The No Stopping Rule
Wicked problems don’t end — they shapeshift.
🔍 What It Means
Wicked problems don’t have clear endpoints. There’s no final version, no box to tick, no grand unveiling where everyone claps and walks away. Any solution will open up new problems, create new tensions, or expose something you hadn’t seen before.
You might get to “good enough for now,” but you’ll never reach “done.” Even success is temporary. As Rittel and Webber noted, “There is no definitive solution, and therefore no definitive end.”
⚙️ Why It Matters in Business and Policy
- Teams burn out chasing a finish line that keeps moving.
- Leaders over-promise and under-deliver by declaring things “solved.”
- Budgets explode when maintenance becomes endless reinvention.
- Accountability fades as ownership shifts between phases.
📊 Real-World Examples
✅ ESG Strategy in a Consumer Goods Company
A global food manufacturer rolled out an environmental impact dashboard to meet new ESG goals. But instead of treating it as a one-time scorecard, they embedded continuous updates from suppliers, climate impact reforecasts, and stakeholder workshops. They stopped chasing “completion” and started investing in adaptation.
❌ Smart City Initiatives in Toronto
Sidewalk Labs launched a high-profile smart city project in Toronto that promised urban innovation. But delays, privacy concerns, and political pushback kept shifting the goalposts. No one could agree on what success looked like—or when to stop. The project was abandoned, but the problems remained.
📍 NHS Digital Records (UK)
The UK’s NHS spent billions on electronic health record systems. Despite missed deadlines and supplier failures, the system wasn’t scrapped. It was re-scoped, scaled back, renamed, rebranded—again and again. The effort never “ended,” it just morphed into the next iteration of healthcare IT modernization.
📋 Checklist: Do You Have This Problem?
- No clear success criteria agreed by all stakeholders
- Stakeholders keep revisiting “the finish line”
- Ongoing investment despite repeated setbacks
⚠️ If you checked even one — you have a wicked problem.
🛠 How to Navigate It
- Define “good enough for now”: Aim for progress, not perfection
- Build feedback loops: Include reflection cycles in project planning
- Normalize iteration: Use language like “versioning” or “adaptive roadmap”
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Back to the Full List of Wicked Problem Attributes
Something Wicked This Way Comes: A Wicked Problem.
Related Posts
- No definitive formulation of a wicked problem
- No stopping rule
- Solutions are not true-or-false, but better-or-worse
- No immediate and no ultimate test of a solution
- Every solution is a one-shot operation (no trial-and-error learning)
- No enumerable or exhaustively describable set of solutions
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique
- Every wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem
- The choice of explanation determines the resolution
- Planners have no right to be wrong
Resources and Further Reading
For readers who want to dive deeper into the origins and evolution of wicked problems, here are key resources and further reading:
Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning — Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber’s 1973 paper where the concept of wicked problems and their 10 attributes was first defined.