What wind turbines, cement, Davy’s Bar, and Dr Seuss can teach us about solving wicked problems.

Let me start with a couple of definitions: ‘Tame’ problems are challenges that can be reduced to proportions that can be tested. A tame problem ‘is resolvable through unilinear acts and it is likely to have occurred before.’’ (Grint, 2008). In solving tame problems, we tend to follow known steps and rules. Playing chess or solving a puzzle, for example, are tame problems; they may be complicated but you can solve them by following predetermined rules. Wicked problems on the other hand are:

“more complex, rather than just complicated — that is, [they] cannot be removed from [their] environment, solved, and returned without affecting the environment. Moreover, there is no clear relationship between cause and effect.” (Grint, 2008)

Wicked problems are wicked because they involve people and people have the funny habit of having their own minds, changing behaviours, or just…. being human. Also, wicked problems are:
- Highly contextual, the solutions to which cannot be abstracted and applied elsewhere without adjustment
- Hard to define, or better, easy to confuse with other tame problems
- Worrying, that is, they have greater implications, and require longer timescales to solve,
- Everywhere around us, from solving healthcare challenges to persuading people to pay their taxes, and
- Basically a real pain

It is probably clear by now that wicked problems need a different approach to tame ones. This is a challenge because people love certainty; we love to know where we stand; we like codifying problems and solutions; we love creating rules and libraries of information to solve similar problems in the future. While this approach helps solve tame problems, it does nothing for wicked ones. Messy problems do not follow rules and require a different approach. They require an adaptive approach, an approach that allows for experimentation and uncertainty; they require a creative thinking approach.

So, how do we approach messy problems? The CPS model of the 1940s was one of the early attempts to defining an approach to solving those problems — yes I see the irony of defining rules to solve problems that do not follow rules… —

The model has four steps:
1. Clarify
2. Ideate
3. Develop
4. Implement

Fast forward to the 1990s and Design Thinking makes its appearance with its surprisingly familiar 4 + 1 steps:

1. Empathise
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

Models like CPS and Design Thinking are great candidates for solving highly contextual and hard to define problems as they focus on iteration, integrative thinking — holding two opposing views at the same time -, collaboration, the ability to change course mid way, and the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Let’s look at an example where a collaborative approach trumped a well-rehearsed, tech first approach.

Wind energy is big business. In 2018 it was worth $96.4b and is expected to reach $124.5bn in 2030. Now guess where Vestas, the largest wind turbine company in the world is based. I’ll give you a clue, it’s not China, the US, Germany, or India, the countries with the biggest investment in capacity installations in the world. No, it’s Denmark. The reason for this is in how the Danes approached wind energy. Instead of a ‘high-tech, top-down engineering-led route’ they followed a ‘low-tech and bottom-up approach’ (Blundel and Lockett, 2011). They had developed a grass roots approach to building wind turbines. They experimented, prototyped, iterated, and tested their designs with a small user community. They followed an approach that allowed for experimentation, quick changes in direction as they tested their designs before investing a lot, and were happy to listen to the expert user community.

People are the heart of wicked problems, which make them difficult to solve. Linear and rational approaches are not necessarily the best routes to solving them. Reliance on data can be misleading as quantitative insight tends to only reflect interactions with a system ignoring outliers that sometimes contain the solutions.

Design Thinking approaches however, allow for integrative thinking and moments of divergence, where you spend time looking at the challenge from different viewpoints before you narrow in on a hypothesis.

Take this example from IDEO: When the Data Science for Social Good working group was working on solving the issue of lead positing in children in Chicago, they based their solution on ‘knowing the whereabouts of every pregnant woman in the city’ so they can proactively make sure their children are not exposed to lead. Makes sense: use data to track pregnant women, find where they live, and assess the likelihood of their children being exposed to lead.

‘But there was a problem: their model required knowing the whereabouts of every pregnant woman in the city — information that was neither public nor available…Eventually, they found a human-centered solution rooted in another insight, one that pure data could never have predicted: Women who lived in old buildings most likely to be lead-contaminated were also the least likely to seek prenatal care. Based on that insight, the group changed their focus to providing prenatal care in those neighborhoods and simultaneously inspected the buildings where children lived or would soon be born for lead paint — serving two needs at once.’

Looking at challenges through multiple lenses and questioning data can help uncover better routes to solving wicked problems.

Other times completely left-field ideas can be the solution. Here is a wicked problem:

How do you solve low school attendance?

With concrete of course. This is what the Mexican government did with the Piso Firme programme in 1996 (also in BBC’s 50 things that made the modern economy programme) when they gifted poor families £150 worth of concrete which they literally poured it into their living rooms for the them to spread on their dirt floors. Economists who studied the programme revealed that it dramatically improved children’s education and their parents’ mental health.

Here is the thinking that led to that solution: Dirt floors expose children to harmful worms and parasites which cause diarrhoea or other diseases that cause children to be sick and miss school.

This make sense…but only in retrospect which is quite common when solving wicked problems. No linear, rule-based, tame problem-solving approach would have reached a similar conclusion. Though following a cause and effect thought process, the solution required significant integrative thinking, experimentation, and the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Another characteristic of Design Thinking is the ability to change approach mid-process. Tame problem-solving approaches ensure we follow a well-trodden route to solving problems as we look for familiar landmarks that will help us reach a solution. Wicked problems however, have the habit of not following the same routes, of requiring us to change direction / pivot mid journey. In most cases, we require to change direction before we reach Davy’s Bar..

Let me explain: In ‘The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society’, Charles Handy describes how when lost outside Dublin he asked for directions to Avoca:

“I was driving through the Wicklow Mountains, the bare but beautiful hills outside Dublin, when I lost my way. I saw a man walking his dog so I stopped beside him and asked if he could point me on the way to Avoca, where I was heading. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘and it’s dead easy. You go straight ahead up this hill then down again for a mile or so until you get to a stream with a bridge over it; on the other side of it you’ll see Davy’s Bar; you can’t miss it, it is very bright red. Have you got that now?’ ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Straight up, then down, until I come to Davy’s Bar.’ ‘Great; well, half a mile before you get there, turn right up the hill and that will take you to Avoca” (pp.20–21) (emphasis mine)

Most of the time, realising that we should have changed course ‘half a mile before’ is either too late or too costly. Creative approaches give us to tools to both anticipate those turns or quickly reverse when we realise we went too far down the wrong direction.

While creative thinking approaches include divergent phases where we explore possibilities, they also require us to regularly converge, assess, and decide on the best way forward. Setting constraints is a good way to keep us focused and explore hypotheses in detail before we move on; constraints can facilitate creative solutions.

Take the classic Green Eggs and Ham example, one of the best known children’s books. Dr Seuss wrote the story as a response to his publisher’s challenge to ‘write a compelling children’s story using the same 50 words or less’ (Haught-Tromp, 2017).

If Dr Seuss can write a book that has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide with just 50 words, I am sure we can reach solutions to wicked problems if we apply some constraints ourselves.