By Stine Arensbach and Carsten Joergensen
Across the globe, governments and public sector actors are facing the consequences of massive and complex challenges. Climate change and climate adaptation. War, insecurity, and refugee crises. Disaster management and societal rebuilding. Income inequality and poverty. Aging populations and the related challenge of providing care for the elderly. Education and upskilling the workforce in a digital era. Cybersecurity and protecting citizens and their personal data. Equal access to healthcare and providing the best and newest treatment to patients. The challenges are multiple, and they are everywhere. They go by the name of Wicked Problems.
In this blog post we will dive into the wicked problems as a concept and argue why they escape traditional problem-solving methods. In an upcoming blog post, we will propose a novel approach that might come close to, if not solving them, then at least making them actionable.
What are wicked problems?
The first problem with wicked problems is the name. Wicked is often translated or associated with 'malignant' or 'evil'. Furthermore, we have noticed that wicked problem is often used to describe a situation that requires an extensive, technical, complex or resource-intensive solution. In other words, if it can be solved with a simple solution, it cannot be wicked.
But a wicked problem has nothing to do with the difficulty of the solution. Nor is it necessarily evil or even necessarily a problem in the traditional sense of the word. A wicked problem is an unwanted situation that cannot be resolved by one actor alone, nor can one actor alone define the resolution to the situation. A wicked problem is an interconnected mess of cause and effect that grows uncontrollably in multiple directions. In other words, if you only treat the symptoms, you will make matters worse.
An example could be a national scarcity of nurses. To attract more nurses the government decides to give all nurses a pay rise. Whether the scarcity issue was a pay-related problem or not, the discussion turns toward the pay level and whether this is fair or not. Other professions argue that they, too, deserve a payrise. Suddenly the issue of fairness has been added to this wicked problem. In turn, the allocation of money to the nurses’ pay now requires a regulatory set up that is a substantial cost to the national budget, thus bringing the effectiveness of public administration into question. And when everything has been worked through, the pay rise itself – after tax – may end up being rather unimpressive. The list continues. The solution backfires and leaves everyone worse off than before. You can say that the solution expands the problem that it intended to solve.
A wicked problem-situation can in other words not be understood nor solved from one perspective alone – it is a shared problem-situation. The same goes for solving it – it can only be tackled as a shared solution.
Not our responsibility
Wicked problems have an unparalleled ability to escape the responsibility of any one actor. Who is ultimately responsible for obesity in society, the mental health of our young people, workplace stress, the livability of our cities, and climbing suicide rates? We can say that such problems fall under the jurisdiction of the government, but who ultimately owns the responsibility for solving them?
Public actors today solve the challenges they were created to solve. The police catch criminals, healthcare providers treat the sick, and schools teach children to write. So who is responsible for addressing the increasing insecurity and climbing crime rates, deteriorating health despite more specialised treatment options, and problems in primary schools despite education reforms?
The traditional public sector role
The current government setups are designed for stability, accountability, financial control, and effective operations. They are built upon the logic of an analytical natural science tradition, where we over centuries of deductive practices, have become specialists in tightly defined subject areas. Dependent on the core issue at hand, we have a group of specialists (in a silo) who can cover it. This problem-solving approach is effective. But only when you know what the problem is and who owns the responsibility for solving it.
Our traditional problem-solving approach
Our traditional approach to problem-solving is based on a linear assumption that if we know the root causes of the problem, we can fix it there. But the core of the matter when it comes to wicked problems is that there is no core. There is no center or root cause from which everything else springs. Take, for example, workforce scarcity, which is on everyone's minds these days. What is the cause? Aging populations or a failed recruitment and retention strategy? Brain drain from the provinces or soaring house prices in the city? A professional group's general working conditions or private alternatives' promises of better pay?
There is not one source of this mess. There are thousands. And when there are thousands of reasons for this mess, then we need to stop believing that we can understand or see through the problem. When we try to understand wicked problems, one cone of light is not enough to illuminate all the unknowns, and we risk getting only a fraction of the wicked complexity.
A new public sector role: What if…
In recent years we have seen the sharp boundaries between public, civil and corporate responsibility become more fluid. Public actors have long sought private actors in developing solutions for wicked problems and sustaining welfare systems, initially through privatisation and voluntary help, but in recent years through more institutionalised cross-sector collaboration and co-creation.
One of the most recent and vivid examples have been the lessons from Covid where government agencies very rapidly stood up and through cross-agency and cross-sector teams enabled solutions to solve pressing issues. In countries all over the world, politicians had the courage to let go and private actors had the readiness to adjusting their production. The challenges we were facing could not be solved by one government or one organisation alone. They required and fostered cross-sector and cross-agency thinking. And in many countries around the world that happened with unprecedented speed.
What we saw was a move towards a sharing responsibility of one of society’s wicked problems where public players could act as orchestrators rather than traditionally providers of solutions, with an enabling role for private and voluntary expertise and efforts in joint collaborations.
We saw it could be done. And now, we need more of this. Public actors are increasingly reaching out to private actors with the intention of fostering more co-creation and partnership-style collaboration. This calls for new tools and mindsets to orchestrate these types of wicked solutions. In an upcoming post we will look into this.
About the authors
Stine Arensbach is co-founding partner at Rethink Advisory. She is an expert in wicked problems and co-creation and works primarily with strategy and business development. Stine has more than 15 years of experience from academia and consultancy (Deloitte) with a special focus on innovation, wicked problems, and co-creation. She holds a PhD in designing multi-stakeholder initiatives from the Royal Danish Academy in collaboration with Stanford University. Stine has extensive experience in establishing public-private development consortia, particularly within energy, safety, and security.
Carsten Joergensen leads Deloitte´s Government & Public Services team across North South Europe and the Middle East and is part of Deloitte´s Global Public Sector Executive team. Carsten has 25 years of experience from advising public sector leaders across Europe on strategy development, public policy, developing regulation, organizational development and digital transformation. Carsten has worked across a number of different government sectors and all government levels.
