This list does not presume to be exhaustive, or even particularly selective. But it’s a list of what others have had to write about the subject, and it will be updated on an ongoing basis:
Introduction to the phenomenon and concept models
- Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, by Rittel and Webber, probably the most cited piece on the subject.
- The Science of Muddling Through, by Charles Lindblom, from 1959 (!) on how public policy is made and put into action
- Strategy as a Wicked Problem, by John C Camillus, in HBR
- Wicked Problems and Social Complexity (link to excerpt), by Jeff Conklin, introduces social complexity and fragmentation
- Coming to grips with turbulence, by Angela Wilkinson and Rafael Ramirez, a bit of a contrarian view on how to deal with adversity
- Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, interview with Jeff Conklin, including the advent of the Age of Design
- Complexity Science and wicked problems, by Yasmin Merali
- Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, by Richard Buchanan
- Wicked problems, knowledge challenges, and collaborative capacity builders in network settings, by Weber and Khademian
Tools and frameworks
- Wicked Problems: Structuring Social Messes with Morphological Analysis, by Tom Ritchey, Swedish Morphological Society
- Wicked Problems in Project Definition, by Michael Whelton and Glenn Ballard, related to Lean construction methods
- Wicked problems: the real challenge to progress in IT? By Software Futures.
- Wicked problems, by Robert Lucky, in IEEE Spectrum
- Wicked Problems, by Frog Design – about innovation, design thinking, and wicked problems
- Designing Systems at Scale, by Fred Dust and Ilya Propokoff, principles for designing solutions in a broader ecosytem
- Let self-change: learning about approaches to complexity from gatherer-hunter cultures, av Dave Pollard
Applications and cases
- Tackling Wicked Problems: A Public Policy Perspective, issued by the Australian government in 2007
- Democracy: the wicked problem of the 21st century? by Riripeti Reedy
- Coping with Wicked Problems: the Case of Afghanistan, by Nancy Roberts
- EBO: There Was No Baby in the Bathwater, by general Paul K. Van Riper
- Sandia research team studies best way to solve wicked problems – study on digitally enabled collaboration for wicked problems.
- Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future, by Richard J. Lazarus at Georgetown Law School.
- Homeland Security’s Wicked Problems: Developing a Research Agenda for Homeland Security, video of conference hosted by the Heritage Foundation, with keynote speech by Fran Townsend – “the truly wicked problems are those for which there are solutions, but we don’t have leadership”
- War planning for wicked problems, by T.C. Greenwood and T.X. Hammes in Armed Forces Journal
- Messy regional problems and collaborative leaders, in the UnderstandingSociety blog - nice overview of the problem of regional decline
- Playing it Forward: Path Dependency, Progressive Incrementalism, and the “Super Wicked” Problem of Global Climate Change, by Bernstein, Cashore, Levin and Auld
- Tackling Wicked Problems through Integrated Assessment, by the Graham Institute, University of Michigan, and SeaGrant Michigan
Other references
- Course description for DA-4302 at (US) Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey (Nancy Roberts)
Problem solving in general (because most of it still applies)
- Injecting Creative Thinking into Project Flow, by Ed Sickafus
To be continued…
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