Good People and Wicked Problems
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Highlights
- Wicked problem is a term of art in complex systems discourses, and refers to a situation that is so complex and full of messy internal contradictions that it resists most efforts at resolution. In its modern sense, the term appears to have been introduced in 1967 by systems scientist C. West Churchman in an editorial in Management Science (an equivalent term is goat rodeo).
- People who abandon moral frames as primary frames and look for alternative frames have a shot at being effective, but have no guarantees. These are people who realize 3/4 of the world is covered in water, and try to develop aquatic modes of being, giving up reliance on moral dry ground altogether.
- The problem isn’t just that moral frameworks cover only a small fraction of the scope of the problem (“dry land”) — let’s generously estimate it to be 30%. The problem is that what dry land there is exists in the form of mutually incompatible islands with conflicting definitions of good and evil that cannot be reconciled in the context of the problem.
- Moralists are wont to say things like “all great religions point to the same great truths like love and peace and universal brotherhood.” But once a wicked problem complicates the situation by expanding the scope and increasing the complexity, the frameworks start coming into conflict with each other, and with their own limits where dry ground gives way to liquid ambiguity.
- simple situations reward those who feel, and punish those who think. But when things get complex, and problems get wicked, things flip around.
- “the world is a comedy for those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.”
- a wicked problem defeats intuitions on both fronts, which means things are going to go wrong for you, or worse, not-even-wrong. But how you respond to things going wrong is a function of whether you are a feeler or a thinker (and remember, you don’t have to be good at it; merely prefer it).
- And in doing so, you take on all the befuddling attributes of the problem itself — the list I offered earlier in the essay. Go back and re-read that list. What might it mean to embody those attributes as a person acting within a wicked problem? (The correct answer is Yossarian; somebody who is empowered by Catch 22 rather than trapped by it).
- The problem with bureaucratic cynicism though, is that institutions tend to have their own native moral frameworks that is invisible (“this is water”) to those who occupy them. Humphrey Appleby was neither truly Tory, nor Labor, but he definitely abided by the implicit morality of the British Civil Service. What in the show is generally described in terms of the ultimate character trait of “soundness,” which is, in essence, a predictable commitment to institutional stability and self-perpetuation, in accordance with the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
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You exit a wicked problem not when you adopt what you think is an unassailable posture “outside” of it on a particular moral map, but when nobody can reliably classify you for long enough to consider you either a friend or foe on any map.
- You remain in the situation defined by the wicked problem (because almost by definition there is no exiting it) but are no longer bound by anyone’s moral maps of it. You might make occasional use of fragmented, local moral maps, but you don’t primarily navigate with a moral compass anymore.