Talk:Wicked problem
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[edit] Wicked Problems and Operations Research
"Wicked Problems" and "Social Messes" are well understood concepts in the area of "soft" Operations Research. The whole area of "Problem Structuring Methods" (PSM) was developed to a great extent on the basis of Rittel & Webbers, and Russel Ackoff's, work with these concepts. The article is good enough as it is. It can be improved -- as any article can be improved.
Wicked problems aren't solved, they are made "wickeder" when people try to treat them as tame problems. Using a simplistic example, the bypass round the historic town that was built without prior involvement of the archaeologists means that the ancient Roman temple site that was uncovered during construction now means a costly and time consuming delay while the road is re-routed. 129.230.248.1 18:24, 6 March 2006 (UTC)David Hodgson
I think this article needs a lot better summary and perhaps a couple of examples about what exactly is a "Wicked problem". I tried to study it, but after reading I was still puzzled. Ossiman 10:18, 14 July 2006 (UTC))
[edit] Conklin's Definition
Is the representation of Conklin's "four defining characteristics" accurate, because they're self-redundant.
1) Problem is understood only after solution is formulated. 4) Problem is never solved.
Ergo: wicked problems are never understood.
- I'll throw one more at you... `Wicked problems are often "solved" through group efforts.'. The key here is that solved has more than one meaning in this article. Wicked problems can be solved, but because of the problems nature, a final solution cannot be solved. So solving a wicked problem is really damage control. The problem will always exist, but the goal is to find a compromise and try to balance the effects of each solution. `Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but instead better, worse, or good enough.' & `There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.'--Capi crimm 01:44, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Needs sections
Take a look at where the table of contents appears (under the ~standard stylesheet anyway) and what's in it: the TOC is at the tail end of all the prose, and the only stuff appearing in it is endmatter. That should be a dead giveaway that this article needs to be re-structured (even just a little bit) into sections. Without sections, the entire article is jammed into the "introductory paragraphs" space.
I'm adding a cleanup tag to this end. Mlibby 18:49, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
