🐲 How can we face wicked problems?

The Game of Quality

How to make a mythic pattern language

In the airplane, black rectangles…

A Mythic Pattern Language

How to bring a myth to life (and share it with friends)

Why We Should Create Personal Mythologies (and How)

An experiment in using mythic mode to confront the…

Goals vs opponent processes

Dear Jon,

I think you’re on to something here and I wanna see if I can connect the dots. There are a lot of things that are commonly understood to be a bit tricky to acquire directly. Like happiness, or a high-functioning city plan, or a funny joke…

Where to Focus in an Infinite Game

It doesn’t have to be vague

Buster and Kevin,

I really like the framing of finite versus infinite games. I think it’s a good way to understand things like wicked problems, and also a way to…

On dragons and dark forests

Congrats, Jon Bell, you just killed the dragon (metaphor).

Dragons Considered Harmful

Freeing the dragons from our own mind

Kevin and Buster,

I’m a designer and facilitator by training, and one technique that I often lean on in brainstorms is called “lateral thinking.” When a discussion…

Kevin,

I like what you did with the different kinds of dragons. It’s helpful to think about how dragons can’t exist in a vacuum. Wicked problems aren’t intrinsically problematic. They are only wicked problems from a specific perspective. And I can now better understand why the “there is no single perspective that fully…

Where are the dragon eggs?

Can we identify a source or a pattern that leads to the emergence of a new wicked problem?

Hi Buster,

What are the qualities of a wicked problem?

I’m 100% on board with thinking about wicked problems…

Personally Wicked

What do wicked problems look like on a personal scale?

Dear Nobody,

Does a wicked problem have to be world-spanning? The classic examples all seem to be huge, the solutions out of reach because it would require…

Exploration games, gardening games, and foolish games

Chat transcript between Kevin McGillivray and Buster Benson.

Buster: For my new year’s resolution, I’m starting a low-quality, short-lived blog with musings on a question…