Rittel & Webber’s Dilemmas in Planning

HORST W. J. RITTEL & MELVIN M. WEBBER Dilemmas in a General Theory
of Planning Policy Sciences 4 (1973), 155-169

The original treatise on the concept of ‘wicked problems‘, of interest beyond planning and policy.

ABSTRACT

The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, because of the nature of these problems. They are “wicked” problems, whereas science has developed to deal with “tame” problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about “optimal solutions” to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no “solutions” in the sense of definitive and objective answers.

Article:

George Bernard Shaw … averred that “every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” The contemporary publics are responding as though they have made the same discovery. … Our restive clients have been telling us that they don’t like the educational programs that schoolmen have been offering … . In the courts, the streets, and the political campaigns, we’ve been hearing ever-louder public protests against the professions’ diagnoses of the clients’ problems, against professionally designed governmental programs, against professionally certified standards for the public services.

It might seem that our publics are being perverse, having condoned professionalism when it was really only dressed-up amateurism and condemning professionalism when we finally seem to be getting good at our jobs.

The professionalized cognitive and occupational styles that were refined in the first half of this century, based in Newtonian mechanistic physics, are not readily adapted to contemporary conceptions of interacting open systems and to contemporary concerns with equity. A growing sensitivity to the waves of repercussions that ripple through such systemic networks and to the value consequences of those repercussions has generated the recent re-examination of received values and the recent search for national goals. There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in the professional’s support system lies at the juncture where goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet. We should like to address these matters in turn.

I. Goal Formulation

Goal-finding is turning out to be an extraordinarily obstinate task. Because goal-finding is one of
the central functions of planning, we shall shortly want to ask why that must be so.

On the one hand, there is the belief in the “makeability,” or unrestricted malleability, of future history by means of the planning intellect–by reasoning, rational discourse, and civilized negotiation. At the same time, there are vocal proponents of the “feeling approach,” of compassionate engagement and dramatic action, even of a revival of mysticism, aiming at overcoming The System which is seen as the evil source of misery and suffering.

Some have arrived at deep pessimism and some at resignation. To them, planning for large social systems has proved to be impossible without loss of liberty and equity. Hence, for them the ultimate goal of planning should be anarchy, because it should aim at the elimination of government over others. Still another group has arrived at the conclusion that liberty and equity are luxuries which cannot be afforded by a modern society, and that they should be substituted by “cybernetically feasible” values.

Professionalism has been understood to be one of the major instruments for perfectability, an agent sustaining the traditional American optimism. Based in modern science, each of the professions has been conceived as the medium through which the knowledge of science is applied. In effect, each profession has been seen as a subset of engineering.

II. Problem Definition

By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex causal networks the trouble really lies).

Many now have an image of how an idealized planning system would function. It is being seen as an on-going, cybernetic process of governance, incorporating systematic procedures for continuously searching out goals; identifying problems; forecasting uncontrollable contextual changes; inventing alternative strategies, tactics, and time-sequenced actions; stimulating alternative and plausible action sets and their consequences; evaluating alternatively forecasted outcomes; statistically monitoring those conditions of the publics and of systems that are judged to be germane; feeding back information to the simulation and decision channels so that errors can be corrected–all in a simultaneously functioning governing process. That set of steps is familiar to all of us, for it comprises what is by now the modern-classical model of planning. And yet we all know that such a planning system is unattainable, even as we seek more closely to approximate it. It is even questionable whether such a planning system is desirable.

IH. Planning Problems are Wicked Problems

A great many barriers keep us from perfecting such a planning/governing system: theory is inadequate for decent forecasting; our intelligence is insufficient to our tasks; plurality of objectives held by pluralities of politics makes it impossible to pursue unitary aims; and so on. The difficulties attached to rationality are tenacious, and we have so far been unable to get untangled from their web. This is partly because the classical paradigm of science and engineering–the paradigm that has underlain modern professionalism–is not applicable to the problems of open societal systems. One reason the publics have been attacking the social professions, we believe, is that the cognitive and occupational styles of the professions–mimicking the cognitive style of science and the occupational style of engineering—have just not worked on a wide array of social problems. The lay customers are complaining because planners and other professionals have not succeeded in solving the problems they claimed they could solve. We shall want to suggest that the social professions were misled somewhere along the line into assuming they could be applied scientists– that they could solve problems in the ways scientists can solve their sorts of problems.
The error has been a serious one.

The problems that scientists and engineers have usually focused upon are mostly “tame” or “benign” ones.

There are at least ten distinguishing properties of planning-type problems, i.e. wicked ones, that planners had better be alert to and which we shall comment upon in turn. As you will see, we are calling them “wicked” not because these properties are themselves ethically deplorable. We use the term “wicked” in a meaning akin to that of “malignant” (in contrast to “benign”) or “vicious” (like a circle) or “tricky” (like a leprechaun) or “aggressive” (like a lion, in contrast to the docility of a lamb). We do not mean to personify these properties of social systems by implying malicious intent. But then, you may agree that it becomes morally objectionable for the planner to treat a wicked problem as though it were a tame one, or to tame a wicked problem prematurely, or to refuse to recognize the inherent wickedness of social problems.

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem

2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no
opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly

6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of
potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may
be incorporated into the plan

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem

9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in
numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s
resolution

10. The planner has no right to be wrong

IV. The Social Context

There was a time during the ‘Fifties when the quasi-sociological literature was predicting a Mass Society–foreseen as a rather homogeneously shared culture in which most persons would share values and beliefs, would hold to common aims, would follow similar life-styles, and thus would behave in similar ways.

Post-industrial society is likely to be far more differentiated than any in all of past history.

Surely a unitary conception of a unitary “public welfare” is an anachronistic one.

We have neither a theory that can locate societal goodness, nor one that might dispel wickedness, nor one that might resolve the problems of equity that rising pluralism is provoking. We are inclined to think that these theoretic dilemmas may be the most wicked conditions
that confront us.

My Comments

When it was written, this might have been seen as more of an American than a British problem with ‘professionalism’ and education, but the symptoms now seem widespread, at least across the western world.

Part of the problem may be that much of life is ‘contracted out’, and contractors are not so much judged by the outcomes that they contribute to as their efficiency in meeting a necessarily ‘tame’ and ‘severely qualified’ specification, judged against supposedly ‘objective’ acceptance criteria.

Whereas, in Britain at least, professionalism used to be largely judged in terms of effectiveness it now seem more to do with qualification and efficiency, and education seems more aligned with the recognised need to provide such professionals with their qualifications most efficiently, rather than to provide students with insights into ‘wicked’ problems and how to address them.

My own experience is in working with scientists, engineers and others who are well aware of this article and the wickedness of the problems they face, who mostly seek to do the best they can within the discretion they have, and seek more discretion to contribute effectively to tackling wicked problems. But I am not aware of any who are content with the prevailing ‘management culture’. Hence we now seem to face too many super wicked problems. The article calls for ways to resolve the dilemmas that wicked problems present us with. There are some ideas on wikipedia, but these seem scarcely up to the job.

Digressions on mathematics

Mathematics is mentioned five times:

• Consider a problem of mathematics, such as solving an equation.
• In solving a chess problem or a mathematical equation, the problem-solver knows
  when he has done his job. There are criteria that tell when the or a solution has been
  found.
• In the sciences and in fields like mathematics, chess, puzzle-solving or mechanical
  engineering design, the problem-solver can try various runs without penalty.
• Chess has a finite set of rules, accounting for all situations that can occur. In
  mathematics, the tool chest of operations is also explicit;
• In mathematics there are rules for classifying families of problems–say, of solving a class of equations–whenever a certain, quite-well-specified set of characteristics matches the problem.

Thus ‘mathematics’ is seen as sharing the disparaged ‘modernist’ technocratic attitudes attributed to scientists and engineers. Yet mathematical modelling, for example, seems always to be ‘wicked’ in the sense of the above ten propositions. It seems to me that many ‘human scientists’ as well as Shaw’s laity think of ‘mathematics’ as being about solving equations and I am inclined to interpret critiques of mathematics in that light: often valid as critiques of ‘mathism’ or ‘pseudo-mathematics’ rather than mathematics as commonly understood by mathematicians.

It seems to me that while current practice in mathematical modelling may well contribute to our current difficulties, as some contend, better practice could be and perhaps needs to be a part of any resolution.

Dave Marsay