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The concept of "wicked problems" was originally proposed by H. J. Rittel (a pioneering theorist of design and planning, and late professor at the University of California, Berkeley) and M. Webber [1] in a seminal treatise for social planning. Rittel expounded on the nature of ill-defined design and planning problems which he termed "wicked" (ie. difficult) to contrast against the relatively "tame" problems of mathematics, chess, or puzzle solving. Wicked problems have incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements; and solutions to them are often difficult to recognize as such because of complex interdependencies. Rittel and Webber stated that while attempting to solve a wicked problem, the solution of one of its aspects may reveal or create another, even more complex problem. University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (also known as California, Cal, UCB, UC Berkeley, The University of California, or simply Berkeley) is a public, coeducational university situated east of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California, overlooking the Golden Gate. ...
Planning is the management function that is concerned with defining goals for future organizational performance and deciding on the tasks and resources needed to be used in order to attain the said goals. ...
Wickedness refers to human sin, describing not just the wicked aspect of the wicked act, but to describe the state of being wicked; mans own deliberate choice of doing evil over doing good. ...
Euclid, detail from The School of Athens by Raphael. ...
Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from an article revision dated 2006-03-08, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...
An example of a simple puzzle. ...
Classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues (for an extreme case, consider what it would take to "solve" terrorism, where even the term terrorism is highly controversial and difficult to define). Problems whose solution require large groups of individuals to change their mindsets and behaviors are likely to be a wicked problem. For examples of analyses of world-scale wicked problems, you can read about the work done by the Millennium Project of the American Council of the United Nations University. Economics (deriving from the Greek words οίκω [okos], house, and νÎμω [nemo], rules hence household management) is the social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. ...
The Natural Environment comprises all living and non-living things that occur naturally on Earth. ...
Politics is the process and method of decision-making for groups of human beings. ...
The term terrorism is largely synonymous with political violence or the threat of violence, and refers to a strategy of using coordinated attacks that typically fall within the time, manner of conduct, and place commonly understood as unconventional warfare. ...
The Millennium Project provides an international capacity for early warning and analysis of global long-range issues, opportunities, and strategies. ...
Rittel developed what he called the "Issues Based Information System" (IBIS) framework (which enables groups to decompose problems into questions, ideas and arguments), to better deal with wicked problems. Jeff Conklin Ph.D., a computer scientist, while expanding upon IBIS [2], developed gIBIS ("graphical IBIS") while at the Microelectronics & Computing Consortium (MCC) in Austin, Texas. The gIBIS prototype was subsequently turned into a product called QuestMap by Corporate Memory Systems Inc., a spinoff from MCC. This has subsequently evolved into the Compendium hypermedia concept mapping tool. During QuestMap's product life, Conklin also developed Dialogue Mapping as a facilitation skill for using tools in meetings, designed to help groups further understand, and help solve wicked problems. Dialogue Mapping was subsequently integrated with work in knowledge representation and business process re-engineering (Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis, originally at NYNEX Science & Technology) to create Conversational Modelling which Compendium is designed to support. Compendium's development is coordinated at the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute", and its source code is freely available.
In the last decade, other computer scientists [3] have pointed out that software development shares many properties with other design practices (particularly that people-, process-, and technology-problems have to be considered equally), and have incorporated Rittel's concepts into their software design methodologies. The design and integration of complex software-defined services that use the Web (Web services) can be construed as an evolution from previous models of software design, and therefore becomes a wicked problem also. Computer science (informally: CS or compsci) is, in its most general sense, the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. ...
Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields. ...
Usually considered in the context of the applied arts, engineering, architecture, and other such creative endeavours, design is used as both a noun and a verb. ...
Look up Process in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Process (lat. ...
By the mid 20th century humans had achieved a level of technological mastery sufficient to leave the surface of the planet for the first time and explore space. ...
Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields. ...
A web service is a collection of protocols and standards used for exchanging data between applications. ...
Morphological analysis is one of the principal methods employed for structuring and analysing "wicked problems" [4]. Morphological analysis is a technique developed by Fritz Zwicky (1966, 1969) for exploring all the possible solutions to a multi-dimensional, non-quantified problem complex. ...
According to Conklin, the four defining characteristics of wicked problems are:
- The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution
- Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
- Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
- The problem is never solved.
The following characteristics further describe wicked problems: A stakeholder is a person who holds money or other property while its owner is being determined. ...
Resources comprise the base material for an activity or industry: factors of production, the economics term human capital, human resources (HR) and innovation natural resources resource (computer science) resource (Web) resource (Windows) resource (Macintosh) resource (political) resource (project management) Resource Distribution, human influence and the effects of trade. ...
- Wicked problems do not have an exhaustive set of potential solutions.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- Discrepancies in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways--the choice of explanation in turn determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique--lessons-learned are hard to transfer across to other problems.
- Wicked problems are often "solved" (as well as they can be...) through group efforts.
- Wicked problems require inventive/creative solutions.
- Every implemented solution to a wicked problem has consequences, and may cause additional problems.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule(s).
- Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but instead better, worse, or good enough.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- The planner or designer (solving the problem) has no inherent right to solve the problem, and no permission to make mistakes.
The term symptom (from the Greek syn = con/plus and pipto = fall, together meaning co-exist) has two similar meanings in the context of physical and mental health: A symptom may loosely be said to be a physical condition which shows that one has a particular illness or disorder (see...
In decision theory, a stopping rule is a mechanism for deciding whether to continue or stop a process on the basis of the present position and past events, and which will almost always lead to a decision to stop at some time, known as a stopping time. ...
When someone sincerely agrees with an assertion, they might claim that it is the truth. ...
FALSE is an esoteric programming language designed by Wouter van Oortmerssen in 1993, named after his favourite boolean value. ...
Designer is a broad term for a person who designs any of a variety of things. ...
References
- ↑ Rittel, H., and M. Webber; "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" pp 155-169, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Inc., Amsterdam, 1973.
- ↑ Conklin Ph.D., Jeff; "Dialog Mapping: An Approach for Wicked Problems," CogNexus Institute, 2003
- ↑ DeGrace, Peter, and Hulet Stahl, L.; "Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions: A Catalog of Modern Engineering Paradigms," Prentice Hall PTR; 1st edition, February 12, 1998, ISBN 013590126X
- ↑ Ritchey, T.; Wicked Problems. Structuring Social Messes with Morphological Analysis (2005). From the Swedish Morphological Society
See also Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is application software that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users at separated workstations (see also computer supported cooperative work). ...
Computational sociology is a recently developed branch of sociology that uses computation to analyze social phenomena. ...
A computer simulation or a computer model is a computer program that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. ...
Usually considered in the context of the applied arts, engineering, architecture, and other such creative endeavours, design is used as both a noun and a verb. ...
Douglas Engelbart Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Norwegian descent. ...
Heuristic is the art and science of discovery and invention. ...
Morphological analysis is a technique developed by Fritz Zwicky (1966, 1969) for exploring all the possible solutions to a multi-dimensional, non-quantified problem complex. ...
Problem solving forms part of thinking. ...
Russell Lincoln Ackoff (born 12 February 1919) is an American scientist in operations research and systems theory. ...
Systems analysis is the science dealing with analysis of complex, large scale systems and the interactions within those systems. ...
System Dynamics is one approach to modeling the dynamics of complex systems such as population, ecological and economic systems, which usually interact strongly with each other. ...
Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field which studies relationships of systems as a whole. ...
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