts um and they brought it up, not us says
that door tricky like a lepricn, or aggressive like a
lion in contrast to uh, you know a lamb, we
do not mean to personify these properties of social systems
by implying malicious intent. But then you may agree that
it becomes morally objectionable for the planner to treat a

(18:04):
wicked problem as though it were a tame one, or
to tame a wicked problem prematurely, or to refuse to
recognize the inherent wickedness of social problems. And so that
right there, that last bit is what I think gets
to the heart of what maybe the connection is today
is the refusal to recognize what this is right for

(18:26):
what it is. And that brings us back to that
political analogy of everything that's going on right now. Now,
whatever candidate you support or whatever candidate you don't support,
all of them are up there. That's the inherent nature
of the political system. Right when you're running for office,
you pretend like you have all the answers, uh, and
all of them are are are basically running on a

(18:46):
platform where they're like, Oh, that problem, I have the
answer to that. Yeah, that problem, I have the answer
to that. But for me, I'm anti hydra elect me
and I have don't worry, I have a plan. I'm
gonna bring some very classy people to exterminate that high
and it's it's worse than that, right, Like, you can't, man,
how refreshing would it be to have a candidate come

(19:07):
up and just be like, well, look like the problems
that we're facing are so chaotic and so complex that
we as human beings are just not equipped to be
able to solve all of them. Well, there's your problem.
That doesn't sound like a politician, that doesn't sound like somebody,
it's like it's like some kind of philosopher or something.
And we just shove that off in a corner and say, well,
that's that's not authoritative enough for what we need. Yeah,

(19:29):
actual contemplation of the wicked problems either comes after you're
elected or it falls to the people who are charged
with fixing things by the elected indivision. Yeah, that's absolutely true.
And the very idea that you can't formulate a definition
of what a wicked problem is is actually part of
what Riddle and Weber came up with as their ten characteristics.

(19:51):
So the bulk of their article was these characteristics that
they lay down, and they basically say, look, these are
not criteria a test to determine what the wickedness is,
but their insights to help you to decide if the
problem you're facing is wicked. So let's go through these briefly,
and I'll note for those about you out there counting,

(20:11):
there's actually eleven here in our list, and that's because
Riddle and Webber. I keep going to call him Horsed
because that's his first name. Riddle and Weber came up
with ten. But then over the years, as people have
written more about this and applied it to various things,
they've come up with their own and so they're basically
the same, but I tried to sort of merge them

(20:32):
together here for for the purpose of the podcast. So
I'll start with the first one, which is that wicked
problems have no definitive formulation. They are all different and
they can't contribute to solving one another in any complete way.
You can't write a well defined statement of these problems.
And this is a direct quote from the article by
Riddle and Webber. The process of formulating the problem and

(20:53):
of conceiving a solution are identical, since every specification of
the problem is a specification of the direction in which
a treatment is considered. Yeah, I think one example that
comes to mind. Here is the war on drugs, right,
like epidemic is a problem, and then it falls to heaven,
how do you define the problem and then go after

(21:13):
it if you end up approaching it from a purely
you know, law enforcement, right when you brand it as
a war and you have chosen the direction and uh yeah,
and then it's easy for us to look back now,
look back at the eighties now and go, oh, why
did we brand it as a war on drugs? Right?
But at the time it seemed like a solution to
a problem to them. Yeah, yeah, I mean hindsight twenty

(21:36):
on that. But then but then once you've employed that strategy,
you have changed the problems we'll discuss. So number two.
Wicked problems involve many stakeholders, all of whom have different
ideas about what the problem is and what its causes are.
This again, in think of any any portion of the
world where there's a lot of conflict, like my mind
instantly goes to, uh, at least a couple of different

(21:59):
corners in the Middle East. I think of Israel and Palestine.
I think of the current situation in Syria. You have
different stakeholders that are involved at different levels who who
want different things out of this, but they want them
in the name of solving the amorphous problem here totally
and at the micro level, I think we're all familiar with,

(22:19):
you know, being in a kind of work situation or
involved in any organization. Maybe it's not work, maybe it's
your I don't know, you're you're housing organization that governs
the apartment complex you you're in. But you have all
these different stakeholders. Everybody's got their own subjective position on
these things, right, and they all have different goals too,
um So that ultimately, even just recognizing that goes a

(22:43):
long way towards making things a little bit better. All right,
this is number three. It might be impossible to measure
any kind of success with the wicked problem given their interconnectedness.
The search for solutions will never stop. There's a very
hydra portion of the argument here, because any any time

(23:04):
you you actually try and solve a complex problem, you
have to what extent is your solution creating new problems,
um and then not addressing other areas that are all
a part of the same issue. So, for instance, poverty,
if you're just if you're just trying to solve the problem,
the wicked problem of poverty by looking at jobs. That's

(23:25):
that's gonna that's gonna help some people. That is gonna
help everyone, is gonna erase poverty. No, okay, the fourth one.
There are no true or false solutions to wicked problems,
only good or bad subject It's all subjective, right, um,
And everyone's judgments will differ, and the solutions can only
be described as in that good bad paradigm or and

(23:46):
this is from the Riddle and Webber thing, but what's
probably better to describe it as is better or worse? Right,
things got better or things got worse, not they're good
now they're bad now? Yeah, Like I I think back
to the War on drugs. Like you can imagine someone saying, hey,
we applied this solution to the wicked problem. And then
someone says, well, you put a lot of these people

(24:07):
had drugs and they're in prison. Now they're off the streets.
That's good, right. And then someone might say, well, it
also means that our prison population is extremely overloaded with
these low level offenders. That's bad. They say, that's bad, right,
And the two things are like it's like a scale.
It's like this like situation where you've got all these
different scales that are attached to one another, and anytime

(24:28):
you move one little thing, everything shifts a little bit. Yeah,
it's like seating on an airplane. It's like, all right,
they move their chair back, that's bad. I move mind back,
that's good. But now the person behind me is uncomfortable,
and now the person beside me, and it gets everything
gets out of whack, and everybody's miserable and there's nothing
you can do about it. The domino effective misery. Yeah, alright.

(24:51):
Number five, there's no template to follow when tackling a
wicked problem. There's no way to determine right away if
a if A solution is working. So yeah, this gets
into just the problem of this is where we come
back to the example you mentioned earlier where they mentioned
rapid prototyping, which I guess would work in with certain
types of wicked problems, but certainly larger issues out there,

(25:15):
like how do you rapid prototype towards you know, dealing
with crime, or dealing with poverty, or dealing with hunger,
or or or or any number of what we could
problems that pop up. It's especially on that scale it's
especially difficult. Uh, we'll talk a little bit more about
I think what they meant by rapid prototyping, but it's
essentially uh, the gist is that, like, rather than come

(25:38):
up with one solution to approach a problem with and
then see if that works, and then if it doesn't,
then come up with another solution and keep trying them
over and over again, they recommend coming up with multiple
solutions and trying them all at once. But you know
there's problems with that too, so not rapid in succession. Yeah,
I believe they were like scatter shot exactly. That's the

(26:00):
shotgun method like that, Okay. Uh. The number six is
there's always more than one explanation for a wicked problem,
and you can see that inherent in the examples that
we've just mentioned as well. Yeah, number seven, Every wicked
problem is a symptom of another wicked problem and there's
no single root cause. So back to the interconnectedness and

(26:23):
the hydra nature of it, right, And this one, this one,
I think is one of the most important of their
their ten characteristics here, specifically for us here it's stuff
to blow your mind. They say there's no way to
scientifically test wicked problem strategies because they're all human inventions,
they are outside of nature. Right, So when we're thinking

(26:44):
about all these problems, like, let's go back to the hydra, right, Like,
the hydra is a natural being that we are learning
to understand by looking at through that. We're talking about
the biological biological hydra, right, and we now understand how
it's mouth opens because we looked very close slee at
it with uh light microscope. But poverty is a human invention.

(27:08):
Uh so, so how do we look at that with
a microscope? Yeah, I mean the mythological hydra is of
human creation changes every time you tell it exactly. Yeah,
you can't. So many of these problems you can't just
apply physics, and so you can't just apply look at
it from a fluid dynamics standpoint and try and figure
it out. Maybe that can be helpful in some cases
in figuring out a part of the problem if it's applicable,

(27:31):
but but probably not. Number nine. Solutions to wicked problems
are usually one shot efforts that minimize trial and error efforts.
Every implemented solution has quant consequences that cannot be undone
and this is where we get to um the fact
that every time you try and solve the wicked problem,
you change the problem, and now you have a slightly

(27:52):
different problem you have to deal with. It's not like
a mathematical equation where you like you figure out what
X is right like every time in these situations, if
you figure out what X is, then like it changes
what the definition of all the other numbers are the
original equation. It's kind of like this this Rubik's cute
that is on the table in the podcast chamber we're
we're recording right now. It's like if I try, I'm

(28:14):
trying to solve this thing, but every time I move it,
I cannot move it back to where it was. And
I'm just I'm just lost every time because each time
I try to solve it, it is a new problem
that I never get a second shot. It's solving the
same problem. The rubikscube is a great metaphor for wicked problems.
That would be maybe the Lament configuration. Okay, every wicked

(28:42):
problem is unique. This is number ten. There is no precedent.
So what this means is essentially that you can't look
back to any previous wicked problem that you've tried to
make better as like a template to say Okay, well,
let's try the same thing that we tried with that
here and see if it works. Because they're so totally
unique that there's no there's no model to work from.

(29:03):
At number eleven, this is an interesting one. Designers attempting
to address a wicked problem must be fully responsible for
their actions. Yeah, so this one, Um, I don't know
that I had trouble with it as much as just that, like,
you know, it's essentially a mission statement by the authors
here saying like, okay, so if you're going to approach
this from a design policy standpoint, you have to own it. Yeah,

(29:28):
and certainly, I mean this seems like it it is,
or at least certainly should be just part of the
you know, any political attempt or military attempt or what
have you to to tackle any kind of socioeconomic wicked problem.
Is that. Yeah, anything you do, you should be held accountable.
But as we often see that accountability here doesn't always

(29:52):
spread to everyone in the scenario. It's also important to
note here, like we can say though, that not all
hard to solve problem is are wicked. Only those that
have an indeterminate scope and scale. So let's go back
to the Rubik's cube. Right, that's a hard to solve problem,
but it cannot. Yeah, well, you have a clear objective
to like, how do you solve this thing? Will you
get I'll know it's solved when I have all the

(30:15):
same colors on the same side. So, like wicked problems,
you don't know at what point do you know it's solved.
And there's also no instant feedback because the effects of
trying to to to implement changes, say you know in society, Um,
the you're not gonna get instant to feedback. You're gonna
get feedback rolling in in waves over years, decades to come,

(30:36):
like like we were just mentioning with the war on drugs,
it's a lot easier for us now, uh, you know,
thirty plus years later to say that seems like a
silly approach, or at least the branding approach to it.
I don't want to criticize the methodology necessarily. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will discuss macro wicked problems, wicked problems in science,

(30:56):
and micro wicked problems. All right, we're back. So we've
been talking about wicked problems and how that it's a
framework that we can sort of apply almost to anything. Right, Like,
as I was saying before, I had a friend who

(31:17):
was like, well, you can talk about the human body
as being a wicked problem, but um, let's take a
look at sort of the definition that it was originally
assigned for. And what I'm calling for the purposes of
this episode macro wicked problems, which are the things The
best example I can think of to tie this to
is the current political campaign, right, So uh, and maybe

(31:39):
you're not American, but you're probably familiar with all the
zan nous that's going on in our political process right now,
or maybe wherever you're from, you I can't imagine that
politics are all that much different. It's the same friend
who mentioned the human body thing had recently traveled to
Ghana and he was like, yeah, you know, over there,
there was an election cycle in process while I was

(31:59):
visiting there, and it was the same as it is here.
It's just on a different level. So what we're talking
about here are the stances of where these you know,
these various politicians, I think that they have the one
single answer to solve a problem that society is basically
you know, arguing over right, the budget and economy, civil rights,

(32:21):
rights of corporations, uh, crime, drugs, we've mentioned those already. Education,
how we use energy and oil, the environment, uh, foreign policy,
free trade, how we reform our government. That one alone, Wow,
what a tangled mess that would be. Yeah, I mean,
did you mention climate change and the climate changes at

(32:43):
the end here? Yeah, that's a big one, because I
mean that one, it's all the definitions are talking about
multiple stakeholders. Yeah, I mean that one. That one fits
most of the criteria we've been discussing, especially multiple stakeholders,
different views on what what success means and what the
root cause is and what the problem is to begin with,
gun control, same thing, right, It's such a complex issue.

(33:05):
It's not just you know, it's always interesting to try
to bring it down to a personal level. But you know,
like I've I have friends who own guns and love
their guns and are very uh very much wants to
keep their guns and are against gun control. And it's
not for them. It's it's not like a connected to
crime at all. Right, they don't see that. But then

(33:26):
there's the wicked problem of the connections between gun control
and crime and drugs and education. You see, you see
how they they all kind of span together. Oh yeah,
I mean on the gun control issue. And we see
it time and time again, Like the issue comes up
and you know, one side says, oh, what's it's not
a it's not a gun issue, it's a mental health issue.
I just say, well, if you take all the guns away,

(33:47):
you're still not people are still going to kill each other.
I mean it goes back and forth with people. Uh
people are arguing, and that the one thing that's becoming
clear is that we don't even have a full graphs.
Like the problem it's self is as a morphous and
and just and shapeless, and all that these different voices
are doing are all they're doing is trying to give
shape to the problem. Yeah, exactly when you can't. Uh So,

(34:11):
a couple of really quick other ones, right that you're
going to be hearing about, or you're probably currently hearing about,
homeland security, immigration, that's a big one, Jobs, social security,
tax reform. Technology. Just just like this kept coming back
to me because we work in the digital media industry
and it changes so quickly that it's interesting to see

(34:32):
how both policymakers and business people try to adapt with it.
And it's it's it's impossible to sort of predict the
wave of how it's gonna progress, right, Um, and then
there's of course the good old war and poverty ones.
So yeah, these are all huge issues that affect all

(34:52):
of us. And I think like, based on the definition
that we set up for you before the break, you
can see how these are all wicked problems. All right,
we've already discussed with the problem of trying to apply
science to wicked problems that it's not uh an A
plus B equalcy scenario. It's not like saying, oh, how

(35:13):
do we get people to the moon? That's a hard
problem to solve. We solved it because we knew what
the problem was, and we knew what the destination was,
and we knew how to know that we had succeeded. Yeah,
that's absolutely true. And so the this is actually the
impetus for us talking about wicked problems here today is
there was a great article earlier in the week that

(35:35):
came out from the bangor Daily News, and it was
written by a woman named Linda Silka, and she is
a social and community psychologist at the University of Maine,
and basically she was addressing how Maine as a state
is coming together and trying to approach their wicked problems
in a different way, uh, using science basically, And she says,

(35:59):
and this is this is the key here, This is
why I thought this really connected well to our show.
She argues, Look, there's this popular culture image of science
where there's a lab coded researcher and they prove a
brilliant idea and h then you know they've solved it, right,
They've solved a problem, or they've given humanity more knowledge

(36:20):
about a thing the hydra. Right we we when we
discussed the actual hydra and its anatomy in the previous episode,
the way that we talked about it, I had that
in my head. I'm I'm imagining that some of our
listeners did, too, of people in lab coats looking at
hydras under microscopes and going, ah, we solved it right. Yeah.

(36:42):
And you know, we encountered this occasionally with with listeners
and readers stuff about your mind, because there's that vision.
But but science also involves getting it wrong, getting a
wrong a lot like. That's how we helped define what
we know and what direction research is going by making mistakes,
mistakes that you you can you can't necessarily make in

(37:04):
tackling a wicked problem. Yeah. I mean so like for
some of the things that we work on here at
how stuff works, this comes up again and again where
we're tasked with answering how X works, right, and there
isn't always an answer it the uh very often, especially

(37:24):
like when Joe and I are writing for our general
science video show brain Stuff. The answer is, well, science
doesn't know yet, but here's what we do know, right,
and there. I can't tell you how many times we've
seen answers in the comments on social media or YouTube
or something where people are like, well, why did you
even bother to make this because science doesn't have the answer,

(37:46):
And I think, well, the the the importance is like, well,
when we cover what we do know, then we're able
to sort of approach it differently, right, Yeah, I mean
it kind of gets down into that area too of
this is something science doesn't know, but here are some
theories is to how it might work. That's just that's
is how we feel our way out exactly forward. Um. So,

(38:08):
Silko's argument is that this lab coded research myth is
becoming outdated and that we need to make efforts to
ensure that research can help solve the societal challenges we have,
like wicked problems, like all the things that we were
just defining. But she's looking at it very much from
a main perspective because she's working at the University of Maine.

(38:29):
So she says, in order to solve these science needs
to be approached in a more complex way. There needs
to be interaction between scientists, decision makers and citizens. And
you may have heard about this discussed elsewhere. Some people
label it as citizens science. I know a couple of
years ago I went to south By Southwest and that
was like the big term that was being thrown around.
A lot of people were creating apps that allowed everybody

(38:51):
to be a citizen scientist and to go out and
gather data with their their phones by like taking pictures
and then it would upload to a particular scientists laboratory
have various efforts to say everybody, like everybody take pictures
of whale sharks the encounter and looking to a database.
Everyone used a screen saver that enables Setty to search
for intelligent lot. The library that I used to work

(39:11):
at was part of the World Community Grid that contributed
basically whenever the computers were uh in sleep mode, they
were contributing their processing power towards solving scientific problems. Uh
so yeah. So her argument is essentially that all of
us need to know about the issues, and all of
us need to be involved because we all have important

(39:34):
roles to play. And she says, let's move away from
what is called the loading doc approach to science, and
the metaphor for that loading doc approach to science goes
like this. You've got a scientist and they're basically acting
like a factory that produces widgets, right, and they're not
producing widgets for any particular person. Then they just put
those widgets on the loading dock and they wait for

(39:55):
somebody to come along and go, oh, that's something I
have a use for and take it away right. Um,
And I see this, you know, having worked in academia previously.
Of course, like the way that that system is set up. Uh,
it's not always necessarily working conjunction to solve a problem.
More often it's kind of like I need to get
published that I can get right. Uh So, instead of

(40:17):
the loading doc procedure, she says, we should create a
product that is useful to people who actually need it.
So science should try to work together to figure out
the poor and the hungry issues that we've been talking about,
or something that doesn't require people to necessarily have full
access to the set of complications that are involved in
scientific research. Essentially, I think what they mean by that

(40:39):
is like, you don't have to have a PhD. Right, Um,
So we already have really scared science resources, as we
know from all the stuff that we cover for the
show and for the other stuff that we work on here.
How do we focus our solutions for the right kind
of stakeholders? While in Maine, she says, researchers are trying
to tackle this problem differently and specifically so that the

(41:01):
way that they address sustainability. So they're bringing together shellfish
harvesters with their policy makers and biologists and economists to
all discuss the issues surrounding What I would assume is
you know of farming shellfish for for food industry. Another
example she gave was solving the decline in mains blueberry crops,

(41:24):
which they see as also being connected to the collapse
of their pollinator be population. Now, I don't know how
many times in different forms are shows here at how
stuff works. We've talked about colony collapse disorder. It's something
that's on a lot of people's radar, but this is
an interesting way to approach it, that it's not just Okay,
that's a science issue we need to solve, but also, hey,

(41:45):
we've got these blueberries over here that are important to
our economy. What does that mean for this you know? Uh?
And then ultimately her she says, there's also scientists who
are going to argue against this, so be prepared for
a backlash. And there's lots of scientists who claim that
anyone who doesn't have formal training, they won't do any
good research, right, They're not going to be capable of

(42:07):
contributing to the discipline. It's what in academia is often
referred to as the siloing effect, right where everybody puts
themselves in little silos and they sort of have their
their beefdoms that they want to fight over control full
of her well, in Nane, this is exactly how the
the Arrowhead facility opened up, that rift into the Todash
darkness exactly. It's you know what, like the Mists would

(42:28):
not have happened if we just approached things as a
wicked problem. I know, all those people in that grocery store. Man. Yeah,
it was a tough time. You know what, That's a
good uh segue for us to bring it down where
we've been up. We've been up in the outer space
of todash darkness, talking about the macro version of this,
talking about the science version of it. Let's bring it
down to the micro level, right. Uh. We've all worked

(42:50):
for organizations, presumably right in our current society. That's how
we can afford the devices that we have to listen
to podcasts on. Yeah, even if you don't have to
work for an organization, you're probably having to come in
contact with organizations. You know. If that alone, hit man,
you still have to work for the mafia. Yeah, it's true.
It's true. So what we found when we were looking

(43:12):
at the wicked problem thing is, yeah, it's being applied
in the science aspect up in Maine. But by and large,
almost all the research that was showing up for me
was management stuff or business review type magazines. And the
big one that I looked to was a piece by
John Camillis that was in the Harvard Business Review in

(43:33):
two thousand and eight. Uh And basically, uh, he studied
strategic planning at twenty two different companies. Then he looked
in depth at seven of them, and he finally zoned
in specifically on DuPont Pharmaceuticals, which has come up on
the show before. I don't I can't remember at the
top of my head was Alexander Shulgan who worked for DuPont.
It was somebody like It wasn't, Yeah, I think it

(43:56):
might have been shun Um. It wasn't really no, right,
So he finally he zoned in on DuPont to kind
of see how that company drew up its strategies to
deal with uncertainty, and he used all of these to
come up with ways to talk about taming problems within
the workplace, the ones that can't be solved, the wicked problems. So, yeah,

(44:19):
camillisit basically makes the same argument that those guys made
back in the early seventies, but in terms of companies, right,
So he says, companies are faced with constant, wicked problems
in their increasingly complex and violent environment. So you're looking
at changing the way that we look at strategic planning processes,
which are very traditional. They don't address wicked problems in

(44:41):
any way. So in fact, the actual processes that are
used to approach the problems may and sell it may
in fact be wicked problems themselves. Right every time you yeah,
every time you change the structure of the business, potentially
new wicked problem. Right. Yeah. I'm thinking of like every
time like a company goes through a reorganization, right, or

(45:03):
a restructuring pivots, Yes, the pivoting, which is something we
hear about quite often. Um yeah, or uh you know,
big surprise. This piece was written eight years ago, and
it doesn't seem like policymakers and companies have really acknowledged
it yet. You know, I've I've worked here for three years.
I've worked in the public sector, in academia and in libraries.

(45:26):
I used to work for a publishing company before this,
and then long ago, I was a graphic designer working
in a sort of direct marketing world, and I didn't
see it. Any of those businesses a sort of recognition,
recognition of the like organizational principle of the wicked problem. Um.
And I don't know, I don't know. Maybe they're out there.

(45:46):
I'd love to hear it. If some of you out
there listening work for a company that thinks about running
the company in such a way let us know, because
it sounds like it would be, I don't know, sort
of heavenly place to work at. Um. Well even know,
one of the issues is that I feel like a
lot of workplaces and I'm and i'm speaking you know,
I'm speaking to it to My history with with various

(46:08):
employers over the years is that, um it's one thing
to to have a meeting about a problem, to try
and to find that problem in a way that's that's good. Like,
that's how you should approach wicked problems, is to not
just throw out solutions willy nilly and see what happens.
You should discuss it. You should try and get figure
out what are some of the route issues here, what
are the different viewpoints. But a lot of times in

(46:30):
a corporate environment, like that's all that gets done. Like
you have those meetings, the results are are are typed up,
and the wicked problem UM summary winds up on somebody's desk.
Maybe there are some recommended solutions, Maybe some of those
get implemented, maybe the safer ones get implemented. But does
does anything ultimately change? Maybe not. Yeah, that's actually interesting

(46:53):
because Camillus, you know, one of his recommendations is essentially uh,
right at the top, he says, well, you got to
involve your stakeholders and document everybody's opinions and then make
sure that everybody's communicating about what those opinions are. And
that's what you just described. But you're right, in a
lot of situations just kind of stops there, right, Um,
Like there, there isn't the action part that comes after it. Um.

(47:15):
And he he actually came up with his own five
system symptoms based off of all these other people came
up with and they're fairly similar. Um, you know, we
get the same thing with there's many stakeholders. They all
have different values and different priorities. Of course, you see
that in the workplace, right like some managers of some
departments have their own values and priorities while another manager
and another tier above them into the side of them,

(47:37):
has a different set of priorities. It is not necessarily
being communicated clearly or in the worst situations, you're you're
one of those employees who find yourself with two or
more bosses, figure out who am I listening to what
and what is the priority? And just like the larger
macro problems, you know, they've got complex, tangled roots their problem.
It's difficult to come to grips with and every time

(48:00):
you try to approach it it changes. I'm thinking like
like I'm thinking of previous workplaces I've been at, where
like there's been a problem employee, right, and it's just
like a person that everybody knows is a problem, and
you go the simple solution is just fire that person.
But like in certain atmospheres, you can't just do that, right,
because there's repercussions to that as well that subsequently tangle

(48:21):
and lead to other problems too. I have unfortunately seen
that many many workplaces. Um again, they have no precedent,
there's nothing to indicate what the right answer is, right,
there's no Like I love how we we all think
of HR human resources is being like, oh, well they've
got the answer, right, Like there's a handbook they go
to school for that. So clearly there's there's gotta be

(48:43):
a way to approach this in a particular way that
has the answer. But I don't necessarily know that that's true. Yeah,
I mean you get to say that they have a
they have a system, they may have a guide, they
may have a way to discuss a problem that arises,
but ultimately the the I mean, we've all heard of
situations with people we know where the the HR solution

(49:03):
is not the best solution. Yeah, certainly, certainly. Yeah. Um.
And it's interesting too because, like my wife has worked
at all different kinds of companies as well too. I
feel like between the two of us over the last
fifteen years, we've had like this very broad spectrum of
types of places to work at, and yet like we
see the same problems that all of them, you know, Yeah,
I mean, in a way, it comes down to what

(49:24):
was the famous Reagan quote about government, about government isn't
the solution of the problems? Government is the problem? Which
is you know, I think going a bit too far,
but it does tie in to the basic idea that
the body that tries to fix a wicked problem, be
it you know, a large sweeping macro problem, more micro problem,
the body that tries to fix something almost inevitably messes

(49:47):
it up or messes it up for some people. Yeah,
it's like it's almost like you have to figure out, like, Okay,
they're gonna mess this up, But is the mess that's
going to be left afterwards better than the mess that
we have, Yeah, what is my relationship to the mass?
Want to be like I know, like you know, I
know it's gonna be messy, but can I live with
the mass. So let's quickly go through Camillis's solutions, which

(50:10):
are beyond just like what you described, which is the
sort of Yeah, everybody sit around and talk about a thing.
We'll write it down and we'll put it in a
document somewhere and file it away. Um, does this sound
familiar for anybody out there? Define what your corporate identity is? Right?
What what are the company's values? What is it competent at?
And what are its aspirations. I can't tell you how

(50:31):
many places I've worked for that, uh that those aren't
clear to all the employees. And yet like it seems
like something that should just be relatively simple, right, even
like when we see like fictional versions of companies and
thinking like I'm thinking of what's the evil company in RoboCop? Uh? Yeah, yeah,

(50:52):
Like that's a perfect example. Like the people who worked
there seemed to pretty much have an idea of what
its values were, what they were good at building killer robots,
and what its aspirations were, which is basically taken over
the city of Detroit. Right, But you find in a
lot of situations that there's there's like a vague sort
of anxiety inducing uh, amorphous nous to what the company

(51:14):
you work for is doing. Right, Yeah. I mean meanwhile,
you go to like a your average kindergarten class and
generally the rules are on the wall, right exactly. That
would be great if we had that like on the
refrigerator or something at all different corporations, like here's what
it is, it's written in kran There's also, of course,

(51:34):
like what Robert was mentioning earlier, you got to take
action on things. And this connects to what we were
talking about with the rapid prototyping. So instead of thinking
through every option that's available before choosing a single one,
they recommend what Camillis does in particular, experimenting with multiple
strategies that seem like they're feasible, uh, and launch innovative

(51:55):
pilot programs. And this is interesting to me because this
is something actually at how stuff works. We've heard a
lot in the last i'd say two years maybe, which
is don't be afraid to fail, right, And there's a
At first I had trouble struggling with that and now
I sort of see, oh okay, so this is that
approach that I don't know that rapid prototyping is the
right term. The way I've often heard it described as

(52:18):
the whole fail, fail quickly, and fail often, you know, yeah,
which is try a bunch of different things, which is
you know sort of that's okay, then we know not
to do that one approach. Yeah, Yeah, Like generally a
b testing is is uh is that it's a great
way to do this. You just roll it out for
some people and you show them a you show them
be figure out what works, and you go with that
and you do this and you know, with without having

(52:39):
to invest much more time and money in testing the product,
and you bring it back to the macro level for
a second here, and you go, oh wow, Like, there's
no way that governments can act this way, right, because
if they're just like, well, we'll just try twenty different
things and if nineteen of them fail, at least we'll
have found one thing that works. There's plenty of people

(53:00):
out there who go, what about all my tax dollars
that were just spent on the nineteen things that didn't work? Right?
So there's an inherently a wicked problem there as well well,
and a lot of them a lot of a lot
of businesses or maybe maybe have a lot more in
common with dictatorships as opposed to a democratic republic. So

(53:21):
you know, it's a little more a little a little
more complicated on on the macro level life well, spinning
off your dictatorship metaphor. It's kind of interesting because dictators
don't necessarily have this one particular communication orientation that Camillis recommends,
and I like this. Uh, it really stems out of
the basic necessity of all kinds of human communication, and

(53:43):
it is to adopt what's called a feed forward orientation.
So when you're trying to solve problems, don't just use
feedback for communicating with your organization about what the problems
are and how to tame them, because feed back rely
solely on the past and what happened, while wicked problems

(54:05):
all arise out of an unclear future, right, So remember
that that indeterminable scope that they have, um, so you
really need to envision that that future that's that's unclear
and try to envision what you'd like it to be.
So this gets back to the aspirations of what of
who you're working for, and then communicate what that organization

(54:26):
wants its future to look like to everybody involved in
the organization. You know, it's interesting because some of these
ideas regarding the corporate environment, they have spilled over into
sort of family management uh scenarios there. For instance, in
my family, UM, me and my wife and my son,
we try and have a weekly meeting, and at the

(54:48):
weekly meeting, everybody has to has to discuss what worked
during the week, what didn't work during the week, what
they would like to change in the coming week, as
well as like what we would like to eat in
the coming and things like that, uh and that. But
that approach is based on some of the principles that
have been bouncing around in the corporate world for the
past ten years or so. Yeah, that is an interesting approach.

(55:11):
And essentially what we're talking about here is just open communication,
which surprisingly, you know, for human beings, which like one
of our greatest assets is our ability to communicate with
one another. We're not so good at at at doing
it in these kind of situations where we're tackling these
real world, big problems. Yeah, I mean, we did a
workbook uh for it where we had to. We even
had to come up with our own essentially our corporate

(55:32):
identity for like, what our what's our motto? What are
our values? I bet Bastion had a giraffe in there somewhere. Um,
you know, he was not he was not super helpful
in the crafting the of of this particular document. But
that sounds like good advice for for any you know,
uh family unit. You know, so you know, who are

(55:53):
we what what are we trying to do here? What's
this little family? You know, let's get out of the
moment to moment ing and just think a little a
little broader. Yeah, I like that. That's cool. Well, it
sounds like that you can take that and you can
extrapolate it out words and apply it on the work level.
You're can apply it on the science level, and then
you can apply it on the sort of macro scale
level that we've been talking about. So that really gets

(56:15):
at the gist of wicked problems we weren't able to.
I mean, you know, obviously it's much denser than what
we talked about today, and I feel like this is
maybe a little denser than most stuff to blow your
mind episodes are. But you know, we we at least
covered the surface of this is what they are, this
is how they apply to the real world that we
exist in and science. Yeah, and I have no doubt

(56:36):
that we will refer back to wicked problems in the
future as we tackle other other topics, be they you know,
ultimately scientific or or more likely cultural. So, those of
you out there listening, uh, let us know. I'm really curious.
I'm always curious to see what our audience has to
say about our episodes, but in this instance, in particular,

(56:57):
I'd like to see what you think about the theory
of wicked problems, how it's applicable in your life, or
how you could see it being applicable maybe on a
larger scale. Or those of you out there, we know
a lot of people who listen to the show are
graduate students or actual scientists working in laboratories. How it
affects the work that you're doing. Yeah, indeed, and how
do you personally tackle wicked problems? I don't think about

(57:19):
them because they're they're wicked problems that that exist. Uh,
you know within a country. There we could problems that
exist within a family. Uh, how do you dance around
those and define them? So usual places to reach out
to us and let us know your thoughts on these things.
We've got Facebook, we're on Twitter, we are on Tumbler,
we're even on Instagram. Now we're gonna start posting to

(57:39):
that soon and you can start seeing pictures of things
that we're taking and of us, and probably images I
would assume of the podcast episodes that were distributing as well. Yeah,
we'll blow the mind on there. I think currently there's
just one picture of me with a third ey Oh okay,
well that's a good place to start. Uh. And then,
of course, how else could they reach out to us
to just discussed their wicked problems. Oh, just get in

(58:01):
touch with us the old facting way. Email us at
below the mind at how stuff works dot com for
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