Jake Chapman gave us a particularly illuminating example of this complexity: One central aspect of drugs policy in the UK is ‘supply-side intervention’; disrupting the heroin trade by seizing drugs at borders, and arresting 'upstream' dealers and traffickers (this contrasts with ‘demand-side’ interventions such as drug-treatment or sentencing of drug-users). Jake argued that although such supply-side interventions address one aspect of the problem(s) of heroin misuse (there’s less heroin on the street, and it’s more difficult to come by), they actually worsen other problems. A disrupted supply of heroin may, if it causes higher prices, lead to higher rates of drug-related acquisitive crime, as addicts need more money to feed their habits. Or, it may lead to dealers cutting heroin with more impurities, exacerbating immediate health problems for addicts, and increasing the risk of overdoses once a purer supply of heroin subsequently becomes available to addicts whose opiate-tolerance has been weakened by impure heroin.

 This isn’t to say, of course, that ‘the answer’ to the problem of heroin misuse is to cease supply-side interventions. In Connecting the Dots, we’re not aiming to make such policy-suggestions. Rather, we aim to take a step back from the policy issues and give an account of the problem that foregrounds its complexity, to emphasise the difficulties in, and the necessity of,  adopting a ‘big-picture’ approach to the problem, which cuts across policy-area boundaries. Any effective attempt to manage the problem must coordinate a broad-range of policy areas, from education , employment and housing, to healthcare and the criminal justice system, to international development (The near-anarchy and severe poverty in Afghanistan has contributed to it becoming the global centre of opium production). 

So, there’s plenty of dots that need to be connected.  But we also want to look at another aspect of the ‘wickedness’ of the problems of heroin misuse; the intractable disagreements over the problem formulation.  The UK’s drug-policy is sometimes characterised as being ‘crime-led, treatment-driven’. Criminal proceedings are brought against those who possess and deal drugs (and many heroin addicts are  ‘user-dealers’), but the focus of many sentences is coercively imposed drug treatment, often through Drug Rehabilitation Requirements (DRRs), a subset of community sentences.

Switzerland, however, has a very different approach to the problem. Just last weekend, a referendum was passed in support of the heroin prescription programme, first trialed in 1994, under which doctors have provided injectable heroin to addicts.  In Switzerland, then, heroin misuse is framed as more of a healthcare problem than a criminal problem, in contrast to the UK (indeed, some government figures have recently argued that the UK’s policy doesn’t go far enough: a 2003 Strategy Unit paper called for heroin use to be criminalised).

Again, our aim in this project isn’t to argue for one side in the debates over decriminilisation. Rather, we want to look at the different assumptions underlying these disagreements; do the divergent conclusions stem from different formulations of what the problem is?  These disagreements may be over whether reducing drug use, or drug-harms, or drug-related crime should be the focus of drugs policy; and over which should take priority when these aims conflict. These debates may in turn be rooted in disagreements over questions such as the legitimacy of paternalistic state action, whether drug-use is intrinsically bad, and moral disagreements over the appropriateness of using criminal law to ‘send’ public-health messages. There may also be disagreements over the formulation of aspects of the problem; for example, just what is to count as ‘drug-related’ crime: all crimes in which drugs were a motivating/contributory factor, or crimes which are carried out primarily because of a need for, or the effects of, drugs?

There is, then, great scope for deep and broad disagreement over the problem formulation. In a sense, parties to the debate over drugs policy may not be disagreeing about the same problem at all, and so one group's solution may be another's tragedy. This is a characteristic of many wicked problems, from social deprivation to climate change mitigation.  We hope to tease out some of the main faultlines of the disagreements over problem-formulation in the case of the UK heroin trade, and offer some suggestions as to how noting these intractable disagreements over what the problem is should inform the policy-making and policy-enacting process.

"If you read Tolstoy's War and Peace, he has some wonderful descriptions about how battles which look very clear to military historians never seem that way to the people involved in them, that when you're actually in the smoke and the roar of the cannons, you have no idea what's happening. Even the generals have no idea what's happening."

The quote is from a BBC website article by Michael Blastland, discussing the difficulties that politicians have in seeing 'the big picture', and how  (either as a cause, or an effect, or both) there is a political culture in which admissions of ignorance, ambiguity or confusion are taboo - something that Jake Chapman mentions in Systems Failure.

The article goes on: 

"Tolstoy intended these passages as a parable of society as a whole, to show there's no vantage point from which to get the big picture.

This also holds for the complicated financial systems currently under the spotlight worldwide.

We had become a little too confident that we thought we could see the big picture, and now the big picture has come back and hit us rather hard where it hurts."

What all this seems to point to, though, is the importance of trying to see the big picture, but acknowledging that unpredictability and surprises will always be in store; problems are then approached through the objective of managing this unpredictability. Indeed, seeing the big-picture, or trying to, should give us a better grasp of what kind of shocks might occur in the future. 

So, perhaps, big-picture thinking, but with humility, is the way to go.

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?

Wicked problems are characterised a great deal of complexity and disagreement among stakeholders, and require coordinated action from a broad range of policy makers and practioners. Given this, so the argument runs, leaving the resolution of wicked problems to a small group of experts runs the risk of leaving important aspects of a wicked problem unarticulated and unaddressed. Each individual or group will only have a part of the story, so involving more people will allow you to see the big picture, in all its wickedly daunting form.

Nancy Roberts, one of the central figures in research on wicked problems, has argued in favour of 'collaborative' problem-managing approaches. Group workshop tools for resolving wicked problems have been developed and highly finessed; Robert E. Horn and Robert Weber's paper 'New Tools for Resolving Wicked Problems' presents their 'Mess Mapping' and 'Resolution Mapping' processes, both of which rely on collaborative engagement from a range of stakeholders.

However, recent research by Sandia National Laboratories in the USA has challenged this consensus. Researchers found that the quality and quantity of responses to a case-study wicked problem were higher among individuals working alone, compared to the responses from a group who were able to see and build upon their fellow participants' work via an intranet system. One might, of course, challenge the criteria Sandia used to judge the quality of responses, or question whether other forms of collaborative working, aside from intranet-facilitated brainstorming, would be more effective than working alone. Still, it's interesting and provocative research.

Clearly, all this presents policy-makers with some pretty daunting challenges. Given the complexity and unbounded nature of wicked problems, taking the big picture is essential; focus narrowly on only one aspect of the problem, and unforeseen consequences are likely to crop up elsewhere, with the wider problem still unresolved.

Demos has in the past argued for a 'holistic' or 'joined up' government approach to wicked problems, in pamphlets such as Holistic Government and Systems Failure. With wicked problems, dividing the problem up between silo'd departments is an inadequate response.

Many politicians and policy-makers understand the value of holistic government approaches to wicked problems, yet so far reforms in this direction have been sporadic. However, the Australia Public Services Commission has been particularly alert to the complexities of wicked problems, and receptive to innovative problem solving approaches to them.

Their 2007 paper, 'Tackling Wicked Problems: A Public Policy Paper' is a compelling and clear argument in favour of cross-departmental collaboration in the management of wicked problems. Sections 5 and 6, on the institutional difficulties to establishing holistic government, are particularly good food for thought.

With Connecting the Dots, we want to see how this general approach can be developed further. We'll be focusing on three case-studies of wicked problems; local violent crime, international drug trafficking, and climate security. We want to bring out in-depth the 'wickedness' of these problems, to argue for holistic government in the management of wicked problems, and to discuss what meeting this ambition would mean on the ground in our three case-study policy areas.

One idea that we envisage will be central to Connecting the Dots, and which is not discussed in detail in the APS paper, is that of leverage. Leverage points are places to intervene in a system, in which small changes can have large effects. The complexities of wicked problems provide opportunities to policy-makers as well as challenges; the feedback loops and interdependencies between causal factors can be exploited to effect large-scale changes in a system. Change one aspect of the system and you might, given the web of interconnections, set off a chain (or even a loop) of system-wide changes.

What’s keeping us awake at night, then, is how to identify leverage points in our three case-study problems, and how these leverage points could be exploited…