Unpacking Wicked Problems
As a senior executive in a series of environmental engineering firms, I was shocked and confused by our inability to make real impact on the environmental outcomes of our clients. Our client list included major mining companies, energy producers, salmon farmers, beef producers, abattoirs … serious, well-capitalised companies, with a significant investment in Corporate Social Responsibility. Regardless, change was incremental, environmental harm ongoing, and staff frustrated as a result.
I discovered similar limitations in Green politics, climate education of engineers, facilitation and mediation of community groups and corporate staff. As a result, at the age of 57, I took myself off to University to study this problem using academic rigour to analyse the vast amount of research literature generated on the topics of sustainable development, sustainable business and sustainable transitions. Ten years later, I am writing about the nature of wicked problems, the reasons we cannot solve them and how we overcome the mistakes that lead us to keep using old methods to tackle problems they were never designed to solve.
I was excited then, to see the crystal-clear analysis of wicked problems laid out by Dr Alwin Tan on Linked In this week. Raising the issue of single use medical equipment (yes, we daily throw out surgical scissors that have been used to cut a bandage, open a plastic bag or trim a finger nail) Dr Tan notes, “No clinician ordered this outcome. No nurse designed this system. No sustainability officer can ‘educate’ their way out if it.”
It is the nature of wicked problems that they emerge from complex systems where many relatively simple systems, designed for many different purposes, are overlaid and interact in ways that have unintended consequences. There is lots of analysis of the mechanisms that cause this, the mathematics of it, and frameworks for understanding and dealing with it. My role as a consultant and an academic is implementing, teaching, and researching these solutions.
Dr Tan puts his finger on the challenge for large organisations when he writes,
“Wicked problems require clumsy solutions:
- overlapping responsibilities,
- built-in feedback loops,
- room to pause and correct course,
- and shared ownership of risk.
Leadership here is not about having the answer. It’s about asking the right questions and holding the tension.”
Dr Tan also addresses the role of AI in this complex landscape. That is very important but is for a future article. What I write about in this article, though, is how we ask the right questions, and understand the tension(s) that we will be asked to “hold”.
Complexity
The first thing to understand is the nature of complexity and why wicked problems are “unsolvable”. The easiest tool I know for visualising this is called the Cynefin framework, pronounced kuh-NEV-in. (I know … it’s Welsh!) It’s a proprietary system so I have not used their diagram here, but a simple search will reveal its mysteries.
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If we think about a large building, an aeroplane, or a piece of software it is pretty complicated, but it can be broken down into a series of individual parts. These individual parts are pretty simple. If we move that lever, the speed of the engine increases, for example. There is a direct relationship between cause and effect. We can take the engine apart and put it back together. If the throttle does not work properly we can track down the point where the communication breaks down and fix it. Complicated systems can be examined, deconstructed and understood. We know how they are put together.
Complex systems, however, do not respond to such straightforward analysis. This is not just a matter of the number of moving parts, though that does contribute. The more complicated we make our machine or software, the more we lose touch with the relationship between the inputs and the resultant behaviour. Antoine St Exupery, the fighter pilot who wrote The Little Prince wrote in 1939 “at the end of its evolution, the machine hides itself.” This was famously echoed by Arthur C Clarke in 1963 when he declared as Clarke’s Third Law “The best technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Complex systems are more like nightmares than magic, there is something unhinged about them. To quote Dr Tan’s article of yesterday again, “If we reduce waste, we may increase infection risk, cost, or staff workload. If we prioritise safety, we increase environmental harm. Every solution creates a new problem.” The interdependence of these systems creates feedback between them that were not part of their design. Usually this is because they were not designed to interact. As a result, when we try to manage complex systems, our interventions have unexpected results.
Constraining the questions
My research indicates that when we try to define a wicked problem, we realise that the problem is not limited by the things that we control. We keep finding ourselves drawn outside the container in which we have decided to work and dealing with external issues, that should have nothing to do with the problem we are trying to solve. We try to reduce emissions by electrifying transport and create a problem of battery waste and do nothing to reduce emissions from building new cars and freeways, parking congestion or pedestrian death and injury. At the same time, our focus on carbon emissions is starving the environmental movement of funds to manage biodiversity loss, shrinking ground water and nutrient overload or microplastic.
Mariana Mazzucato has developed a Misson Mapping process that manages this, by breaking down broad goals into smaller missions, in the same way that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals have been broken down into 169 targets and even more measurable indicators (232 to 244 depending how you do the counting). Her key innovation is to map the stakeholders in any particular mission and then design individual impact projects that one or more stakeholders care about, that contribute something to the overarching goal.
In my research, I discovered that there are fundamental conflicts between stakeholders that prevent agreement on appropriate pathways to a particular goal. These conflicts are not just disagreements about how we best manage a particular process or measure an outcome. These are disagreements about what is good, what a particular term actually means, what we are measuring and why. What Mazzucato’s method provides is a way to separate these individual projects so that individual stakeholders can get on with a project that does something good, without needing to convince everyone else to get on board. The challenge then, is how do we manage all these different responses all pulling in slightly different directions?
Holding the tensions
I call this orchestrating multi-faceted policy responses and I have outlined this in my responses to various government inquiries in food security and am now applying it to the digitisation of health records. I have worked with three Masters students developing different solutions to the problem of medical waste applying Mazzucato’s approach to their workplace.
We are still at the beginning of understanding how to unpack wicked problems and how to create impact projects that address the pieces we unpack. It is critical, though, because passing laws that outlaw the recognition of wicked problems, arresting the people who suggest solutions that do not fit with our world view, or bombing people who complain about the outcome of our oversimplified solutions will not make the problems go away. The world is going to get a whole lot more complicated, a whole lot more quickly, and we are going to need every tool we can to respond.
#wickedproblems #yourlifeyourplanet #ylyp #correlatingresonance #normativedissonance
Ebbs, G. (2025). Unpacking Food Security. Retrieved from https://geoffebbs.au/unpacking-food-security/
Mazzucato, M., Cimoli, M., Dosi, G., Stiglitz, J. E., Landesmann, M. A., Pianta, M., . . . Page, T. (2015). Which Industrial Policy Does Europe Need? Intereconomics, 50(3), 120–155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10272-015-0535-1
Snowden, D., & Rancati, A. (2021). Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis. A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework. Retrieved from https://thecynefin.co/
