The Field Guide › Paper
Rittel and Webber gave the world the term wicked problem, and the distinction it draws is one the whole complexity strand of this map depends on. Writing against the confident, science-based model of planning that dominated post-war policy, they argue that the problems planners actually face are categorically unlike the tame problems of mathematics or the bench sciences. A tame problem can be clearly stated and has a solution that is right or wrong; a wicked problem cannot even be definitively formulated, because the way you frame it already commits you to a kind of solution, so the formulation and the solution are the same act. They set out the properties that make such problems wicked: there is no definitive formulation and no stopping rule, so you stop when you run out of time or money rather than when the problem is solved; solutions are not true or false but better or worse, with no immediate or ultimate test because the consequences ripple outward indefinitely; every attempt counts, since you cannot run a wicked problem as an experiment and there is no undo, which means the planner, unlike the scientist, has no right to be wrong; and every wicked problem is essentially unique and is also a symptom of another problem, so there is no settled catalogue of solutions to draw on. Underneath the taxonomy is a critique of professional expertise: the planner cannot stand outside the problem as a neutral technician, because they are part of the system they act on and answerable for the lives their one-shot interventions touch. For a corpus about psychological safety and complexity the connection is the one Snowden and Pelrine also make: most of the problems that matter in organisational life are wicked rather than tame, and treating them as tame, as things to be analysed once and solved by best practice, is precisely the error that makes the safety to question, dissent and revise so necessary. If you cannot get the answer right in advance, you need people able to say when it is going wrong. Its limits are those of a foundational essay from planning theory: it names and anatomises the problem with great clarity but offers little by way of method for acting under it, which is part of why the later complexity and sense-making work exists. (Text drawn from the 1973 Policy Sciences paper, 4(2), pp. 155-169.)