I have been thinking a bit about wicked problems. As the Font of all Wisdom puts it, a wicked problem is:
A problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.
I have been contemplating an expanded view. The definition implies a dense unstable network. The key term is unstable, or put in somewhat different terms, unpredictable. This is true of many of the problems we deal with.
But it is not true for all of them. In fact most networked phenomena in our political, economic, and social lives are exceedingly stable. That’s what deep attractors and self-organization are all about. And it’s a good thing. If not for that stability, no social institutions would exist. What makes a stable scenario “wicked” is if we care about changing it, and we can’t.
So the real question becomes: When do dense networks in the phenomena that we are interested in result in unpredictable network behavior, and when do they result in stability? I’d be rich and famous if I knew the answer to this question, and I am neither.
My point though, is that if we are to make productive use of the concept “wicked problem”, we might do well to shift our thinking from whether a problem is wicked, to why it is wicked, and whether “wicked” means too much instability, or too much stability. A little thought along those lines might lead us to some productive solutions, or at least, to some hints as to what those solutions might be.
Evaluation Uncertainty 