Lessons learned from a year spent tackling wicked problems
Good design can literally change the world.
Very few other disciplines offer the same ability to deconstruct societal systems to their core and rebuild the structures shaping human behaviour.
As such, as your design career progresses, it’s highly likely that at some point you’ll get a run at developing solutions for the big hairy societal issues
However, you’ll soon come to learn that all problems are made equally.
Whilst product or service design is bounded, the truly meaty problems plaguing our age are systemic, diffused, underfunded, orphaned, or perhaps more depressingly, hardwired into our social fabric.
In design parlance they’re ‘wicked’, requiring not only a very specific set of skills and working practices but project structures, guardrails, approaches to insight and organisational engagement techniques.
On the Prison Leavers Project our 4 innovation teams have spent the last 18 months applying systemic design to generate novel, scalable and evaluable ways to reduce the national criminal reoffending rate.
Feeling our way to these macro-level interventions has involved gargantuan levels of energy, creativity, goodwill and stamina with plenty of battle scars won along the way.
Whilst every single wicked problem you encounter will be different, below are 8 lessons I’d personally share with any innovators setting out on a similar journey. All views my own.
1. Recruit deliberately for hybrid minds and teams
Project management 101 states that most initiatives fail before they’ve begun which makes paying attention to your upfront structures vitally important.
Whilst all teams naturally benefit from diversity of thought, the extreme complexity of wicked problems creates an enhanced need to assemble teams combining sufficient technical breadth with the right levels of emotional intelligence, pragmatism, and (frankly) patience needed to operate in sensitive spaces.
These are problems where generalists come into their own, whose smorgasbord of mental models help teams think themselves out of dead-ends, creating the collective confidence to pivot to more fertile territories.
However other capabilities worth seeking out from the start include:
- Those with lived experience: who are able to intuitively spot systemic cause-and-effect and prevent empathy drift.
- Frontline expertise: who recognise what it really takes to bring ideas to life and whose healthy respect for organisational and environmental constraints often acts as a healthy block to over intellectualisation.
- Academic hackers: sufficiently educated to mine the academic literature, sufficiently grounded to extract the principles that are genuinely actionable
- An oft overlooked skill set is including individuals with high social capital with a knack for opening doors needed to try out less traditional ways of working
However, it’s worth remembering there is a sweet spot between distributed intelligence and mutual incomprehension which makes taking the time to deliberate screen the skillsets and attributes of your team important.
2. Mine for hidden agendas… before they bury you
People swarm to wicked problems because they want to make a difference.
Whilst this goodwill can feel intoxicating, relying too heavily on favours and ‘random acts of kindness’ from your network can create a dangerous undercurrent of competing motivations and visions of success.
This might not matter at the enthusiastic outset, but later down the line the impossibility of arriving at an ‘objectively correct solution’ will require some tough collective decisions and trade-offs likely to put noses out of joint.
To ride out in front of this at the outset, invest in reflective practices such as assumption mapping and decision-making charters to unpack completing priorities, motivations and levels of skin in the game.
These artefacts can be periodically reviewed as your team or stakeholder group waxes and wanes. However their existence will help to prevent the 11th hour discovery that redressing the north-south spending divide or servicing the needs of a particular under-served community was a massive factor in support all along.
3. Rituals and routines will build psychological safety and control
I’m in no-way advocating for enforced rigid working practices but establishing the processes by which planning and prioritisation will flexibly occur as your project progresses will help to increase mental bandwidth.
Ritual is an ancient and inextricable part of human nature. And while it may take many forms, it remains a powerful tool for promoting resilience and solidarity, especially in a world (or project) full of ever-changing variables.
Team processes to consider deliberately building rituals around include:
- Assigning and evaluating work in an interdisciplinary environment
- External relationship building and storytelling
- Re-scoping procedures
- Resolution practices for disagreement and debate
- Health checks — for people and ideas alike
4. Build in outside voices to keep you honest and sane
Working in wicked problem spaces like poverty alleviation or sustainability involve deep levels of cognitive and emotional investment.
However alongside this comes the danger of losing perspective and proportion which makes building deliberate checks and balances to your project architecture from the outset a hugely important part of project design.
Thinking in terms of multiple levels and functions can be helpful here:
- External Evaluators. AKA eyes on the process: this group, often in a formal external capacity such as an academic partner, can help keep the big picture in mind and feedback valuable intel to project leaders on emergent working practices, cultural norms, blind spot worthy of course correction.
- Stage Gates Reviewers. AKA eyes on the output: this might look like project boards who can analyse outputs from expert vantage points and ensure ethical independence.
- Embedded Collaborators. AKA eyes on the context: recruiting field to your mission and choreograph how they engage with the core team back at the ranch and a project.
- Mentors and Coaches. AKA eyes on the theory: Whilst our teams have responsibility for decision making, mentorship opportunities were set up with social researchers, behavioural scientists, evaluation experts, and a live experience panel providing safe spaces to test thinking.
Making your project more discoverable by working out in the open can encourage random connections and happenstance which can keep you on track.
5. Embrace action as a form of intelligence
The one thing wicked problems certainly don’t lack is research.
Upfront literature reviews and rapid policy assessments are useful for orientating yourself and appreciating contributing factors to previous successes and failures. However at some point your team will need to embrace the reality that not everything of importance can be learned in the abstract and that taking action, especially within complex systems is in itself a critical form of intelligence.
For the methodologically minded, adopting an action research approach can be beneficial here; a set of practices encouraging repeated spirals of experimentation to inform your research agenda and set priorities for further discoveries. On a practical level this might look a lot like repeated stages of desk research, expert interviews, prototyping, testing, analysis and rescoping.
Other advantages to early experimentation include the ability to build in frontline perspectives from the beginning, creating a dialogue with voices often left out from ivory tower perspectives
From experience it can also help to kick unhelpful perfectionist tendencies by preventing a comforting over-intellectualisation of the issue at hand.
6. Map how maps make decisions
Everyone knows that systems thinking involves mapping.
Aside from the general benefit of getting everything on one page, this type of work adds value by:
- Focusing attention on the relational interplay between components
- Disrupting lazy, linear explanations of cause and effect.
- Encouraging longer term thinking e.g. the role of unintended consequences and feedback loops in behavioural performance.
- Promoting specificity about the mechanics required to effect change — e.g. the benefit of designing self-stabilising systems vs creating one with exponential growth.
Yet even experienced teams will run into problems if:
- Mapping is treated as an event not a practice: since they exist to concretise your view of the problem space, keeping maps updated in response to new knowledge and the style of thinking required is critical. Whilst it looks impressive a static map is little more than a show pony or comfort blanket.
- Representations are mistaken for truths: the fact that wicked problems can’t be comprehended from a single vantage point makes system change the ultimate team sport. The best maps and mappers will use self-aware tools for dialogue, collaboration and communion- not to educate experts on their own reality.
- Artefacts don’t have a defined role in decision making: If your system map is the answer, then you must be able to articulate what the question was? Smart teams get crystal clear about the knowledge required to move their process on and go to work building momentum and trust around their learnings.
7. Develop strategies for emotional friction
As Alfred Adler once pointed out, at their heart most problems are interpersonal relationship ones.
Whilst generating interesting ideas for service improvement is relatively easy, building genuine momentum to work in underfunded spaces is a much more difficult task. Doubly so when your work requires poking a big stick at carefully concealed issues, equilibriums and trade-offs.
Innovators in sensitive settings typically go on a journey of self-realisation as to the importance of relational intelligence to experimentation.
Recognising that change naturally triggers reactions around loss of control, status, pride and jealousy; smart teams invest conscious time and energy into emotional management strategies. These might include:
- Respect and reflect hierarchies: accommodating power structures in your communication approach can ward-off conflict. E.g. Allowing sufficient time for your messages to disseminate internally and asking permission before proposing ideas to delivery or frontline teams.
- Spend time on the frontline: facetime is a powerful signal of emotional investment and displays empathy for situational constraints
- Ask for inputs: build-in in existing ideas commitment bias
- Work in the open: show you have nothing to hide, take time to take others through your thinking. Set up regular updates blogs and show-and tells.
- Keep your promises: reputations of others may be on the line so never overpromise.
- Come with resources: stretched services can’t run on ideas alone. Investing in capabilities demonstrates serious long term thinking.
8. Make your peace with emergent design
In complex systems the notion of complete control is as fantastical as hens teeth.
It’s also undesirable since in the most part front line services keep the show on the road via flexibility and creative resourcefulness.
This means designers and policymakers must be open to solutions which leave space for interpretation based on evolving circumstances and fit.
Practically speaking this means spending more time specifying the outcome, principles of delivery and vision of success and less on insisting on precise methods of enactment.
Tracking naturally evolving patterns and processes will provide plenty of time for course correction but also important intelligence about system functioning for further change.
