Summary
A wicked problem is a social or policy problem with no definitive statement, no stopping point and no right answer, only better or worse ones. The idea was set out in 1973 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, professors of design and city planning at Berkeley, in ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’. They contrast it with the ‘tame’ problems of science – an equation, a chess puzzle – where the mission and success are clear. ‘Wicked’ means tricky, not evil.
One of their ten properties is that each is “a symptom of another problem”; and such problems, they say, are never solved, only re-solved.
Rationale
Our caveat is with the word ‘problem’, which can suggest something out there awaiting a fix. Yet Rittel and Webber already saw what we stress: the analyst’s world view decides how the trouble gets explained.