Mapping a Wicked Problem
unfolding the puzzle
The air’s quality affects everyone and is influenced by everyone. However, this influence is not evenly distributed. Anyone who starts a fire in the backyard or uses spray paint or noxious household cleaning products pollutes a little. Everyone who drives a fossil fuel-burning car pollutes a bit more. Anyone who drives a SUV or pick-up pollutes even more. It could be said that an automobile manufacturer, by extension, pollutes a great deal. Industrial sources such as refineries and coal-burning electricity plants, therefore, would pollute a heck of a lot.
Addressing the wicked problem of poor air quality is challenging given the plethora of ways in which pollutants are emitted (“sources”)—not to mention the way these pollutants morph into even worse pollutants once they’re in the atmosphere. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes six criteria pollutants—pollutants it measures to determine air quality and compliance—there are over 240 categories of sources, each with their own rules and context.
The problem is also tricky because of conflict between the black and white standards, limits, and cost-benefit analyses and the messy social and political relationships that color the dynamics.
Post-It Iterations 1 & 2
I began by exploring online news articles and organizational websites in regards to poor air quality in Pittsburgh. One major thread I found was U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Plant, which is the largest of its kind in the country and a heavy polluter in the greater Pittsburgh area. I then started to extract causes or consequences from the points I initially found.
Post-It Iteration 3
In order to include a greater diversity of points in the map, I shifted my investigation away from Pittsburgh-specific issues to national and canonical air quality challenges and currents. I initially created a new grouping, “Mindset Issues”, but later on nested it under “Social Cues” given the precedent set in the provided example. While mindsets are socially held and spread, they (worldviews, metaphors, values) underpin our thinking and thus can be thought of as leading to the issues in each of the other four groups. Further iterations of this exercise might consider new ways of denoting how mindsets influence issues across the map.
Digital Iteration 1
After simply adding the Post-It notes to a digital mapping tool (Mindmup), it was still challenging to holistically make sense of the wicked problem because each item was functioning on a different level of scale.
Digital Iteration 2
Organizing the issues into root causes, secondary causes, and consequences made the key challenges to address much more apparent. This process also surfaced commonalities between issues that were originally disparate, allowing me to see how the similar nature of two issues, indicating a shared root cause. I found this format very effective for finding and representing causal links within categories yet less effective for doing so between categories. As I ‘peeled the onion’ of an issue, I sometimes found that deeper down it was the result of a cause of a different category.
System Dynamics
The causal hierarchy represented in the map points to key challenges in each category. This has given me a broad hypothesis for how change flows between categories.
Economic motivations influence key actors to extract as much value out of natural resources as possible by refining industrial processes and equipment, combustion engines, etc. Thus the development of this technology centers around productivity. These methods and tools pollute a great deal, emitting various compounds and particulate matter into the environment. As the density of such compounds and particulates in the atmosphere rises, sensitive groups start experiencing greater incidence of health impacts such as asthma, cancer, and even death and eventually more and more of the population is impacted.
Once there is enough recognition that the poor air quality is causing these researchers, health professionals, and activist groups pressure politicians to regulate industrial actors (since they are not self-regulating). Regulation is thus institutionalized leading to the setting of air quality standards and then emission caps. Political infrastructure such as permits, penalties, and emissions markets are set-up to incentivize less emissions by industrial sources (eg. refineries, electrical plants) and products (eg. automobiles, consumer chemicals).
Regulations push polluting companies to shift their priorities by focusing on reducing emissions while making as much money as possible. Tension grows (and often remains) in that these are two conflicting priorities. Nonetheless, this tension starts to hold companies responsible for the externalities, health impacts and environmental degradation, they inflict without facing ramifications by requiring them to spend money to curb the externalities or by issuing violations and fines.
externality: a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved
This pressure influences changes in the equipment and processes that are used in industrial sources or sold to consumers, leading them to release less emissions. Over time as the various sources of pollution that are most disruptive in an area are curbed, air quality there starts to improve. This leads to a lower incidence of health and environmental impacts for the majority of the population and eventually for sensitive individuals.
As regulators and academics conduct new research about the impacts of pollutants on the body, national air quality standards are updated which reconfigures the emissions standards for the relevant criteria pollutants. This leads to new cycles of modifying technology and infrastructure and then subsequent improvements in the environment and public health.
Scaling the Research
The following resources were very helpful in beginning to sketch out this wicked problem map. With more time and a larger team, I would return to these books to extract more of the subtleties of this wicked problem.
