Thanks to everyone who responded to my call for examples of “wicked problem” cases. What a rich and diverse set of topics! Working through these, maybe this framework may help organise our understanding …
The make-up of wicked problems
Why this framework …
First, not-wicked cases
The examples you raised were indeed wicked, or heading that way, on the criteria from that 1973 piece by Rittel and Webber. But some documented cases are either not wicked at all, or only made-so by choosing to add complications.
Some claim that supply chains are cases of wicked problems. Yes, they soon get complicated, but we’ve known how to use dynamic models to wrangle those complications for decades. Any wickedness tends to come from the intervention of people in the system, as has long been shown with the well-known Beer Game team exercise.
That HBR article Strategy as a Wicked Problem gave us the case of Wal-Mart’s challenge on how to sustain growth when it had used up all the opportunities for its original store format in N America. But that’s a well known challenge that many retailers have confronted and solved, either by format-variation (France’s Carrefour) or by geographic expansion (IKEA). The first solution is a complicated, but not wicked problem of diversifying to exploit new market segments. (I will try to explain a simple tool for planning that strategy another time). The second solution is not wicked either.
Twitter’s problems of a few years back (per-Musk) – how to become sustainably profitable, is another putative wicked case. But if we follow our drill-back method, what do we find? They couldn’t make enough ad-revenue to cover costs. Why? Because the whole point of the platform’s ‘value’ (the short message) meant users spent too little time per visit to be worth advertising to. Now there may be further complications, but following our Ockham’s razor principle, let’s prove first that this simple explanation can’t explain what we see.
People and intangibles
That supply-chain case hints at a common cause of true wickedness – people. It’s not easy, but certainly do-able, to devise technical management systems for managing supply chains. Indeed some who follow these notes are experts in doing exactly that! But that Beer Game exercise confounds teams because players are trying to figure out in their heads – and fast – what’s happening, creating false expectations and over-compensating.
One reply I had pointed to another case where people complicate an otherwise easily-managed issue. Product development pipelines often feature products that fail somewhere along the path – they don’t appeal to enough possible customers, are too costly to make, etc. But what if you are the product champion? You don’t want to be the person who presided over a failure, so you wriggle in any way possible to make it look like the product could work, then move on quickly, leaving the problem to someone else to deal with. So, we end up with a wicked problem – a pipeline of zombie products.
Multiple actors
So we have tricky issues (Twitter/Wal-Mart), that can become complicated if they extend outside the business itself (supply-chain) and/or made a bit wicked by the limits of human intuition (product development).
Then we have the further source of true wickedness – multiple stake-holders. Thanks to Sam Allen for the challenge of cutting food waste.
Objectively, it could be just a complicated supply-chain problem – where does food waste arise from farm to shipper to processor to retailer to household? But those actors have motivations that make it not so simple. E.g. households buy more than they need because price-per-unit is lower, then throw away out-dated food; stores stock slow-moving items so they don’t lose consumers that go out of date etc.
From tricky to wicked
So it looks we have a kind of hierarchy of wickedness. Sorting the issues mentioned last time in order of increasing wickedness may be something like this:
Customer experience and satisfaction
Technological obsolescence
Supply chain management
Cybersecurity and data privacy
Employee engagement and retention
Improving diversity and inclusiveness
Sustainability and environmental issue
And it looks like truly wicked business problems are actually quite rare, only arising in multi-stakeholder cases replete with intangible factors.
NEXT TIME we can think about how we can use this hierarchy to wrangle ever-more wicked problems.