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.