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Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. – H.L. Mencken, 1917
In business school, kudos went to the student who first figured out what the hell the case really was all about. It was all about being incisive, smart, able to cut to the chase. And I’ve been in lots of meetings (especially at McKinsey) where one person was able to take a step back, synthesize what everyone was getting at, and bring everything to a close.
Some of these people really were that smart, but I suspect that more than anything else they were really good at bringing an otherwise unproductive meeting to a fruitful outcome. Which, given the alternative, added plenty of value, but left many of the meeting participants feeling that much more dependent on the brilliance of that one person.
Immersion is the opposite of this lightning-fast brilliance. It means to deliberately delay judgment by listening a bit longer than you usually would, to actually resist the temptation to form and defend a hypothesis.
This goes a bit against human nature. It’s unpleasant to wade in ambiguity and contradiction too long, and our tendency is avoid more pain by drawing a conclusion, stick to it, and then find out later if we were all wrong. Especially if others who have struggled with the same problem are impatient about moving beyond it and ahead with other things.
Immersion is about moving beyond heuristics in order to build a robust set of insights, usually based on pulling together many facts and perceptions, and applying rigorous inductive reasoning.
“I much prefer talking with someone who is interested in understanding the situation and responding to it appropriately,”
John Brennan, president Obama’s counterterrorism advisor
In a lengthy article in the New York Times, Peter Baker reviewed the Obama approach to the war on terrorism, and especially as a continuation of Bush’s war.
Much has been said and written about Bush’s military and foreign policy, but, as the Obama administration has learned, some of it was worth keeping. Bush said early on that this was a long-term effort that required patience and persistence, would lead to setbacks and disappointments. Commentators pointed out that in order to win, all of the United States’s resources would be put to the test: military, diplomatic, technology, etc.
Under Obama, these premises are proven and re-emphasized. It’s less a matter of grand or decisive victories, but about being effective, nimble, and maintain constancy of purpose. The problem has changed and been redefined several times, the front line is not easily found, and there is no clear end point.
The New York Times article points out several factors that illustrate how the Obama administration is going about taming this wicked problem:
- Learning through immersion – Brennan notes that in one of his early meetings with Obama, it became clear that the president-to-be had taken the time to study many points of view on the war, and had reached his own conclusions, apparently through rigorous inductive reasoning. It also appears that Obama, throughout all this, has allowed new facts to challenge his conclusions, and has adapted his decision-making, possibly even his strategy accordingly.
- Path dependency related to the means chosen – it is interesting to note that both Bush (with time) and Obama (from the start) realized that the course of the war depended on the means with which they chose to fight it. It wasn’t just about the victors and defeats, but the methods themselves. Bush had already prohibited water torture and started dismantling Gitmo by the end of his term, and Obama confirmed these decisions and accelerated their implementation. By his own reckoning, one of Obama’s most important initiatives was an act of diplomacy, a speech to students in Cairo. In both of them, there was a realization that how the war was fought could profoundly affect the nature of the war.
- Making distinctions, particularly about stakeholders. A big issue in this war is, how do we characterize the enemy? Curiously, this seems to be a critically important semantic problem. Bush used his terms, Obama others, and yet it seems that the same people are being targeted, hunted, arrested or killed. Still, Bush described the enemy as a political ideology with demonic characteristics, whereas Obama sees terrorism as a tactic in a deeper conflict. This distinction, which may seem frivolous to many, makes a big difference in how you enlist stakeholders in your work.
- Being clear about trade-offs and the dimension of time. When confronted by civil rights groups about continuing Bush-era practices, Obama explained that other priorities weighed more heavily. The article notes that measures that ran counter to American civil liberties (John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Act and Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus inter alia) in times of national crisis were changed as a counteracting forces when the crisis passed.
What’s notable about these factors, and Obama’s problem-solving style in general, is that the issues are explicitly articulated, thereby opening for a richer, more pointed debate.
What remains to be seen, is whether Obama’s approach to the war has the right leverage: having understood that all problems can’t be solved at once, has the administration chosen a policy that targets the right measures at the right time?
Several smart thinkers in this field have attempted to categorize problems along a continuum where, say, a math problem is on one end, and wicked problems on the other. In the middle are problems that may be tough, but can be solved with known, conventional means. Wicked problems are in a category of their own, separated from the others by discontinuity. They are simply unlike all other problems by any reasonable standard.
There’s a temptation to characterize wicked problems the way George Costanza characterized the premise for the “art imitates art” Seinfeld show on Seinfeld: to say that there’s nothing you can do to nail down a wicked problem.
That’s demonstrably untrue, or all the world’s biggest problems throughout the ages would still be with us.
Many, if not most, of these problems were resolved because they were overcome by other events. More often than we’d care to admit, wicked problems have metastasized and caused war, famine, genocide, displacement, and other hugely destructive and catastrophic, but nevertheless definitive courses of events.
The complexity of problems can be mapped along two dimensions:
- The degree of linearity in the problem-solving process. Or put another way, the extent to which the path dependence is predictable. Building a suspension bridge is no trivial undertaking, but engineers have a good idea in what order it should happen. Conversely, policymakers in international affairs are constantly arguing where to start resolving conflicts.
- The compatibility of solution constraints – i.e., how many eggs we have to break or people we have to annoy, in a workable solution. Software development projects seem to always have this problem – choose any two of quality, cost, and time.
Wicked problems are on the extreme ends along both these dimensions, usually to the point of confounding anyone who tries to hold them down long enough to make sense of them.
Consequently, these are problems that can be solved, if solving them means: a) being confident that a given approach will yield a solution, and b) that the solution will satisfy all, or even any, of the known constraints.
Taming them, however, means bringing enough order and discipline that progress can be made against the problem’s underlying needs. Instead of a catastrophic resolution of the problem, we can make deliberate trade-offs, choosing which constraints to satisfy. Similarly, by pursuing a problem pacification strategy, there will be some control over the timing and sequence of events.
It is a fair hypothesis, I think, to say that all chronic policy failures are wicked problems.
Chronic policy failures are societal problems that defy any reasonable attempts to resolve. In Australia, indigenous issues are prominent, as they are, or should be, in the Americas. In Norway, it seems that there is constant bickering over the way we treat senior citizens but little real progress against goals everyone agrees about. Most of the entire continent of Africa is a chronic policy failure, and we can spend a long time just arguing whose chronic policy failure.
I suspect that the hallmark of chronic policy failures is that they involve truths that are politically unacceptable to the point that they can’t even be articulated. Usually these involve trade-offs that we make consciously but are unwilling to admit. For example, we are willing to accept a large number of motor vehicle deaths if we can get a higher speed limit.
Initial assessment
- Clarity about stakeholders –
- Size includes everyone living in the United States directly, but considering secondary effects (related to bargaining power of providers, critical mass in research, etc.) hundreds of millions of people outside the US as well.
- Stakeholder diversity is enormous and complex. Although everyone is a patient from time to time, many also have differing stakes both in the status quo and in possible changes.
- Consensus around the need for change is unclear. Some point to the strengths in the current system and worry that reform will diminish the advantages and create new problems, but even among those who favor change, there are vastly different views on the root problem, where leverage exists, and even what the target benefits should be.
- Similarly, the type of solution is subject to considerable debate and dispute. Some favor a public health payor and provider system, others for a more regulated private, system, and several hybrids can be imagined.
- Boundary conditions and constraints are not fully defined. Is this supposed to be a universal solution that discourages private enterprise? Are “alternative” providers included? To what extent should public policy on other matters (e.g., abortion, euthanasia) be implemented through a health system?
- Understanding of secondary effects is unknown. The United States is the largest, most complex market for health care in the world and covers everything from basic research to the most basic outpatient care. In addition, health and economics cover virtually every political issue today directly or indirectly.
- Diversity of factors is similarly enormous, simply because health issues can not readily be measured and are subject to enormous emotional considerations.
- Urgency is high, in the sense that it is hard to experiment further with these kinds of reforms. If the reforms fail, there is no going back to the current status quo. Rather, a whole new set of realities will become apparent.
- The solution set is divergent and largely unknown – in spite of all good intentions and ingenuity, there will be lots of bumps on the road and unforeseen complications. Consequently, the end state is essentially unknowable.
Reflections on taming this beast
- Finding leverage – as Dan Roam points out, this issue is really about insurance. Who absorbs the cost and risk of health problems, and who has the incentive to reduce risk and reduce costs? Healthcare reform should seek to realign incentives to create more virtuous behavior.
- Eliminating trouble-makers – in many wicked problems, there are stakeholders who are a) heavily invested in the status quo, and b) have means of hindering change. There needs to be a separate strategy for neutralizing them, either by buying them out from their investment, or reducing the power they have to stop change. The focus in this debate appears to be the health insurance companies, which is why there is talk of regulating them in a different way. I am not convinced it’s that simple, so I’d advise deeper analysis (or reading the analyses that have been performed).
- Instituting feedback loops and learning – early warning systems are needed to identify potential problems and bottlenecks in the changes that are underway.
- Keeping the engine running – question here is, how do we make sure that people get coverage, are in fact covered, and receive health services while the change is underway?
- Where to be brutal – nobody likes to use brute force, but sometimes it’s a bit like a band aid that needs to come off. Better to rip it off, wince at the pain, and move on.
The Norwegian government professes a nearly insufferably self-righteous commitment to reducing CO2 and other emissions, especially considering that our economy is entirely dependent on selling stuff that produces CO2 when burned, or, rather, combusted.
There are several ways to reduce CO2 emissions, but everyone agrees that fewer people should drive themselves and their backpack to work every day. Most large cities have invested to make public transportation fast, inexpensive, and convenient.
Not so much in Norway and especially the large cities.
Norway has something called a “district policy” that essentially involves trying to stop people from moving away from rural areas. There are various arguments for this policy, but what’s clear is that it’s only postponing the inevitable:
From the late 1800s to about 1972, the rural population stayed constant, while the entire population growth happened in urbanized areas. But since then the actual population in rural areas has declined at a rate that seems to be accelerating.
Not surprisingly, real estate values in urban areas have skyrocketed, and pressure on cities and towns – in terms of pollution, traffic congestion, etc., – is increasing.
During the election this year, Natur og Ungdom accused the incumbent government (which was reelected) of allocating investment funds to building roads in rural areas rather than public transportation in urban areas.
Transportøkonomisk Institutt also points to a pending crisis in congestion in the three largest cities.
Some wicked aspects to this problem:
- Unresolved, it will only get worse and reach a level of absurdity (empty highways and roads in rural areas) and crisis (LA-like commutes in Oslo)
- It is inherently political. The rational thing to do is to freeze investments serving communities with declining populations, which of course would speed up rather than postpone the migration.
- Economics are messy. Any kind of punitive incentives (tolls, parking fees) are inherently regressive, any positive incentives are very expensive.
- Investments have considerable lag. It takes years to upgrade railroads and subway tracks, build bike paths, etc.
This blog will expose, reflect on, and (with hope) build understanding of the world of wicked problems.
Entries will primarily consist of case examples of wicked problems from all walks of human existence. I will try to illustrate why they are wicked problems, what characteristics make them so hard, and what we are looking at in terms of resolutions and outcomes.
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