Beyond wickedness
Today we met up with Jake Chapman. He’s a researcher, lecturer and consultant on systems thinking, a Demos associate, the author of the Systems Failure Demos pamphlet (one of our crucial texts for Connecting the Dots), and generally a great guy and brilliant thinker.
One of the many helpful things that came out of our discussions with Jake was a more developed understanding of wicked problems. For the past few weeks, we’ve been focussing on the ‘unbounded’ nature of wicked problems; the fact that wicked problems can’t be solved definitively, but rather can be managed better or worse, according to the time and resources available. However, Jake emphasised another aspect to wicked problems; that they are characterised by fundamental disagreements – disagreements over both what the problem is, and what the solution is (and, indeed, even if the ‘problem’ is a problem). Social deprivation and climate change are examples of problems that are 'wicked' in these ways.
This got us thinking. One of the case-studies we’re considering for Connecting the Dots is youth knife crime in the UK. Now, there’s not so much disagreement as to what the problem is, nor what the objectives of a solution should look like (bring about a substantial reduction in the number of people harmed or killed by knife attacks). So, the problem might not be characterised as ‘wicked’ in the sense that Jake was stressing. But it’s still a hugely complex issue; many different causal factors are involved in the problem, interacting in countless ways. Furthermore, the tools used to address knife-crime; educational institutions, the police, community groups and so on, are complex systems, the components parts of which often impact on each other in unpredictable ways (and this social complexity gives one clue as to why setting performance targets for such institutions can lead to unintended and unwanted consequences).
So, one question we want to look at in Connecting the Dots is how to approach ‘tame’, but nevertheless complex problems; is breaking them down into smaller problems, such as the meeting of performance targets, effective? And if not, how can they be managed better?