Idea for January 2026: wicked problems

My idea of the month is wicked problems. And I’ve handed over to Claude to write this. I’m not sure about Claude’s final paragraph - though I’m taken with their suggestion that cleverness isn’t the answer…

In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined ‘wicked problems’ – not evil, but mischievously resistant to solution.

What makes a problem wicked? No definitive formulation. No stopping rule. No true-or-false solutions, only better-or-worse ones. Every solution reveals new problems. Stakeholders disagree fundamentally. The problem never gets definitively solved.

Their examples were urban planning challenges: housing, transport, poverty. Today: climate change, AI-induced inequality, polarization. These problems interlock – inequality fuels division, amplified by misinformation, making inequality harder to address.

The wisdom? Stop looking for clever solutions. The biggest challenges are ongoing negotiations between values and possibilities. The work is managing them well, making them less wicked, one imperfect step at a time.