Citizen Journalist: Wicked Problems, Local Solutions
It’s primary election day in Mount Dora. Can you feel the cringe?
As Florida goes to vote today in its Republican and Democratic primaries (polls close at 8 p.m. tonight), I’m thinking about wicked problems. On Saturday as I left Publix I saw supporters of Donald Trump waving big blue Trump banners at traffic. A few others were jocosely waving huge yellow Tea Party flags, the one that shows a rearing snake with the words, “Don’t Tread on Me.” All weekend, Trump rallies careened round the maelstrom of violence.
The big solutions promised by Donald Trump just seem to be making our wicked problems worse.
Not the that the promises of the candidates considered mainstream in this extreme election season give any sense that our wicked problems aren’t getting worse anyway.
And so Election Day seems to be all about the wickedness of our problems, both far and near.
Wicked problems, as defined by media critic Jay Rosen,
… have these features: It is hard to say what the problem is, to define it clearly or to tell where it stops and starts. There is no “right” way to view the problem, no definitive formulation. There are many stakeholders, all with their own frames, which they tend to see as exclusively correct. Ask what the problem is and you will get a different answer from each. Someone can always say that the problem is just a symptom of another problem and that someone will not be wrong. The problem is inter-connected to a lot of other problems; pulling them apart is almost impossible. In a word: it’s a mess.
But it gets worse. Every wicked problem is unique, so in a sense there is no prior art and solving one won’t help you with the others. No one has “the right to be wrong,” meaning enough legitimacy and stakeholder support to try things that will almost certainly fail, at first. Instead failure is savaged, and the trier is deemed unsuitable for another try. The problem keeps changing on us. It is never definitely resolved. Instead, we just run out of patience, or time, or money, or political will. It’s not possible to understand the problem first, then solve it. Rather, attempts to solve it reveal further dimensions of the problem. (Which is the secret of success for people who are “good” at wicked problems.)
Washington is one wicked problem, for sure, showing the biggest crack ever in ole Liberty Bell. Climate change is another wicked problem, coming at us slow enough to keep out fingers off the panic button but too fast and too broadly for any isolated community or state or even country to change. Digital disruption is a wicked problem, erasing a thousand legitimate businesses while a few Internet unicorns become rich beyond all measure.
Gun control is a wicked problem, and so is health care. Wealth inequality, wicked bad problem. Education is an especially wicked Lake County problem (you can build an Innovation District, but who’d want to move here when our schools are so bad?).
We live in an age of wicked problems we are the sorry perpetuation of. (In the newspaper business, it’s called the Death Spiral: once you’ve doubled the cost delivering half the value, it’s time to let the newspaper follow the Titanic into the deep.
The epithet “wicked bad” actually comes from Beantown vernacular, where bad things happen and then something “wicked bad” happens. You can’t help but get the Salem-witchy vibe of it. The new movie The Witch portrays Puritans in terror of the wicked bad forest, though you can’t help feeling they brought the problem with them.
Wicked is the ominous visage of the bad news we haven’t heard yet just about to flash before our eyes in the next status update.
When in despair of ever solving our problems and give up on them, wickedness becomes become the silent ailing backdrop of contemporary life. Life with a broken Washington means abandonment of politics. Life in a broken environment means endless retreat. Life with broken healthcare means a bitterly prolonged old age.
There is a dangerous permission in this. So what if our students are being prepped to fail. Whaddayagonnado? The shrug is Sopranoesque; cue the Badda Bing Dancers.
Problems become wicked when we work on the wrong solutions. As Russell Ackoff wrote in his 2004 essay, “Transforming the Systems Movement,” “The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become.” Much of what I’m writing about today springs from that work.
Sadly, Mount Dora is developing wicked problems. The city’s political interests are now wicked distant from each other, and solutions proposed by either extremes — throw the bums out in city hall, get rid of those bums on council — just hammer the problem deeper into intractable ooze.
No matter what gets drummed forward — strong manager, strong council, Envision Plan, ghostly laissez faire — each solution seems to knock things further off. Whatever past councils cobbled together with their city management team, that’s gone now — both council and staff — removed (“allowed to leave” suffices, too) for largely unspecified outrages. It has come to where shadows are sufficient in this town: shadow motives, shadow deliberations, shadow council.
Ackoff went on to say that reductionist solutions are the devil. Trying to drive the nail into The Problem only proves how mercurial it is. “When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger.” Bang the hammer and the problem just pops up elsewhere. Doing right things right leads to the door marked Wicked.
Today’s primary vote in Florida will not be all that surprising; even upset wins by someone other than Clinton and Trump will do little to change the electoral convention result — and absolutely nothing to fix politics in Washington. We all know that. We now grimly expect it.
The way out of a wicked problem, Ackoff suggests, requires transformation, and that transformation begins at focusing not on the proclaimed objectives but rather the pursued ones. Donald Trump’s proclaimed objective is building a wall across the southern border of the United States and then getting Mexico to pay it: the pursued objective is payback for the jobs American employers squandered and the drugs American parents can’t keep from their kids. It’s not about Tea Party relief; it’s about ghettoizing of the American dream.
The objective of electing Hilary Clinton president is not equal rights for all, it’s making sure that government is paid well enough for making sure those rights fail to to spread equality to all. In both cases, the parties work together to keep things broken, because brokenness creates all kinds of opportunity for the vast political bureaucracy.
Lesson one: Reverse the objectives.
Also, Ackoff says, its critical to learn the difference between what is practiced and what is preached. Those who wage war against big government as the way to save taxpayers money end up costing taxpayers far more. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were largely outsourced to professional armies and contractors, and have we ever gotten out of there? There are those in Mount Dora government who feel that big-ticket items like utilities should be outsourced to private industry, but nowhere in Central Florida has such privatization not been a costly mistake for the communities who always ended up shelling more.
Lesson Two: Listen to what is preached, but watch what is practiced.
Finally, to get out of wicked problems, we’ve got to get out of wicked thinking. As Einstein once said, “Without changing our patterns of thought we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought.” (E.g. no alcoholic fixes their drinking problem using their alcoholic brain.
Lesson Three: If you don’t like the weather, change the vane.
Ackoff suggests what he calls “systemic thinking” as the alternative:
Systemic thinking is holistic versus reductionistic thinking, synthetic versus analytic. Reductionistic and analytic thinking derives properties of whiles from the properties of their parts. Holistic and synthetic thinking derive properties of parts from properties of the whole that contains them.
There’s no fixing our Washington problems with more Hillary or just Trump, but we can fix the broken politics within us. I used to think that Mount Dora was Someplace Special enough that national politics don’t afflict us at the local level; but I was wrong. Broken Washington necessarily mean Broken Mount Dora; the mire isn’t deeper here than there, but we’re stuck in it just as bad. Reductionist thinking produces the solutions we now face — new sheriff in town, staff better heel, awayyyyyy we go — is a solution based on the most cynical understanding of politics.
Observe the objectives, watch what is practiced.
But what if all of government — Washington’s and Mount Dora’s — could be seen as a development project that could be solved by changing the way how public policies and decisions are made?
Instead of government growing worse getting hammered by solutions which aren’t working anywhere (with the penudlum poised to swing all the way to the other, wrong set of solutions come next election), why not look as our government as a developing one? What if government could be seen as a process of becoming more competent through efficiencies and cross-functional integrations between departments, between hired staff and elected staff, between our city and our neighbors? Instead of more economic muscle, improved standard of living. It’s a learning process — thus the importance of communication — and as learning is incremental, mistakes are important. “It is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right,” Ackoff says.
All we have to do is ditch one set of politics for another.
Dealing with global warming is a great opportunity for learning this other politics. (Sorry, Governor Scott, demanding radio silence on “climate change” while Miami is awash is a very bad way of doing the wrong thing right — the emperor’s new clothes without the nakedness.) A complex, diverse, unstoppable change without a widespread political involvement from people around the world. It’s not something our current wicked bad politics can even face, but that’s not to say that news about water reclamation technology and good ideas for saving rainwater and how to reduce the effects of Florida’s ever-more-withering summers one tree at a time (but planted many, many times all that once.)
There’s nothing like hope of finally solving a wicked problem for finally solving a wicked problem. If anything, Donald Trump can inspire that hope, if only to prove that his kind of wailing wall will only keep our problems on our side where they always were. I have similar hopes for Mount Dora whenever council allows another immensely talented and experienced and dedicated staffer go. They’re getting good at wrong solutions.
Democracy is a difficult process; we despair both nationally and locally at its gridlocked impossibility. Yet the problem is not that votes end up giving us what we have, its that so many votes simply aren’t cast. So why not improve democracy by enlarging the franchise?
And why not learn something about democracy by enervating the communication? Why not cover all communities? Make the northeast communities drainage problems is important politically as the downtown greenscape, the cost of insufficient education as impactful as the cost of our utilities?
Why not learn from each other? James Fallows of Atlantic Monthly recently published a piece about his research travelling across the country and finding in all sorts of out-of-the-way and discounted places communities in their own process of transformation. (“How America is Putting Itself Back Together, “ link here.) Despite the national rhetoric of wretched, wicked-bad brokenness in Washington, Fallows found communities large and small who believed their problems were solvable in the unlikeliest of ways. Take how Duluth, Minnesota has become a leading center of the aerospace industry (attracting vibrant start-up business as well) mainly because the environs were so much more laid back and affordable than San Francisco or New York. Or how a depressed region of Mississippi known as the Golden Triangle became a hub for industries, so that now a racially-mixed workforce of about 700 earn a median wage of $80,000 a year.
When comparing these communities across America, Fallows noted a number of shared characteristics of transformation: no local political division; a “local patriot” who makes things go (alluding to the idea that there are answers); strong public-private partnerships; a wide understanding of the town’s story; a thriving downtown; proximity to a research university; a good community college; schools are unusual (lots of experimentation); openness to change; a big plan; and there are craft breweries (Fallows has no idea why.)
A local self-assessment using this criteria shows scattered possibility with a critical need to do better on almost every account.
How? Let’s ask the people. Let’s find leaders in support of systemic change.
Let’s be sure to report the good news.
And if you’re registered Democrat or Republican, for gosh sakes go out and vote today. Everyone can use the practice.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
