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May 9th, 2008Righteous Solutions: A Catalogue of Modern Software Engineering Paradigms (1990); Conklin authored Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems (2006). Policy makers, age of conan power leveling in particular, have put this powerful concept to good use, but it has been largely missing from strategy discussions. Although many of the problems companies face are intractable, they have been slow to acknowledge the wickedness of strategy issues.
Between 1995 and 2005, I completed three research projects that provided insights into wicked strategy problems. First, aoc gold as part of benchmarking projects that the APQC (formerly known as the American Productivity & Quality Center) and the Hong Kong Productivity Council conducted, I analyzed 22 North American, European, and Asian enterprises that use innovative strategic-planning techniques. They include ABB, Alcoa, Honeywell, John Deere, PPG Industries, Royal Dutch Shell, Siemens, Sprint, Whirlpool, and Xerox (China and USA). Second, I studied strategy implementation in depth at seven of these enterprises. Third, a colleague, Gaurab age of conan gold Bhardwaj, and I tracked DuPont’s pharmaceuticals business to learn how companies draw up strategies when returns will accrue only in the long run and are highly uncertain. Based on these studies, I’ll explore in the following pages how companies can tame—since they can’t solve—such problems. I’ll conclude by describing a planning process that helps PPG Industries tackle wicked issues.
What Is a Wicked Problem?
There are several ways to define a wicked problem, but according to Rittel and Webber, it has some or all of 10 characteristics. aoc gold (See the sidebar “The 10 Properties of Wicked Problems.”) Caveat: The criteria are not a set of tests that mechanically determine wickedness; rather, they provide insights that help you judge whether a problem is wicked.
Sidebar IconThe 10 Properties of Wicked Problems
Wicked problems often crop up when organizations aoc power leveling have to face constant change or unprecedented challenges. They occur in a social context; the greater the disagreement among stakeholders, the more wicked the problem. In fact, it’s the social complexity of wicked problems as much as their technical difficulties that make age of conan power leveling them tough to manage. Not all problems are wicked; confusion, discord, and lack of progress are telltale signs that an issue might be wicked.
In my consulting work, I’ve found that when five characteristics are present in a strategy-related issue, executives agree they have a wicked problem on their hands. I’ll list the key criteria below and use them to aoc leveling show how the challenge of growth that Wal-Mart faces today may well be wicked.