Solving wicked problems

I had never run across the concept of a wicked problem before yesterday, but I’m finding it to be a fascinating concept. A wicked problem has no single solution and is intricate, difficult to delimit or even define, and often inextricably linked to other problems. It’s about as different as can be from the kind of puzzle or math problem that has a single answer that can be reached by the careful application of reasoning; a wicked problem often requires an iterative approach to a solution, and a flexibility that recognizes the shifting nature of the problem. Examples of some big wicked problems include climate change, terrorism, dwindling oil supplies, and the US health care system. Wicked problems that are smaller in scope but equally baffling plague many companies and other institutions, judging by the amount of literature there is on the subject of managing this type of situation.

A lot of the information I’ve found about tackling wicked problems involves communication strategies for helping groups of people work together to understand the problem and come up with approaches to a solution (e.g., a couple of the methods are called Dialogue Mapping and Conversational Modeling). That makes a recent research project at Sandia National Laboratories particularly interesting. In this real-life study of a genuine problem that concerned them, Sandia employees and interns were asked to brainstorm ideas about the problem, either alone or in groups that pooled their ideas by contributing anonymously to a web site. Those who worked alone had no access to the ideas of their co-workers.

When you think about brainstorming approaches to a complex problem, you might think that the more brains you have, the better the ideas that will be generated (unless perhaps you’ve had to sit through too many fruitless or overlong meetings). However, in this case the ideas generated by the people who worked alone were rated by the organizers of the study as being better in terms of originality, feasibility, and effectiveness. One of the organizers pointed out that if online meetings are cheaper and shorter than face-to-face meetings, having people work alone might be even more cost- and time-efficient. (Not to mention that it gives the introverts like me a big break.) There’s a caveat toward the end of the press release to the effect that in some circumstances online or face-to-face interaction is still going to be needed. Still, this is a very interesting result, especially since it comes from a situation where people were dealing with something that presumably really mattered to them in their working lives.