105 – Wicked Problems

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Lily Clements, a Data Scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS. Hi, David.

[00:00:14] David: Hi, Lily. I’m looking forward to another discussion. What are we on today?

[00:00:18] Lily: A little bit different than usual. We usually discuss kind of AI and data, but today I was thinking about wicked problems and what wicked problems have we solved? Well, not we, obviously at IDEMS.

[00:00:30] David: You don’t solve a wicked problem, almost by definition.

[00:00:35] Lily: Well, okay. So let’s firstly go into what a wicked problem is. So you’ve spoken before about it. It was several years ago, actually, I think, that you introduced the concept at an IDEMS team meeting. But my understanding is that a wicked problem is a really big problem, which has to be solved incrementally, that you work towards that solution. There’s no one solution. What else am I missing?

[00:00:58] David: All of those things are sort of true. But the main point is, a wicked problem is one which cannot be solved. So, let’s say, good education. That’s a wicked problem because you can never get the best education, you know, there’s always things you could do to improve. There’s always things which can be done. So it’s not something where you could do something and then suddenly have the best education.

Even if you have, as some would argue Finland has in certain ways, the best education in the world, by some measures, then there’s still improvements that you can make to the education system. There’s still things you can do better.

Your public health is another example of a wicked problem. Yes, you can do things to improve public health, but you can’t solve public health. You’re always going to have issues. These wicked problems, the nature of a wicked problem is, in essence, one where you shouldn’t be looking to solve it, but the problems in education, the problems in health, these are wonderful examples of things which really matter to society, they’re hard, you can improve them, you can always improve them, you can never solve them.

[00:02:22] Lily: So then that’s very interesting. I guess my definition of a wicked problem is wrong or was slightly off because I was thinking a wicked problem was something like climate change or the kind of…

[00:02:33] David: Well, I would argue climate change is a wicked problem. So that definition is not necessarily wrong. Let’s dig into that. Carry on with climate change.

[00:02:40] Lily: So then, okay, then with climate change, my understanding is that we are working towards… If you say to me that, okay, well, no, it’s always going to be a problem. That’s a little bit disempowering though. Okay, of course it’s never, okay, great, we’ve solved it, we’ve done it. Now we can all go and spray aerosols in the air, because I believe that that used to be a thing. But then it got me thinking, so the ozone used to have a hole in it, which is now closing. Now, is that an example of a wicked problem that’s been solved? Well, clearly not, because you’re saying that it doesn’t get solved.

[00:03:15] David: Well, I would argue that if you think about climate change, and you think about the ozone layer and the hole in the ozone layer, which was a huge problem and a huge part of that, and the interventions that then happened related to reducing that hole in the ozone layer. I’d argue this is all part of a wicked problem which is maintaining and interacting with our environment in a way which is sustainable and healthy, so to speak.

And so yes, I’d say this is part of a wicked problem and the hole in the ozone layer arguably was part of a wicked problem, even if it wasn’t the wicked problem in its own right. Because, you know, the hole in the ozone layer, well there were solutions to that, which, well, if you do this, that could solve it.

Now, it might be that isn’t the whole problem. And that’s what I believe, this is part of a broader problem that we have in terms of climate change and our impact on our environment. And that I believe is a wicked problem, because even if we were to get to the stage where we suddenly were within the boundaries of temperature thresholds that we’re setting for ourselves, you know, I’ve just read that we’re going over this year for the first time, the 1. 5 degree threshold. That’s this year, I believe. What about the two degree threshold?

Staying within the bounds of actually the change, even if we were to go back and actually get to the stage where we had a, we stabilised our climate in a way where the human activity wasn’t impacting it so much, I don’t know that we would ever be able to stop thinking about the human impact on our planet.

That’s the wicked problem. That’s the wicked problem related to climate change. We always have to be thinking about how we impact our environment at a planetary level, but also at smaller scales. And that’s something where there’s no single solution to be able to say, okay, we do this and we’ve won, we’ve done it, we’ve solved it.

[00:05:33] Lily: Okay.

[00:05:35] David: So it fits in perfectly to what I would express as a wicked problem. And I think it’s one of the most interesting. And a lot of people don’t like wicked problems. And I’ll come back to why, they prefer grand challenges as a reformulation.

[00:05:49] Lily: Is that to do with the way that it’s phrased? Is that to do with the word being more…impactful? I guess a wicked problem sounds like it’s something that you can’t have as much control over, whereas a challenge you can?

[00:06:03] David: No, my understanding is that it was wicked, people sort of confused it with evil and therefore wicked in a bad sense, rather than wicked as in, you know, representing the complexity of it. And so the actual language of wicked problems was misunderstood and misinterpreted in certain circles. And therefore the language of grand challenges, particularly in international development arenas became representative of the same sort of complexity, but more acceptable, and I think also less well defined.

I don’t know that that’s true. I tend to like to equate grand challenges to wicked problems, but I’m not sure that others do. I think I’ve had enough discussions with people who I’m fairly certain are not conversant with the theories and the language behind wicked problems, but who talk very comfortably about grand challenges. And so I think there are sort of differences in interpretation there.

But there is a lot of theory behind wicked problems. I don’t claim to be an expert on it. I do like it as sort of a way to challenge our thinking and to push us to think more deeply about how we approach some of these things.

[00:07:22] Lily: Sure, and so at IDEMS, if we can never, if there’s no solution, and I know that that’s the point of a wicked problem, I thought it was that there was no one size fits all solution, but there is an end goal. I guess that’s why I’m getting at here is that it feels like that there’s no end goal.

[00:07:38] David: Well, there isn’t an end, you know, with education, improving education, what is the end goal? Give me an end goal which you would be happy with.

[00:07:51] Lily: Sure, because then if I set an end goal then I’m setting a target such as students getting a certain grade and then we both know that having a black box target is never the solution. So then it’s about how do you measure that end goal?

[00:08:05] David: It’s not just how do you measure that end goal because this is an important point of the Wicked Problems. It’s that what is the state, however you measure it, at which there is no longer work to be done to improve. There may be a state at which additional work to improve is not cost effective, is not a priority, and that I would argue would be true within IDEMS.

That, you know, there will be times, I hope, when some of the work we’ve done reaches a point where it is no longer our top priority, and we’re able to move on and focus our efforts on other places which need more attention. But the essence of these grand challenges or wicked problems is that there is no end state at which you should be happy and content that no work is, no further work is needed.

[00:09:09] Lily: And is that because, I mean, if I take the example of climate change, because I can see how you’re saying it for, say, education, that you can always improve it more. But is that because with the case of climate change, if we all manage to reduce the emissions, we still need to, you know, I’m not even sure what the kind of terms are for it, at least off the top of my head.

[00:09:32] David: You’re trying to jump to an indicator. If you talk about emissions, that’s something you can measure. That’s something you can have as an indicator. Let me frame what I think you’re trying to say. Let’s say, through a global collective effort, we were able to not only stay within the 2 degree threshold but actually get to the stage where we were rebalancing the climate to a healthy level where maybe we were even going down rather than up in terms of the global temperatures towards where the planet would have been without human intervention.

[00:10:08] Lily: Sure, yeah.

[00:10:09] David: But let’s say we got to that, then essentially, we are, through human intervention, changing the climate in a different way. Do we need to worry about what the implications of that are going to be? Yes, of course. Anything that we do, we would always have to worry about what are the impact of our activities as species, which is global, and which has been demonstrated to affect the global ecology, what’s happening on a planetary level.

So we will always need to worry about how our actions as a species are affecting the global climate. So that’s never going to stop. That’s going to be part of our understanding, part of our knowledge, part of our responsibility from here on out.

[00:11:04] Lily: I guess you win that point. Okay.

[00:11:07] David: I’m not trying to win points here. But a very simple, different example of this is, of course, that elephant conservation has been a really interesting topic in different ways. But there have been wonderful examples of where the overpopulations of elephants have destroyed ecosystems, local ecosystems in different ways.

And this is something where, so like humans, elephants have responsibility to their environment in some sense. Now, they may not have the ability to really think about and worry about the local ecosystem change that they are leading to. But this is exactly where we as a species with global impact through our actions, we now need to be deeply conscious of how our actions affect our environment and the planetary climate.

That’s not a bad thing.

[00:12:13] Lily: No.

[00:12:14] David: There’s more work to be done right now than is reasonably possible. But if we got to a stage, you know, it’s a nice thought experiment. What could a stable solution look like? How much knowledge would we need? How much control would we need to have over behaviour at a sort of global level to be able to actually act in ways which are really… I don’t know what the right word is because preserving isn’t even the right word for climate change. Responsibly managing our environment. I have no idea. I’d love to go through that thought experiment at some point and actually sort of try to think through what might a word look like.

I was challenged fairly recently, there was this article, or this question, where the question was, what examples are there in film or literature or art in general of positive science fiction futures? Many of the science fiction futures we read and we see and we’re exposed to, these are pretty dystopian in one way or another.

[00:13:44] Lily: Yeah.

[00:13:44] David: There are elements of positivity, of course, everyone always talks of Star Trek as soon as you mention it, but that I’m not going to go down that route. I am interested in this idea of what can we as an exercise in art, think, imagine what a society would look like, which overcame some of the challenges we’re now facing?

In the past, you can imagine times when, let’s say when slavery was more visible than it is today, when people could have imagined a future without slavery, where all humans are free. That would have been a positive future to have imagined. Can we really imagine now, what are our instances of imagining positive futures?

Because this is part of what I think is so interesting with these wicked problems, is if you’re looking towards those, as you put it, solutions, whereas I would put it as sort of improved states, can we even imagine for a lot of the problems we’re facing what an improved state might look like? Can we think beyond things that already exist?

And I think in many cases, that’s the sort of creativity where we really want art to help us, to actually imagine some of those so that we can aspire to them.

[00:15:16] Lily: The pause is me thinking, and it’s a really interesting idea because it’s like, I guess my first reaction when you said it was, well, if I think of science fiction, then what kind of book is good which isn’t positive? Sorry, which is positive in the future? If we think of like a science fiction book, they like to have a negative dystopian future because that’s what’s gripping and fun and exciting and that’s what gets you to read it.

[00:15:41] David: Absolutely.

[00:15:42] Lily: Is that why we’re more inclined to think of that?

[00:15:46] David: I don’t know. I mean, this is the thing. I do agree that the idea of a good story needs challenge. It needs you to feel the pain of the protagonist and to engage with their environment, which is against them. But almost by definition, if we’re looking into the future, that needs a form of dystopian future so that there is something for them to fight against.

So that there is something for them to rebel against, for something for them to, to genuinely, to improve either in themselves or in their environment. If you have something where it was a utopian vision, well what interesting is happening? There’s nothing interesting happening. You know, it’s human nature. If you did have a utopian future, wouldn’t people rebel against that as they actually look for excitement in their lives?

[00:16:46] Lily: But then in a way, kind of, what you’re saying is, ah, thank God we have these problems. We’ve got something that we can work towards. Or rebel against.

[00:16:57] David: I don’t know. I mean, certainly, we are living in a time when we are not short of grand challenges or wicked problems, which really feel urgent for us to address. However, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. I don’t know what a future, I hope that there are futures where that urgency is less demanding. And I think that we could therefore have a world I would rather live in.

But it might be a world where my own existence was less meaningful. If I can contribute to a big problem, if I can actually do something, then that gives me a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. What more is there to want from a life well lived than a good sense of purpose? So if society didn’t have quite the challenges we’re facing, would we live a less purposeful existence?

I don’t know. I hope not. I hope that purpose can be found in the smallest of things. The people who I admire most aren’t the people who are big at changing the world and the rest of it. The people who I’ve admired most in my life are often people who are living in their environment and who are really central to their communities and making their communities better.

That sense of actually, that local element to that is something where, well, I’m sure as wherever we happen to be in terms of resolving big problems, there will always be communities, I hope, where, being a part of and supporting and enabling that community is something which is to be respected and to be valued.

[00:18:51] Lily: I know that you’re rounding up, but there’s just so many questions. In a way is a kind of big problem or a wicked problem just relative? Well, no, a wicked problem can’t be relative, surely, because that’s, the definition.

[00:19:04] David: By definition, it’s not relative. But elements of the wicked problem, the importance of it, the priority it should be given, that is probably relative.

[00:19:15] Lily: Okay.

[00:19:18] David: And in a society where you have other problems which are more urgent, and I’ll just take the concrete one of education, education is a really important and interesting wicked problem for our day, because it both creates immense inequality because of the differentiation between education that people can receive in different contexts. And how much of that is associated to or tied in with existing inequalities. And therefore it is a great creator of inequality, but it’s also a great equaliser in many different ways. And it’s not been that long that the idea of education in different forms being valued and being respected has been globally acknowledged.

And I want to be clear here, I don’t necessarily mean formal school education because even that there’s some wonderful instances, particularly with indigenous communities, where actually the concept of school is not positive sign of progress. It means you’re not learning the indigenous knowledge you would have gained because the school is a external construct and not an internal construct within the society.

There were forms of internal education which are being lost through the imposition of a formal education system. And so there are really interesting contrasts there. Especially because I think as we learn more and more about how the formal education system works, there is recognition that actually this isn’t necessarily the best form of education for most children.

I’m thinking specifically of childhood education. And there are interesting questions about how much this is a construct which serves society versus the individual children. And if you try to build education around individuals, then it looks very different. And this is this sort of context specificity.

A lot of the effort in education is now going towards… In Kenya, they’ve just introduced, or in their process of introducing, a competency based curriculum, exactly with the idea of actually trying to better serve the individual children. Implementation there is challenging, but these are very much at the heart of ideas about how education should evolve to better serve society, and we don’t know how to do that.

This is a wicked problem, and there have been really big efforts to get everyone into school, and now there’s sort of recognition in other contexts that actually everyone being in school might not be the best approach to getting everybody educated. And what does it mean to be educated?

Oh, these are hard questions. I don’t have any answers to this. I’m just interested. This is to me the essence of a wicked problem, that if you actually reduce the problem down to making sure that everyone is in school, then that’s a solvable problem. You can say when you’ve solved it.

[00:22:50] Lily: Yeah.

[00:22:51] David: But what have you lost along the way? Actually getting everyone into school, maybe that shouldn’t have been, that’s not about getting good education out there, that might not be what’s in everyone’s interest. There are contexts within which schools are a wonderful. I mean, both my kids go to school and I have no regrets. I do wish they had better maths education at a young age. Because they’re not stimulated in maths. My son doesn’t like his maths classes!

[00:23:20] Lily: Nah.

[00:23:21] David: I know it’s terrible, how can that be? But it is this element where he’s not stimulated enough, he’s just doing things which he finds boring. Okay, he’s five.

[00:23:33] Lily: I know that your daughter anyway is exceptionally good at maths and she’s seven, she’s eight now, right?

[00:23:40] David: She’s just eight, yes.

[00:23:41] Lily: So there might just be a problem of having two parents that are just very good at, well, maths and those areas.

[00:23:51] David: The idea of school and the value that they get out of going to school is still something I appreciate. Does it mean it’s the best education I believe I could give them? No, absolutely not. I am very conscious of the fact that if I wanted my kids to come out with the best education they could have, I certainly wouldn’t be sending them to the schools that I’m sending them to.

But the point is that the experience, the human experience they get from being within that school environment, building friends, building relationships with other kids, with other adults. This is all good and it’s a value and I value it more than I would value necessarily the academic.

I’m not saying that everybody should do that. Some people might value the academic progress that could be made more. These are just decisions for families to make. I guess I’m getting sidetracked because the key point is not about any individual within the system. It is about the fact that education is so complex. You know, what is good? Are we looking for an education which is good for society, which is good for individuals? Is that the same? Can it be made close to being the same? These are the challenges which mean that thinking about education improvement is an impossible challenging topic and a wonderful one to be working on.

[00:25:29] Lily: Very interesting. And I suppose there we’re just digging into one such wicked problem and that’s why my thinking it’s kind of a much more appealing way of thinking. If you don’t think too much about it is like, yeah, we have a solution. I’m a mathematician or mathematical scientist, going towards a solution.

[00:25:51] David: Yes, whereas the real world is much more complicated than that. That’s why I chose to study maths because it’s so much easier than the real world.

[00:26:00] Lily: So yeah, maybe I’ll just get back to my coding and…

[00:26:05] David: Things you can solve.

[00:26:06] Lily: Yeah.

[00:26:07] David: But that’s the whole point. The whole point is that we have skills as mathematicians which come from being able to understand the difference between problems which can be solved, and identify them, and skills towards solving them.

And actually learning to apply those skills to problems which can’t, societal problems, that’s a whole process. And it’s a painful one at times. As you said, my life was so much easier when I was working on, you know, just simple math problems, tilting T structures and stuff like that.

[00:26:40] Lily: I don’t know what a T structure is, I just know that you’ve mentioned it. But you don’t need to say what it is, it’s fine.

[00:26:47] David: I won’t, I won’t, I’ll spare you that.

[00:26:51] Lily: Anyway, do you have any final kind of thoughts before we close this off?

[00:26:55] David: Just to sort of say that, you know, if you forget about the fact that problems need solutions, and you accept the fact that there are challenges, and this is where we’re getting to the grand challenge language, challenges that can be worked on. It’s very natural to just work on challenges and actually try to contribute and move the dial on these grand challenges.

What does it mean to move the dial? You see this occasionally where the level, the nature of the challenge being faced within a grand challenge, the nature of where you are, suddenly changes, where the things that you were worried about before, such as just getting kids into school, is no longer the challenge that needs to be faced.

And I think I really liked the transition from the Millennium Development Goals, the Sustainable Development Goals, around education where there was this recognition that so much emphasis has been putting on getting people into schools that we hadn’t actually addressed the issues of quality. And so access to a quality education rather than access to education became part of that shift.

And the fact that when I work in different places on, and I’m going to stick with the education, when you go from one country to another and you see that the nature of the challenge is different in one country to another. In some countries you find that there’s still, you know, huge class sizes which can’t be coped with because the teaching capacity isn’t there. Whereas in a neighbouring country, where the problem is there is the capacity, but the capacity hasn’t been trained in all the subjects.

And so you have imbalance between, let’s say, the arts and the sciences, where you have a shortage of science teachers and an abundance of arts teachers, and that then has an impact on how the system works. So there’s enough teachers overall but there’s an imbalance between them.

And then you have other countries where well actually you do have enough teachers, teachers and not the problem. But just because you’ve got teachers who are trained, who are there, doesn’t mean you don’t have other challenges in getting a quality education out to people.

And so on and so on and so on. That’s where, what we mean by the dial having moved, you know, if you were somewhere where the problem was just there’s not enough teachers to go around, and you then find 20 years later, the problem’s not there’s not enough teachers, but the problem is something related to how those teachers are able to teach, you’ve moved the dial.

[00:29:50] Lily: I see.

[00:29:50] David: This is what it means to move the dial on these grand challenges.

[00:29:54] Lily: And here the grand challenge isn’t that there’s not enough teachers. The grand challenge is about that education.

[00:30:03] David: What do you mean? I mean, I work in contexts or we work in contexts where there aren’t enough teachers and we work in other contexts where there were plenty of teachers and we work in contexts where there’s actually too much wealth being thrown at education, and yet you’re not getting the educational results.

So in some cases it might be it’s just not enough material funds to go around. Whereas in other contexts where you observe, well actually the limiting factor isn’t the money. There is more than enough money to go around, but that doesn’t solve the problems. That’s what’s so interesting about working across contexts on these grand challenges, is that it gives you some element of perspective on, well, okay, it’s not enough to just, you know, pay teachers more. Which is what quite often teachers want.

In many contexts, that is needed. But it’s often not enough. It’s not that it’s often enough. It is never enough. Because this is the nature of a wicked problem. Paying teachers more will not solve your problems in education. It might move the dial in certain cases, but not in all cases. There’s no one solution for every context.

[00:31:14] Lily: Okay. Well, thank you very much, David. We’ve definitely run over there, and that’s okay. But there were so many times there where I’m sorry.

[00:31:22] David: No, it’s good. It’s good. I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you.

[00:31:25] Lily: A really interesting discussion. Thank you very much.