Back to the Full List of Wicked Problem Attributes
Something Wicked This Way Comes: A Wicked Problem.
Wicked problems don’t have a menu of solutions — only possibilities you invent.
🔍 What It Means
For tame problems, you can look up best practices or run through an options list.
With wicked problems, there is no catalogue of answers. Every “solution” must be created for the specific context, shaped by values, timing, and who’s in the room.
You can’t choose — you have to design.
Each attempt becomes part of the learning about what’s even possible.
⚙️ Why It Matters in Business and Policy
- Benchmarking fails: Copying another company’s fix often imports their mistakes.
- Consultant fatigue: Frameworks promise structure but rarely fit your unique constraints.
- Innovation pressure: Teams must invent while executing, not wait for a known answer.
- Decision paralysis: Endless analysis hides the truth that no exhaustive list exists.
📊 Real-World Examples
✅ Climate Adaptation Plans
Cities facing rising sea levels can’t pick from a manual. Each geography, economy, and culture requires its own mix of barriers, zoning, and migration incentives. What works in Rotterdam may fail in Miami.
❌ Digital Transformation Playbooks
Many firms adopted “industry best practice” roadmaps. Few achieved the promised agility because the context — legacy systems, culture, leadership — made every implementation unique.
📍 Public Health Responses
During COVID-19, nations compared strategies, but no single plan fit all. Success depended on trust, behavior, and timing more than on the checklist itself.
📋 Checklist: Do You Have This Problem?
- Stakeholders keep asking for “best practices” or “proven models.”
- Borrowed solutions don’t work as expected.
- Progress depends on local creativity, not templates.
⚠️ If you checked even one — you have a wicked problem.
🛠 How to Navigate It
- Co-create options: Involve multiple perspectives early to expand what’s thinkable.
- Prototype in context: Test small interventions rather than generic solutions.
- Document learning: Build an evolving “field guide,” not a fixed playbook.
- Reward exploration: Measure learning gained, not only outcomes achieved.
Other Wicked Problems
- 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
Reference 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.