I have been puzzled by the documented cases of supposedly “wicked” problems that do not seem to me to be particularly wicked at all, and I suspect do not look very wicked to you either?
Then I remind myself that, while we may be able to see ‘the system‘ behind these cases, other folk can’t. If all they have to work with is a linear cause-effect, ‘spreadsheet’ view of how the world works, it’s hardly surprising they see intractable complexity everywhere.
I am really not trying to show off here. I had exactly the same problem in the past. I cringe in embarrassment to recall some of the marketing-analyses and business plan models I did back then! And I would still be in that state if I had not been lucky enough to be shown how dynamic models capture the real world. It is simply a different way of seeing that you can’t not-see once you know how.
So let’s pick up what we learned from ‘What makes a wicked business issue?‘ and walk through how a step-wise approach can help wrangle those challenges …
HOW to wrangle wicked problems
1. Start with the tangible system we can easily understand
Common advice seems to be to engage all stakeholders to brain-storm the whole issue. Now my facilitation skills are not great, but I fear that’s a huge task in itself, that will take a long time, at much cost. And [1] we won’t have any data about most things, so the exercise can only be descriptive, and [2] we already know that people don’t understand the systems in which they operate.
So I start by capturing the core of the system that we can understand, and that we can validate with numerical evidence.
How does that help? Well, no matter how wicked the problem, its outcome must – ultimately and most directly – be driven by changes to tangible factors. And we know exactly how to do that!
See our course on how to build business models here (includes free preview lessons).
2. Push on to include relevant intangibles
We further know that intangible factors affect how that tangible system performs – reputation drives customer-growth; work-pressure drives productivity and staff losses; and so on. We further know how those intangibles themselves are affected by conditions and changes in the tangible system – as well as by our own actions and decisions!
And the great news here is that we also know how to capture and quantify those intangibles themselves, and their impact on the tangible system.
Which intangibles to tackle? – those that are most directly connected to the tangible elements that are most problematic.
Adding intangibles to our understanding may be enough, alone. Some wicked problems are traceable entirely to intangibles interacting within our own business system itself. I have previously commented on a seemingly simple case of poor customer-support in a B2B SaaS business. There, the obvious solution (hire more staff) can’t work, because the problem is constantly exacerbated by other parts of the system (customer demand for more features + winning ever-more customers who find the system hard to use). But we can’t just stop winning customers or adding the features they want. So we have to intervene elsewhere in the system, and accept that meeting objectives A and B will mean compromising on issues C and D.
See a short course on Intangibles here, and my full Intangibles class here, with a free Preview lesson.
3. Reach out to external factors and stakeholders (if needed)
But the most wicked problems of all are those that involve the interests of, and interactions with, 3rd parties and factors beyond our direct influence.
One of the issues in Wal-Mart’s growth challenge noted in the HBR article Strategy as a Wicked Problem concerned the sourcing of products from countries where super-low costs came from exploitation of cheap labour … and that’s a problem, beyond its moral implications, because of its potential to damage Wal-Mart’s reputation among new potential consumer groups. (Although, as I noted last time, the challenge for any retailer of overcoming saturation coverage of its store-network expansion is a known, not-wicked problem.)
I have posted previously on how we can extend our digital-twin models to encompass any such external factors that we wish.
See a short course on extending models to external factors here.
Wrangling the biggest wicked issues
In principle, we should be able to deploy the same 3-level approach to encompass any degree of wickedness, such as transitioning the entire car industry and its market from ICE to EVs, or anticipating the impact of AI on the legal profession. Whether that’s practically feasible, or worth the effort, is another matter.
So do we conclude … ?
There is no such thing as wicked business problems,
only problems we don’t have the frameworks to solve –
but we do have those frameworks.
I guess there will be howls of disbelief at this claim that we already have the concepts and tools to wrangle wicked issues, so please reply to let me know .. contact@strategydynamics.com.