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Went for a hike with a friend and former McKinsey colleague this weekend, who shared with me a pearl of wisdom he had received from one of the senior guys at McKinsey he had worked with.
It went something like this:
Remember, that in solving our clients’ problems, we only figure out the solution in one time out of ten. In nine times out of ten, our work consisting of finding the one person in the organization who already has it figured out.
Whether this overstates the matter and is rather reductionist about the consultant’s role, it makes a critical point.
Which in turn have important implications:
- With all this talk about collective intelligence, individual intelligence – especially outliers – are also valuable.
- But this value remains unrealized because organizations fail to encourage the outliers to speak up (which is itself a wicked problem)
- This in turn breeds learned helplessness, which actually serves to degrade the individual genius that is already hidden in the organization
- The Objective Outsider with a Mission (OOWAM) ends up playing an essential role in simply ignoring organizational barriers and raising naïve questions with seemingly uninvolved people.
It is, of course, overly optimistic to believe that the solution to a wicked problem can be found if you just look long enough for the Right Guy or Gal.
In virtually every project I have worked, there has always been one person, or a couple of people, whose insights and knowledge make all the difference to the project. These can be found in the most unexpected places: a systems analyst who is holding entire business processes together with gum and spit; a market researcher who has empirical evidence that nobody wants to hear; an accountant who has been struggling for years to explain certain disparities; a lawyer who keeps warning about certain risks.
However:
- Critical insights related to wicked problems will often come to the surface if you ask open-ended questions, in a safe environment, to the right people.
- Finding the right people may be a numbers game that requires exhaustive coverage of an organization. Technology might be helpful here – everything from Dialogue Mapping to polling technologies.
- There may be real gold in them hills for complicated problems (that require expertise) and complex problems (that rely on emerging patterns).
This puts demands on the consultant as well: he/she must be genuinely curious, have the ability defer judgment, be a good, active listener, and instill confidence and trust among the people he/she talks with.
Cynefin is a framework developed by David Snowden and Mary Boone and presented concisely in the November 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review. The premise of Cynefin is fairly straightforward, namely that different leadership approaches apply to different situations.
Cynefin is helpful in providing a robust taxonomy for understanding the context (or what some might call the “nature”) of the problem. Cynefin describes five types of contexts:
- Simple – the domain of best practice
- Complicated – the domain of experts
- Complex – the domain of emergence
- Chaotic -the domain of rapid response
- Disorder – where even the context is unknown
Sources of Insight has provided a good summary of the five types, but let me add some additional thoughts:
- As Jeff Conklin indicates in Dialogue Mapping, there is both a “technical” and social dimension to wicked problems.
- By technical, I mean the objective, or “hard” factors that determine the problem characteristics. This would generally mean the success measures that survive the involvement of the people.
- The social dimension includes the stake held in the problem, the process for resolving it, and the solution. Call them “soft”, but they are real and decisive.
- Cynefin goes a long way toward distinguishing between the four contexts in terms of the technical and social dimensions, but I’d like to do it more explicitly, so:
- Technical dimension
- Cause and effect
- Linear, single-threaded
- Linear, multiple contributors and outcomes
- Syndromatic, cause and effect reinforce each other
- Solution space
- Convergent – one right solution, or a few closely related solutions
- Divergent – mutually exclusive and radically different solution paths
- Pattern-based – possible solutions are only visible in vague outlines with a great deal of attendant uncertainty
- Urgency
- Gradual deterioration, crisis is a ways off
- Cliff clearly in sight
- Emergency
- Social dimension
- Learning approach – essentially, whether there is time to accumulate a solid fact and analytical basis before acting or whether it is necessary to learn by probing or even committing
- Availability of knowledge – the need for expertise in certain areas, involvement of stakeholders, etc.
- Value of precedence – the value of past experience in addressing this issue
- Alignment of values -the extent to which the stakeholders have conflicting or coincident interests in the outcome
Including these variables in an assessment will not improve the precision of categorizing into the right Cynefin buckets, but they will help a) prepare for the complications ahead, and b) provide a bit of comfort and solace as people run headlong into these issues.
See also my column on this subject in e24 (Norwegian).
The Economist Intelligence Unit has published an extensive global analysis that compares economic opportunity for women in different countries.
There is an interesting pattern in the lowest echelons of the rankings. Failed or failing states figure at the absolute bottom, as they seem to always do in all kinds of ratings.
It also seems pretty clear that equal opportunity is correlated with GDP/capita (IMF numbers):
 The correlation is 0.71 when income is measured on a linear scale, and 0.79 when income is measured on a logarithmic scale. These are both meaningful and significant measures.
Causality is a different matter, but my hypothesis would be that equality and economic development reinforce each other, but that equality is a symptom of other healthy societal factors.
The factors that determine women’s economic opportunity are:
1. Labor policy and practice, which is a determinant of whether women have access to employment at fair and equitable terms, both absolutely and relative to men;
2. Access to finance, which is a determinant of whether women are able to borrow money and make financial transactions
3. Education and training – the extent to which women are able to obtain academic and vocational education to help them pursue their professional and financial goals
4. Women’s legal and social standing -the extent to which women are protected from violence and discrimination, and have essential human rights
5. General business environment – the extent to which the general environment is conducive to economic activity, including entrepreneurship
These factors in turn develop as a result of other factors, so that root causes are elusive. Rather, a favorable economic climate for women correlated with a favorable economic climate in general, which in turn is consistent with human rights, rule of law, and the development of efficient markets. All of which are hallmarks of evolved civilizations.
The important implication for public policy is that neither equality nor economic health are standalone goals: rather they are among several important measures of a society’s success. In other words: efforts to improve these have to be combined with efforts to improve other systemic factors.
This lends support to the notion that effective policy will often look more like muddling through, in the words of Charles Lindblom (see my reading list). As much as we would like to prioritize one goal over another, interaction among many and diverse factors confound such efforts.
The question then, is: what about accountability for muddling through? If progress comes through incremental, seemingly disjointed steps, mixed with setbacks, corrections, etc., how do we know that we are making progress rather than getting lost?
The Oslo Architecture Triennale 2010 is underway these days, and one of the key events is Man Made Tomorrow – meant to examine the consequences and sustainability of urbanization.
In response to a request from the conference, Kristi van Riet wrote a letter with some thoughts about the necessary shift needed in urban and transportation planning to safeguard the natural resources urbanization and transportation otherwise would invade. The letter stands well on its own and is worth reading.
The interesting point with respect to wicked problems is in this observation:
Cities need to re-conceive themselves as elements of a bioregion in which human settlements co-exist with, and are wholly dependent on, natural systems as well as human communities.
As becomes apparent in the piece, biological systems, while remarkably resilient (though not invulnerable) do not lend themselves to top-down planning. They are allowed to try and fail and evolve as a consequence. They are structured to allow for improvisation and change. Things are constantly being built and torn down.
Cities used to be a lot more like this. Rome, London, Jerusalem, and other ancient cities were subject to constant shocks, cross-currents, and changes, and things were changed to accommodate life.
But van Riet points out that human habitation is no longer the dominant imperative: land use must be based on an accounting that attributes value to natural resources.
In truth, cities are also biosystems that involve many species of animals (including home sapiens), plants, and other organisisms that feed on each other. It comes into formation under the constraints imposed by the man-made structures, and thousands of years of experience over the last several thousand years indicates that these are indeed resilient biosystems.
The trick to conservation is therefore to choose which constraints and what freedom to give the formation and evolution of non-human life in these cities. In other words, we can not shape the future through grand design but by carefully selecting constraints and enablers and then learning from what happens.
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.
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