Wicked Problems
It’s late at night. You’re watching the TV. All of a sudden, a loud CRASH immediately outside your dwelling. You go to check it out and find there has been a car crash, in which the passengers seem to be incapacitated. Even if you are distressed, you know to call emergency services and ensure the people are breathing and not in extreme distress. Maybe you know how to do CPR and First Aid. Responders will show up, who are part of a well-funded standardized emergency response system backed by the state and billions of tax-dollars.
These are emergencies we as human beings have an easy time conceptualizing and organizing responses to. They have these qualities.. They are: Immediate (‘There’s was just a crash outside’), Concrete (‘Two cars have crashed here’), Unpredictable (‘This has not happened here before’), and Urgent (‘We have to act now, lives are on the line’). When we start talking about Crisis, it can become more difficult to respond and conceptualize the problem in a helpful way. Depending on the situation, it may be:
- Abstract – How do you explain environmental collapse or melting glaciers as succinctly as yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater?
- Long-Term – It’s not immediate, therefore harder to justify immediate interventions and urgent funding decisions objectively to those making power decisions.
- Predictable – Many structural crises have been evident for many years to those who are studying the evidence, patterns, and sequence of events. At the time of these predictions, the person making the call might be dismissed, slandered, and punished. When it’s too late, there is no satisfaction in “I told you so..”
- Requiring Structural Solutions – These problems cannot be fixed by a ‘band-aid’. Solving these problems requires changing the way we think. They require different social structures than the ones that created the problem. Immediate and Long Term responses are necessary to deal with different scales of issues created by this Crisis. We may even need to change the way we live our lives, and may need to uproot power structures. There may be people or groups whose self-interest are in not solving the crisis, and keeping it ongoing as long as possible. This can cause great conflicts, and oftentimes violence, whether that is violence by those resisting the change, or those instigating the change.
These can be called Wicked Problems. Here are a few direct examples:
- War.
- Poverty.
- Homelessness
- Refugee Crises.
- Pollution.
- Species extinctions.
- Environmental Collapse.
- Climate Change.
We can teach and train ourselves to think about wicked problems structurally and systematically, instead of through the lens of trauma and urgency, in order to get organized and respond meaningfully.
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