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Wickedness, complexity and the Man-Machine age
Rittel and Webber coined the concept of ‘wicked problems’ in 1973. This foreshadowed the more popular notion of ‘VUCA’ issues and the IBM concept of Cynefin, which have come to the fore in recent times. The term VUCA stands for problems and opportunities that are Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous in nature. These do not lend themselves to simple solutions, indeed many VUCA issues are insoluble in so far as they can only be resolved rather than solved. We have been seduced with problem-solution thinking in a non-stop world and this is alluring for simple problems where there is no need to consider knock-on consequences of the solutions and where the consideration of options is unnecessary. For the simple things in life we tend to want our problems solved as quickly as possible and without fuss, for example when downloading a piece of music that somehow does not work on our chosen platform. As we add more complexity to our lives we will increasingly need to be able to resolve wickedness. Such problems do not lend themselves to problem-solution thinking. Here we explore strategies and tactics to deal with inherent wickedness.
Consider the problem of having an oversized carpet in your house as an oversimplified example of a wicked problem. It is certainly possible to move the rut around the room but almost impossible to eradicate the rut without re-laying the carpet, cutting the unwanted material off in the process. In the context of an enterprise, moving the rut around the room might mean shifting the problem from the HR division to Marketing to the IT division, etc. But the problem still remains unresolved in overall terms and each rearrangement creates other problems, some of which might be worse than the original problem. Re-laying the carpet in organisational terms is almost certainly not feasible, due to the need to maintain business continuity. It is essentially the equivalent of starting over in your enterprise and maybe reconfiguring the business from scratch. This is, perhaps, why we in the UK cannot ‘fix’ our NHS, our rail systems and other monolithic and complex enterprises that we rely on, as we cannot simply shut down and re-boot like a computer. VUCA problems are characterised by:
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Volatility: VUCA problems do not stay in one place. They move and that makes them especially difficult to pin down, define, contain and stabilise. They are to the business world what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is to physics. ‘Solutions’ for VUCA issues are also not solutions in the pure sense of the word, as they are often sub-optimal. Applying a poorly formed solution or a ‘quick fix’ may have negative consequences of equal or even greater long-term impact, yet busy managers like to control volatile problems and the need to juggle short-term expediency with long-term effectiveness is a constant tension. The long-term nature of VUCA issues sometimes means that resolution takes place while the issue is still ‘moving’ and the dynamic volatility of the issue therefore prevents full resolution. It would be tempting to think that doing nothing might be an expedient course of action, and timing is a crucial factor in the resolution of a VUCA problem. Yet, inaction is not in itself a good choice and this presents leaders with the dilemma of taking sometimes having to take sub-optimal action or doing nothing.
Consider the example of improving transport in London. It sounds like a well-specified goal at face value. Who would disagree with the goal? Let us suppose the Mayor of London decides to tackle one ‘tamer’ element of the wicked problem by installing cycle lanes? The cycle lanes do indeed improve the safety for cyclists but increase the danger for pedestrians jaywalking while on their phones. The lanes also slow traffic down considerably in a city characterised by a legacy road structure through road narrowing measures. Paradoxically, the congestion this creates sometimes causes cyclists to weave through traffic in areas where there are no cycle lanes and thus creates the potential for more accidents. I met the owner of a company who had done a lot of the work to build the cycle superhighways in London. He confidently told me that he thought he would likely be uninstalling the lanes within a few years once a new mayor was appointed and when people realised that attempts to discourage cars had failed, with intolerable amounts of congestion for motorists. Indeed, just as I write this, our MP for East Somerset Jacob Rees-Mogg, with a penchant for classic cars and classical language, has put forward the idea that motorists should not be penalised for wanting to drive in and out of cities, so it begins . . .
Unknown unknowns: One of the difficulties in cracking a VUCA issue is often that people do not know what needs to be known in order to make progress. Priorities are usually challenged. The debates that ensued following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union were characterised by a tsunami of data but a desert of accurate information on which to make any coherent plans. This led to our prime minister’s tautological ‘plan’, stating that “Brexit Means Brexit”. Clearly the reductionism of an unknown unknown into a three-word sound bite makes it appealing at a superficial level. However, on closer inspection, the phrase was found to be content free. This led on to a multiplicity of almost weekly Brexit varieties, including Clean, Dirty, Red, White, Blue, Green, Hard, Soft, Variegated, Ventilated, Venerated Brexit et al., none of which adequately encapsulated the inherent unknowns. VUCA problems are characterised by uncertainty. One smart thing to do when tackling them is to research all the known unknowns. This has the tendency to tame the wickedness to some degree, leaving prime thought space for the major uncertainties. Columbus and Magellan’s breakthrough discoveries thrived on uncertainty and it is the stuff of much entrepreneurship, as people like Sir Richard Branson, Sir Alan Sugar and others would testify. Yet even these ‘adventure capitalists’ build their adventures on solid foundations when you take a peek under the hood.
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Responding to uncertainty is one of the biggest issues facing Pfizer Inc., the world-class healthcare company. Many employees in the pharmaceutical sector live in the world of order and control, reinforced by a necessarily tight regulatory system to ensure that the products are safe and effective. Yet the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical industry is innovation, which, by definition requires exploration of the ‘unfamiliar’. The successful management of this paradox is one of the key issues that occupy top management attention:
The thrust to innovate informs every aspect of business and life at Pfizer. We do everything we can to stimulate, organise, and direct creative development. That’s how we control the innovation process and, as much as possible, keep it predictable. I say as much as possible, because there is always the capricious variable of chance. The unpredictable always plays its part, but we have tried to institutionalise opportunism.
William C. Steere Jr, former Chairman and CEO, Pfizer Inc.
Turning away from macroeconomic issues toward personal development, in the gig economy, young people face higher levels of career uncertainty than they would have done in the Industrial Revolution. While the future of our careers is uncertain, it is possible to reduce the uncertainty levels by adopting the following postures:
• We need to update our skills to make ourselves employable in a disruptive world.
• We will need to manage our careers as a portfolio.
• We must learn to participate successfully in the gig economy.
If the half-life of technology and businesses is in sharp decline, one of the personal risks in managing your career in an uncertain world is that it is possible to ‘reverse’ yourself into career dead ends in the future. A disruptive environment and the possibility that you might need to have 3–5 phases of your career means that an agile approach to your own career portfolio management becomes an essential part of any smart leader’s suite of strategies for an uncertain world. Leaning into the future is better than holding nostalgia for the past or remaining frozen in the present.
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Complex connectedness: When dealing with a VUCA problem, it is impossible to disentangle the issue from its context. VUCA issues have multiple causations rather than single causes and in some cases it might be difficult to identify component causes. VUCA issues are interconnected and interdependent. This came home to me in sharp relief when acting as a mediator with a team of health professionals for the family of a dear friend who was dying from triple organ failure at the age of 30. While trying to hold the rage and grief of his family in the meeting I had to find a way to help them understand that his kidney failure was related to his liver failure and, in turn, the many other complications were related to the complex connectedness of the human body. This was not really like a car alternator breakdown or a computer software problem, where a new part or a plug-and-play solution would rectify the problem, as much as all would have liked to believe. VUCA problems live in a world of soft correlation rather than hard causation. People like to think of problems being caused by a single issue but this is rarely so in the case of complex connected problems. In our example of transport in London, cycle lanes might not cause pedestrian injuries but there might be some correlation between the issues. Traffic jams are only partly caused by traffic and so on, although the terminology might suggest otherwise. In the world of health, while it is well known that smoking increases the risks of cancer, giving up smoking might not stop someone from getting cancer, as there are many lifestyle factors that contribute to the disease, and so on.
Speaking to Carl Bate at Arthur D. Little revealed the difference between complex and complicated. Horst Siebert, the German economist, coined the phrase ‘the cobra effect’ to illustrate the effects of an incorrect understanding of the total view of a situation, and the misapplication of controls in an economy. The term stems from early 20th-century Delhi. The governors of the day were worried about the increasing number of venomous cobra snakes roaming the city and to solve the problem they offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy, with large numbers of snakes being killed. Over time, however, some enterprising citizens began to breed and slaughter cobras for the income and all of a sudden the governors were faced with too many cobra skins and too many bounty payments – the scheme was becoming unaffordable and was rescinded. But by then the cobra farmers had this large population of cobras to deal with. And what do you do if there’s no market? You just release them. And this significantly, by a few orders of magnitude, worsened the cobra menace in Delhi.
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Inherent ambiguity: Multiple stakeholders are often involved in the resolution of a wicked problem, many of whom will see the issue differently or will find it hard to actually even describe the issue in a clear way, and this makes for inherent ambiguity in the goals, scope and potential diagnosis and agreement about what the problem is. Looking at just a few of the stakeholders in our transport for London example:
• The Mayor of London might be concerned with seeking re-election and making the roads safer as a bare minimum. In extremis, some of his own concerns will be in conflict.
• Road transport lobby groups might be more interested with traffic flows.
• Commuters might be more concerned with getting to work quickly, and so on.
• Cyclists might be more interested in having free uninterrupted cycle lanes without people and/or traffic lights.
It is often hard to pick or converge opinions down to the issue that unifies all. Some people say that resolving a VUCA problem is like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling.
Consider this simple scenario built around an ambiguous new product. A colleague has invented a new way to clean your teeth. It is apparently a revolution, bears no resemblance to a toothbrush and, moreover, you can clean your teeth without the need for water. However, you are not allowed to see a prototype, nor have the opportunity to try it. What is your response to the device? You want to buy ten for the family now? Couldn’t give a damn? Interested to find out more? Merely intrigued? Want to try it out before you decide?
Typical VUCA issues are world peace, universal happiness, a universal income and solving world poverty. In the case of world poverty it is clear that we have made huge progress in this area over the last 30 or so years, with the prospect that we could eradicate it within 20 years, although other factors might complicate eradication.
• In 1990, 43% of the citizens from developing countries lived in extreme poverty.
• By 2010 it was just half of the 1990 figure at 21%.
At the same time, our actions to eradicate poverty have also had other collateral effects such as migration, which have contributed to racist divisions in the western world via populist movements. None of these are reasons for stasis, of course, yet to be effective we must do the best thing we can at the time rather than anything or nothing. Yet, many times VUCA problems present themselves as burning platforms, in other words they are both urgent and important in time-management terms. This sometimes precludes their full resolution and promotes knee-jerk reactions.
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The idea of a universal income is also utopian, yet the idea asks as many questions as it appears to solve and is therefore a VUCA opportunity. Musk, however, believes it could open up a new chapter in human life. Would some of us choose to receive a basic income in exchange for full employment, fewer hours worked and the opportunity to earn more by discretionary contribution to our collective net worth through the development of new knowledge? We explore this concept more in the epilogue with our visit to life in 2030:
Julie works 20 hours a week flexibly via a complex coordination of her client’s needs, her family and herself. Julie elected to receive a basic income in exchange for full employment, less hours worked and the opportunity to earn more by discretionary contribution through an international grid of knowledge.
According to Peter Cheese (CIPD CEO, 2017), “People will have time to do other things and more complex things, more interesting things. They will certainly have more leisure time”.
David D’Souza at the CIPD asks some incisive strategic questions about Musk’s vision and VUCA problems that need to be given attention by world leaders on all sides:
1. Financial markets, left to their own devices, are not good at accommodating a greater social purpose – do we need to take more of an interventionist stance to ensure greater societal benefit?
2. More leisure time requires more disposable income if we assume that money will remain as an exchange token for the thing we call work.
3. How will companies pushing automation make money if most citizens survive on a fixed, universal basic income?
4. What is the point of work? To get happiness? Make a difference? Recognition? Will the point of work change and how might it do so?
5. If whole chunks of your life are viewable on the Internet will we become more tolerating of mistakes at work?
6. How do you get a mortgage in the ‘Gig Economy’?
7. People cry when their pets die. What will be the first piece of technology that you cry over the loss of? Do you remember your first download?
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GROUND CONTROL
Rethinking society
It is the year 2030. Form a small working group and set aside a few hours to contemplate two or three of David D’Souza’s questions.
Insist on running the event as a dialogue rather than a discussion. See our conversation on dialogue later in this book for a description of how these terms differ.
Resist as far as possible the tendency to close down dialogue, reach conclusions, decisions or actions such that the conversation ferments and spreads. Evaluate much later, say at one month after the dialogue.
Resolving wickedness
How then does one go about addressing a VUCA/wicked problem/opportunity? There is no single way to go about this but here are some suggestions for commencing:
1. Time to think is essential. Wicked problems must be understood well in order to have any chance of doing anything better than applying a sticking plaster to them.
2. At the same time, it is vital to suspend judgement about sub-optimal solutions that have been tried or suggested. A wicked problem is wicked because it has hitherto eluded all attempts to resolve the matter through ‘plug-and-play’ solutions or piecemeal approaches to problem solving.
3. Be prepared to apply systemic thinking to the topic. In particular, find ways to see the problem from multiple viewpoints and stakeholder perspectives in order to grapple with the whole-brain view of the problem.
4. Sometimes some clearance activity can help to ‘tame’ a wicked problem, by eradicating the ‘knowable unknowns’ through research. The more one can know about the known areas of a wicked problem the easier it is to focus on the uncertainties that actually count.
5. On some occasions, it is useful to invest a good amount of time converging to a point (the super-ordinate goal) to agree what the prime issue is. The issue, which, if addressed will have maximum impact on the sub-issues in the most helpful way. This requires skilled facilitation skills if dealing with groups, and expert coaching if dealing with individuals.
6. In other circumstances, it helps to begin to solve the problem through active experimentation/improvisation, discarding prototypes that do not work until a clear vision emerges from many attempts to ‘hit the spot’. Much exploratory research and development operates on this basis although trial and error can be an expensive business. The classic examples of this are Edison’s light bulb, which reputedly took 10 000 prototypes and Sir James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner, which involved 5127 prototypes. Dyson used the Edisonian/scientific approach to innovation, making just one change every time he developed a prototype.
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7. In some cases a pincer action is needed. Perhaps clarifying questions of shared vision first and then finding ingenious solutions through experimentation. Re-clarifying the vision and then systematically removing the obstacles to reaching that vision.
8. Expert facilitation is needed to tackle VUCA problems and we look at this topic in Dialogue II.
9. Alongside facilitation, there is often a need for process management and tools and techniques. We explore divergent and convergent thinking later on in Dialogue I.
10. The values needed to tackle VUCA problems are those that cultivate a climate of creativity, i.e. curiosity, love, forgiveness and a sense of direction. We examine these within our review of ‘Seven habits for the Man-Machine age’ in Chapter 5.
To resolve a VUCA problem requires all of our intelligences: conventional IQ, EQ and SQ. How then do we create an enterprise that thinks individually and collectively in teams and as a whole system?