Changing Schools is Beyond a Wicked Problem

One of my business partners, Jay Smethurst, sent me a link to a great article about a way to think about making changes to the public school system. Bryan Coffman, another partner, had exposed all of us to the idea of something called Wicked Problems some years ago. In this article, the author uses work from someone called Adam Richardson and his book entitled Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems Are Its Greatest Advantage to describe a set of problems that go beyond wicked problems. He calls these problems X-Problems (or extreme problems).

Wicked Problems

The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960′s by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science.

Churchman describes wicked problems as, ” a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.”

Simple Problems: These are problems for which both the problem and solution are easily defined.

Which budget should be used to purchase supplemental materials? Which grade level will require an additional teacher next year? Who is going to teach the new section of Latin? Which classrooms need instructional aides?

Complex Problems: Here the problem is known, but the solution is not.

How can we get students to complete their homework? Which technology is best to introduce into an elementary classroom? Which curriculum will best meet the needs of our students who are two years below grade level? How do we create a system that allows for student input? What is the most effective assessment of reading comprehension for English Learners?  How can we increase teacher collaboration and trust?

Wicked Problems: The challenge here is that neither the problem nor the solution is known. How can you define a good solution when cannot even state what the problem is?

There is no definitive statement of the problem, and each solution reveals new aspects of the problem.

In our work, the more we grappled with these kinds of challenges the more we developed a small understanding of their nature and complexity. We’ve been able to garner a few insights from this.

One insight is the process of solving wicked problems is non-linear.

Most problem solving processes are thought of as a step by step process – moving through the steps in succession and at the end having a solution. Solving (or attempting to solve) wicked problems doesn’t work like that. Solving wicked problems is non-linear. In practice what this means is that the individual or group engaged in the process bounces around to different aspects of the problem solving process – some times jumping to the end first or covering the same ground multiple times.



The other thing we’ve learned about addressing these wicked problesms is that they cannot be solved by one person – and possibly not by a small group of people.

This may seem obvious but attempting to engage in the problem solving process when dealing with these types of challenges is not something to be done alone. They need different perspectives and diversity to have any chance of developing insights. Facilitating this type of problem solving process has numerous nuances that requires a very skilled facilitator to navigate.

eXtreme Problems

From that article the author goes on to describe this other type of problem which he believes makes changing the schooling system is so complex. He says the problems we are attempting to solve are really X-Problems. He says these types of problems have extreme levels of risk along with extreme levels of complexity. He quotes from Adam Richardson:

But there is a problem even more difficult to grapple with than the wicked problem.

It’s called the X-problem. Why X-problems? Adam shares his thinking on why X represents another level of problem.

X is extreme: X-problems are extreme in risk and complexity.

Educating an entire country’s population and building a system that does it in the most effective way is a risky proposition. You can’t build the wrong system. You can’t make a mistake.

X is mysterious: Every X-problem revolves around questions that have never been asked before, or challenges that are unprecedented.

Solving the “problems” of education and doing so in a way that meets all the needs of all the stakeholders now and in the future is going to create some questions that we have never encountered of thought of.

X is a crossroad: A crossroads is a place where things converge together—and diverge outward. At a crossroads one must make a choice among paths, each of which could entail risk or opportunity.

Do we take the road of creativity, technology, brain research, etc? Saying yes to certain solutions requires that we say no to others. Which do we choose?

X means opportunity: X marks the spot for treasure—the winnings that come from finding the problem and capitalizing on it before others can.

Does this help frame the challenges in making changes to the public school system? If it does, and we started addressing some of the issues in this light, how might solutions developing for problems like this? Maybe there won’t be any solution that can be applied system wide?

That’s something I’ve been exploring in my own thinking lately and in a conversation with Bryan he said the following:

I think his definition of X-problems could be simpler. A wicked problem is one that’s complex where neither the true problem nor the true solution is known. An X-problem is simply a wicked problem with a large diversity of stakeholders who are in varying degrees of contention with one another. That would knock a wicked problem out of the park. Our little edge-of-chaos model for collaboration would predict that in such a situation where diversity of stakeholders is super high, that contrary to intuition, the system needs less facilitative behavior between players overall. In other words, since you can’t hope to facilitate a comprehensive solution, little cells of players who are diverse yet have affinities would hive off and build options. This is what happens in private schooling, home schooling, some rural schools where the stakeholder diversity is smaller, etc. It’s also what is happening with our NAPC project (now the Continuum Initiative). Attempts at national or state standards will ultimately fail to produce the right results because the common denominator they seek puts them way off the peaks of the fitness landscape.  So long as we seek system-wide solutions to X-problems, we will continue to fail.

What do you think? How would you see problems of this nature being addressed and possibly solved?

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