Matt Moore has posted a short and succinct paper about approaches to wicked problems. In my experience, lots of these problems get treated as if they are merely complicated and just need a solution from some (dubiously-qualified) expert. Here in the UK our politicians seem unable to resist responding to complexity other than by pandering to some celebrity expert: such as Alan Sugar on enterprise James Dyson on innovation and a countless number of Lords on a variety of other topics. They almost always come back with egotistical, opinionated, headline-grabbing “solutions” that fail almost comically to grasp the ambiguities and complexities of the issues at hand.
Matt’s paper succeeds in outlining an alternative that is more sophisticated, without making it sound painfully difficult. (It’s no surprise that he wasn’t able to sell it to his government.)
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