Confronting Wicked Problems

After over two decades of practice and research, I am distilling what I have learned about strategy into a PhD thesis. I’ll be finished in a couple of weeks, I suspect.

The work is simple to state but hard to do: How do participants in an open, loosely connected network form and execute a strategy to address wicked challenges?

The problem is hard to solve for two reasons. First, of course, wicked challenges are themselves messy. There is no simple path forward. No right or wrong answers. Multiple solutions are possible. If we look around, we are besieged by wicked problems: the pandemic, opioid addictions, collapsing democratic institutions, climate change, failing schools, and a range of other public health problems from infant mortality to obesity.

But here’s what makes these wicked challenges even more difficult: we need to collaborate to form solutions. And truth be told, we are not very good at collaboration.

The drawing below locates my research and practice.

The good news is that after more than two decades of work, we have a practical path forward, a viable, cross-cultural model: Strategic Doing.

I made it an open-source model, so we could share what we have learned more easily. We need to get on with developing new solutions: designing what’s next.