Wicked problem

A wicked problem in planning and policy is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil.

The diagram of Rittel and Webber (1973) that defines the properties of the Wicked problems.

Quotes

• [Wicked problems are] social problems which are ill formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.
  • C. West Churchman, "Guest editorial: Wicked problems" in Management Sciences 14(4)', p. 141

• Climate change is a wicked problem… [and] there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat.
  • Richard Heinberg, "Something Wicked This Way Comes", republished in Resilience, December 7, 2023

• The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail because of the nature of these problems... Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the indisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about "optimal solutions" to these problems... Even worse, there are no solutions in the sense of definitive answers.
  • Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber (1973). "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" (PDF). Policy Sciences. 4 (2): 155–169

• There are at least ten distinguishing properties of planning-type problems, 1 e wicked ones, that planners had better be alert to and which schall comment upon in turn...
  1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
  2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
  3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but goodor-bad.
  4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
  5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
  6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or exhaustively desirable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
  7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
  8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
  9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
  10. The planner has no right to be wrong.
  • Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber (1973). "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" (PDF). Policy Sciences. 4 (2): p. 161–169: These are the ten paragraph titles in the third chapter of the article, which has become known as the Listing of the "ten distinguishing properties of wicked problems."

• “Wicked problems.” It just says it all. Persistent social problems—poverty, food insecurity, climate change, drug addiction, pollution, and the list goes on—seem aptly condemned as wicked. But what makes them wicked, and what are we to do about them?
  • J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman. "Introduction: Governing wicked problems." Vanderbilt Law Review 73 (2020): 1561.