sometimes the solution isn't there
what do you do then?
The post-it note I mentioned last week – the one stuck to the side of my computer, saying “Don’t use the ‘stack to carry on tedious arguments from social media in an environment where it’s more difficult for people to have a go back” is still in effect. So this started off as a rant about development and regional policy, but has gone through a few drafts from the original, trying to express the same idea in much, much more abstract terms.
The most usual topic of this ‘stack is that of regulation and the organisation of systems – in general, and in specific contexts like that of problem-solving. But sometimes, to identify something as a “problem” risks taking a particular kind of approach to it which might not be right. As they used to say at the London Business School (an aphorism originally from John Kay, apparently), “not all business problems have solutions”.
Most of the time, there is a solution, in the sense of a best (least-worst) thing to do. And most of the time, there will be a method of reaching that solution. But not always. Sometimes, what is needed is to invent the solution – rather than following a process, synthesising from evidence or using analogies with other successful outcomes, you need a creative act to come up with a brand new way of doing things.
In exactly the way that artificial intelligence can’t, or at least can’t on the basis of the currently popular models. Rearranging the ideas and concepts of everything that’s gone before, along the lines of the Glass Bead Game can obviously generate an astonishingly huge variety of potential solutions (recall, a simple Rubik Cube already has 43 quintillion combinations). But equally obviously, the world is substantially more complex even than that. Every now and then, something new has to be attempted.
It might be the case that a lot of the “wicked problems” that resist all solution are in this sort of state – we keep poking at them and gathering evidence, but nothing is going to work because the answer isn’t in the evidence, something brand new is going to have to be attempted. There’s a distinction between problems where no solution is possible, and those where a solution will require something currently unconceivable. However, of course, the difference between these cases can be hard to see.
This seems right. I once conjured the following thought experiment: "what would the political economy dynamics look like of a problem that was *truly* unsolvable?" The answer I came to was that... the dynamics would look quite similar to those we see in general: large promises made; not delivered; opinion flips to the other side; large promises made...
I do think, however, one aspect of your note I'd like to pull on. In dynamically evolving complex systems, change — potentially even at the level of fundamental factors — is constantly happening.
So one useful prompt in the context of someone proposing they can tackle a wicked problem with such and such intervention is: "what is your theory about what has changed in the world [system] that now makes this work in a way it could not before?"
(Incidentally, this particular prompt comes from some spelunking around Techstartupland. It has been useful because that is an environment in which the same approach may be taken multiple times, but the time something works, it is often due to something in that point-in-time in the operating environment.)