Most "wicked" business challenges aren't ! (65)

Most reported examples of wicked business challenges are not wicked at all – we just haven't used approaches that can break them down clearly.

People do love to labour the "complexity" of business issues. And like many topics, advocates have found a sexy buzz-word to promote this idea - the wicked problem.

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Thing is - most "wicked" problems just aren't

Criteria that make a problem wicked were set out in this 1973 piece by Rittel and Webber.

1) They do not have a definitive formulation.

2) They do not have a “stopping rule.” In other words, these problems lack an inherent logic that signals when they are solved.

3) Their solutions are not true or false, only good or bad.

4) There is no way to test the solution to a wicked problem.

5) They cannot be studied through trial and error. Their solutions are irreversible so, as Rittel and Webber put it, “every trial counts.”

6) There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem.

7) All wicked problems are essentially unique.

8) Wicked problems can always be described as the symptom of other problems.

9) The way a wicked problem is described determines its possible solutions.

10) Planners (those who present solutions to these problems) are not allowed to be wrong.

Challenges claimed to be wicked

Those are very demanding criteria, so how many real-world challenges get close to meeting them?

A HBR article 'Strategy as a Wicked Problem' gives examples, such as Wal-Mart’s challenge on how to sustain growth when it had used up all the opportunities for its original store format in N America. But that’s a well known challenge that many retailers have confronted and solved, either by format-variation (France’s Carrefour) or by geographic expansion (IKEA). The first solution is a tricky, but not wicked problem of finding and exploiting new market segments. The second solution is not wicked either.

Another supposedly wicked example ... Twitter faced a problem some years back (pre-Musk and 'X') of how to become sustainably profitable – another putative wicked case. But if we follow our drill-back method (abductive reasoning), what do we find? They couldn’t make enough ad-revenue to cover costs. Why? Because the whole point of the platform’s ‘value’ (the short message) meant users spent too little time per visit to be worth advertising to. Now there may be further complications, but following our Ockham’s razor principle, let’s prove first that this simple explanation can’t explain what we see.

People and intangibles

Supply-chain cases hint at a common cause of true wickedness – people. It’s not easy, but certainly do-able, to devise technical management systems for managing supply chains. Indeed some who follow these posts are experts in doing exactly that! But a simple team exercise - the Beer Game - confounds teams because players are trying to figure out in their heads – and fast – what’s happening, creating false expectations and over-compensating.

Product development pipelines often feature products that fail somewhere along the path – they don’t appeal to enough possible customers, are too costly to make, etc. But what if you are the product champion? You don’t want to be the person who presided over a failure, so you wriggle in any way possible to make it look like the product could work, then move on quickly, leaving the problem for someone else to deal with. So, we end up with a wicked problem – a pipeline of zombie products.

Multiple actors

So we have tricky issues (Twitter/Wal-Mart), that can become complicated if they extend outside the business itself (supply-chain) and/or made a bit wicked by the limits of human intuition (product development).

Then we have the further source of true wickedness – multiple stake-holders. Take the societal challenge of cutting food waste.

Objectively, it could be just a complicated supply-chain problem – where does food waste arise from farm to shipper to processor to retailer to household? But those actors have motivations that make it not so simple. E.g. households buy more than they need because price-per-unit is lower, then throw away out-dated food; stores stock slow-moving items so they don’t lose consumers that go out of date etc.

From tricky to wicked

We know how to wrangle business challenges:

Follow the abductive process, seeking evidence-based causality to build out the core system structure of tangible factors that explain what we see.
IF that tangible structure does not provide a usable explanation, continue to ask "What causes that?" allowing answers to include intangible factors, such human states-of-mind or data.
IF we still can't see a usable explanation, keep asking that question, allowing answers that include the role of other actors and exogenous factors

(It is possible that step 1 above hints strongly at likely answers in step 3, so bypassing step 2. E.g. Walmart's need to seek and capture new market segments)

So it looks we have a kind of hierarchy of wickedness. I polled my followers for some examples of topics that could feature wicked challenges. Sorting those issues in order of increasing wickedness may look something like this:

Customer experience and satisfaction
Technological obsolescence
Supply chain management
Cybersecurity and data privacy
Employee engagement and retention
Improving diversity and inclusiveness
Sustainability and environmental issue

And it looks like truly wicked business problems are actually quite rare, only arising in multi-stakeholder cases replete with intangible factors.

Categories: : business models, business performance, strategy