“Wicked problems” are problems that don’t just sit there and let you work on them. A tame problem is like an engineering problem or like cholera in the 19th century. It was a gigantic problem, it killed millions of people, but as people studied it they learned more about it and then the solved it. Sanitation, if you have piped in water you solve the problem. But Ridley and Weber pointed out that in the 20th century we solved most of those problems, now our problems are like poverty, education, racism. These are wicked problems because when analysts come to them they bring preconceptions, analysts come knowing what solution they want…
The conditions for solving wicked problems are, you have to have people who see from multiple perspectives, you have to bring them together in ways that they have relationships of accountability to each other within a zone in which they can talk privately and they are reinforced with reward for actually reaching a solution. This almost never happens.
That was Jonathan Haidt on the Ezra Klein Show.
This relates to defense acquisition as much as it does academia and politics. It has been well-established that organizational culture is a critical component to deciding what people, projects, and ideas should be pursued and what should not. Our preconceptions have some value, but can prove disastrously wrong.
I don’t think the solution is about having some discussion to reach a consensus. But neither is it necessarily about free individualism, because we work best in small teams and not alone. Those teams need to comprise competing perspectives to arrive at better answers. But they also require insulation from the hoards of experts and rivals who would rather smash their ideas before-the-fact for one reason or another, perhaps to maintain their status or perhaps out of genuine disbelief of the gains.
More and more, advanced technology problems look like wicked problems.
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