Wicked Problems In Education Need Designed Solutions

During my current foray into Design Thinking I have been reading and enjoying the book The Design of Business by Roger Martin. In it I came across a brief primer by Jennifer Riel on what are known as wicked problems.

After reading it, I was struck by just how wicked the problems we face in education can be.

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."

Take the issue of technology. How much technology is enough in school? Which technology should we focus on? Who decides? How do we measure it? How do we pay for it?

 Or take the issue of creativity. Do we attempt to teach creativity or let students use their own creativity? Can creativity be taught? If so, who should teach it? How do we measure it? Is there good creativity and bad creativity?

 Or how about the questions of making students go to school longer. They do they go more days or should they go longer each day? What about breaks? Should they go to school on Saturday? How long is too long? Do we pay teachers more for the longer day or just for more days?

 Each one of the problems opens us another can of worms as you dive deeper into it. There are so many factors involved with each. What does the research say? What do the parents think? What is best for the brain? How will it impact the budget? Who makes the final decisions? Who is in charge, what is best for our society? Which will ensure success in the future? Is it scalable? Who should be involved in crafting the solution? As you try to answer these questions more questions arise. It really gets...wicked.

 Jennifer Riel details how to know if you are facing a wicked problem. "The causes of the problem are not just complex but deeply ambiguous; you can't tell why things are happening the way they are and what causes them to do so.The problem doesn't fit neatly into any category you've encountered before; it looks and feels entirely unique, so the problem solving approaches you've used in the past don't seem to apply. Each attempt at devising a solution changes the understanding of the problem; merely attempting to come to a solution changes the problem and how you think about it. There is no clear stopping rule; it is difficult to tell when the problem is "solved" and what that solution may look like when you reach it."

Jennifer says, "With hard problem, your job is to look at the situation, identify a set of definite conditions, and calculate a solution. With wicked problems, the solution can no longer be the only or even the primary focus. Instead, dealing with the wicked problems demands the attention be paid to understanding the nature of the problem itself. Problem understanding is central; the solution, secondary. It's no wonder that so many designers have come to embrace the notion that their role is to work with wicked problems."

If, as Roger Martin warns, "Organizations dominated by analytical thinking are built to operate as they always have; they are structurally resistant to the ideas of designing a and redesigning themselves...over time. They are built to maintain the status quo"

 Education will have to solve its wicked problems by designing solutions. 

 Tim Brown, CEO of the design company IDEO and author of Change By Design says, "By integrating what is desirable from the human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never though of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems." 

And most importantly, design thinking helps you, "...grasp the needs the of the people you are trying to serve." That means the needs of our students. Solving wicked problems to serve our students is why educational design thinking is a welcome and needed approach in education. Using design thinking to solve the wicked problems of education is Education Innovation.

Comments

[Theo]

I really loved your post about it. I'm thinking about "redesign" education too for few months. However, I think it's needed that you have to talk more about it, i mean, I'd like to understand what is designed solutions for education. I get it that it's necessary in certain way because the whole scientific model allows us to have wicked problems but the thing is: i think you should develop that in another post because i can't discuss if you don't "propose" anything.
I"m your reader now, God bless!