Opinion
In 1973 Rittel and Webber wrote a paper about planning and coined the term Wicked Problem. One example they gave was ‘poverty’. They went on to list 10 characteristics of Wicked Problems that mostly relate to their complexity, the way they are difficult to define, are unique and cannot be solved iteratively by trial and error, are interconnected to other problems, and thus do not have simple solutions.
Universities and many large public-good organisations have fallen in love with Wicked Problems. I think it’s a great shame – because they can never be solved and over time, I think these failures make us look bad. Even worse, they distract us from problems that can be solved.
On top of this, problems that are not Wicked Problems, like assessment in the age of AI, have recently been defined as Wicked Problems. This makes the problems sound grand, but I prefer to classify such problems in simpler terms, as Naughty or Nice.
A Naughty Problem is one with two or more stakeholders with opposing interests. There is no wickedness here. For instance, if one child wants to go to the zoo on the weekend, and the other would prefer to go to the beach, this is a problem with no solution, but it is not Wicked. It is just Naughty if the children do not accept a ‘taking it in turns’ solution. AI in assessment is also just a Naughty Problem too, because the best available answer is – go back to in person exams – but not everyone likes that answer.
Nice Problems on the other hand have a single solution that everyone agrees on. Rittel and Webber call these types of problems, ‘tame’ or ‘benign’. I don’t favour their word ‘tame’, because it is loaded with a sort of anthropomorphism, or perhaps animalism, but ‘benign’ or my preferred word ‘Nice’ captures the point better. A Nice Problem is one that has a single stakeholder and has the prospect of having a single solution.
Importantly, science is all about Nice Problems. The secret of good science lies in framing the problem. As Medawar said “science is the art of the solvable”. In science one is trained to carefully define a problem in a way that it can be tested by experiment. One might ask “what type of a virus is causing COVID?”. In science, one never asks, “why can’t everyone just be healthier?”
In the modern world there has been a growing belief that the remaining problems of humanity are mostly Wicked Problems (many of which are just Naughty Problems and are not really wicked at all). It is often said that society’s problems are so big that they cannot be solved by any single researcher, or department, or university acting alone, large collaborations are necessary.
My university was once involved in a three-way alliance with our past leaders often saying that the problems of today were too big for any one university. I kept wondering which subset of world problems was exactly the right size for a set of three universities!
My own instinct – as a scientist – is that the best way to tackle Wicked Problems remains to break them down into smaller Nice Problems and solve them one at a time. Thus, one never seeks to work on “health” or “happiness”, but a researcher might work on a cure for one particular inherited blood disorder, and an artist might make a good film. Little by little the world becomes better and more interesting.
This approach does not just apply to scholarship and art. It can also apply to human relationships and life in general. One should never fixate on trying to make those one loves, or even making oneself, happy, one should simply make a cup of tea – because making a cup of tea is a Nice Problem that has a simple solution. A solution that cannot be argued about. Many things can be improved one cup of tea at a time.
The other issue with Naughty Problems is that naughty people eventually tire of modern parents not solving the problems and they long for a more authoritarian leader to be their authoritarian leader, and weigh-in to solve the problem. This seems to be happening with modern politics. The Naughty Problems are out there, they never seem to be solved, and they are being talked about all the time. When an authoritarian leader says that they have quick and simple solutions, it is hardly surprising that they get a hearing. Worse still the well-meaning people who want to solve problems often give up because they know Wicked Problems are unsolvable, they can't see any impact of their tiny efforts, and end up in a state of despair or apathy.
I worry that social media has enabled the sharing of discussion of Wicked and Naughty Problems too much and that some leaders are too fixated on big and glamorous projects like solving the Sustainable Development Goals. These problems are impressively important and some good progress is being made but each of us gets little satisfaction from contributing infinitesimally little to each goal. Making a nice cup of tea is better and is more rewarding, as is gently releasing five Bogong moths that have become trapped inside, or setting up a bee hotel, planning a tree, or recording a frog on FrogID.
Progress can be made for all and has been since the Enlightenment by tackling Nice Problems one at a time. This week let’s all see if we can focus on Nice Problems and if it works, we can do it again next week as well…
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW.