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Design Strategy

Challenges in Wicked Problem Territory

Nancy C. Roberts
MIT Press, 2023
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  • Visionary
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Recommendation

“Wicked problems,” like climate change, habitat loss and financial volatility, pose new and complex challenges that will require innovative solutions. But with this opportunity comes a tremendous responsibility, given the massive human cost of being wrong. So says Nancy C. Roberts, a professor of defense analysis, who uses design thinking as a tool to help people drive innovation. Her insightful work will help readers cultivate the skills that change agents will need to tackle these issues and build a better world.

Summary

Humanity can’t afford to ignore “wicked problems,” but it can’t agree on their definition or scope.

Humanity has entered The Great Acceleration: an era in which human activity is reshaping the Earth’s ecosystems with unprecedented swiftness. People working across disciplines must navigate a growing number of issues related to this reality, ranging from climate change to the instability of financial markets. Design theorist Horst Rittel coined the term “wicked problems” in a 1967 seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. He noted “the mischievous and evil quality of these problems, where proposed ‘solutions’ often turn out to be worse than the symptoms.”

According to Rittel and his colleague Melvin Webber, wicked problems tend to have three common qualities: First, they have no single problem frame – a wicked problem’s definition, significance and proposed solutions may evolve and vary wildly, depending on people’s values and assumptions. Second, wicked problems’ interconnectedness means that a problem’s ties with...

About the Author

Nancy C. Roberts is professor emerita of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of Operational and Information Sciences. She uses design strategy to help government and business leaders innovate and become better problem solvers.

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