Wicked Problems

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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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? 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. 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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,

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

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 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 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. 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, 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

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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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. 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

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 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, 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, 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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

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 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

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 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 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

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, 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

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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

touch with us the old facting way. Email us at below the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com