[HN Gopher] The Tendency Towards Solving Wicked Problems Reducti...
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The Tendency Towards Solving Wicked Problems Reductively (2019)
[pdf]
Author : CiceroCiceronis
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-10-04 12:15 UTC (2 days ago)
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| bob1029 wrote:
| I've seen something like this in B2B consulting. The decision
| makers (our customers) have a difficult time parsing all the
| complex variables and wind up making really bad assumptions that
| turn into a vicious cycle of broken expectations and even more
| complexity. I think the basic human flaw here is impatience.
|
| The opposite experience was had in semiconductor manufacturing.
| Not a soul in those engineering offices would hazard the remotest
| assumption about a problem until many hours of confirmation
| occurred first. No one wanted to be the reason something got even
| more complicated.
| b3morales wrote:
| A possible explanation, from the book _Thinking Fast and Slow_
| : when confronted with an intractable (or even just very
| difficult) problem, the human mind has a tendency to substitute
| an easier problem and solve that instead. It's tricky to catch
| yourself doing this, and group inertia makes it harder.
| n4r9 wrote:
| If like me you're wondering how a problem can be "wicked" and
| scoured the summary with a growing sense of futility: it turns
| out to be a term in social planning that means a problem that's
| difficult or impossible because of incomplete, contradictory, and
| changing requirements.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
| contingencies wrote:
| Interesting intellectually, but sort of self-defeating as a field
| of inquiry. The delineation between wicked and non-wicked
| problems is itself effectively arbitrary and artificial. It is
| odd and somehow amusing to see the 'academic' (analysis-
| paralysis) lens focusing on perception failures in the (bias
| toward action/fail fast/fail forward) field of 'entrepreneurial'
| activity.
|
| Compare to received startup wisdom: reduction is fine, often
| 80:20 is good enough, and failures are expected. You miss all the
| shots you don't take. Sometimes moving in the right general
| direction with wrong perception is the best path to progress.
| Learning is a goal.
|
| The percentage of failed ventures which can be directly
| attributed to reduction-related problems of founder perception is
| probably very small.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| IMHO some other distinguishing factors of true "wicked
| problems", like housing, welfare, drug policy, traffic etc is
| that it tends to be very easy to make things _worse_ if you are
| not extremely careful, and they are subject to ideological
| warfare, which means changes are contentious and consume
| significant political capital.
|
| It's more like "working in enterprise" (aka a large, already
| somewhat successful business with all the factors that entails)
| than startup land where problems can be "unpicked" more easily
| because the system does not have as much state, history and
| inertia.
| peteradio wrote:
| Test case based problem solving. Write some hilariously simple
| test case scenarios, solve those, ship it! I have yet to find a
| workplace that doesn't suffer from this bias towards simplicity
| in inherently complex problems. How do you explain to non-
| technical folks "its not that simple" without looking like a
| sandbagging son-of-a?
| bena wrote:
| It's quite possible these people charging into these wicked
| problems don't understand they are charging into a wicked
| problem.
|
| Nearly every problem involving people or the environment is going
| to become a wicked problem. The problem space is just so big and
| you can't really test at the scale you'll have to implement on.
|
| And it's hard to know what works and what doesn't. Because
| sometimes things can get better due to something else and your
| solution just happened to be implemented while that was
| happening. And it's not like you can isolate either.
|
| Essentially, you're always testing in production.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Nearly every problem involving people or the environment is
| going to become a wicked problem.
|
| Plenty of problems are well-defined. Even the ones involving
| people.
|
| Just because people create situations that are wicked at the
| macro level, it doesn't mean that most problems reside there.
| If most problems were wicked, society would never evolve.
| bena wrote:
| Just because a problem is wicked, it doesn't mean it can't be
| overcome. It's not all or nothing.
|
| Also, just because a problem isn't completely solved, it
| doesn't mean progress isn't useful.
|
| But figure that we don't have definitive ways to effectively
| teach people. We have ways that work somewhat for some
| people, but disseminating knowledge in ways people can
| understand is a wicked problem. Anything you can think of, we
| have probably tried. And there is still some segment of the
| population that it does not work on. And those methods will
| work on those people in other cases. But not the ones those
| methods worked on in the first place. So obviously the method
| is not general, it works in some cases.
|
| People make problems wicked. Because every problem becomes
| incredibly multi-faceted as you are dealing with so many
| different fields at once.
|
| And it is the navigation of these wicked problems that is
| responsible in part for evolving us. A lot of societal
| progress is the result of attempts to solve wicked problems.
| carapace wrote:
| I think you have inverted the logic: humans evolve _because_
| most of our problems are wicked. If our niche were simple we
| would not devote so many calories to our brains. (Something
| like 20% of the oxygen you breath is used in the brain
| alone!)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Is there a social problem that is not wicked?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Returning your shopping cart when you're done shopping. Just do
| it people!
| Abekkus wrote:
| Aldi requires a quarter to use a shopping cart. If you don't
| return your cart, someone else probably will for a quarter
| per cart.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Those small rewards don't really work.
|
| At the mall, I will rent a kid's cart (often shaped like a
| car) for $9. You get a dollar back if you return it.
| However, instead of returning it, I usually find a family
| with small kids coming into the mall and ask if they want
| the cart.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Well, isn't that just returning it with extra steps and
| you paying a dollar more than you had to?
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