Wicked Problems: Structuring Social Messes with Morphological Analysis

If you work in an organisation that deals with long-term social, commercial or financial planning, then you've got wicked problems! You may not call them by this name, but you know what they are. They are those complex, ever changing societal and organisational planning problems that you haven't been able to treat with much success, because you haven't even been able to structure and define them properly. They're messy, devious, and they fight back when you try to "solve" them. In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, both urban planners at the University of Berkley, wrote an article for Policy Sciences with the astounding title "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning". In this landmark article, the authors observed that there is a whole realm of social planning problems that cannot be successfully treated with traditional linear, analytical approaches.