There is a nice summary of wicked problems in Harvard Business Review . “Strategy as a Wicked Problem”—Harvard Business Review. 86: 98-101 which suggests if you have five of these criteria (see below) you may have a wicked problem:
- There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
- Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- 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.
- Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- 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.
- The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate)
With attention to the second criteria (Wicked problems have no stopping rule), I would suggest that Covid19 may well turn out to be a particularly bad wicked problem.
Why?
Because of the global scale, and because of the likelihood of continuous development of variants throughout the world, “herd immunity” is a chimera.
I would also suggest that the key to wicked problems, partly because there is no stopping rule, is to have an infinite game mindset.
So what does this mean in practice for healthcare institutions?
One thought. They need to move beyond finite goals ( “We need to get 80% of out patients vaccinated, and 90% of our staff vaccinated”—noble milestones, but ineffective for a virus like this, which doesn’t distinguish between an institution’s patients and people in the community) towards infinite processes (“How do we sustain a continuously improving vaccination status within our region?”).
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Note: Original use of term by Design theorist Horst Rittel “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” Policy Sciences. 4 (1973): 155–169.