Wicked Problems: Modelling Social Messes with Morphological Analysis
Wicked Problems: Modelling Social Messes with Morphological Analysis
If you work in an organisation that deals with social, commercial or financial planning – or any
type of public policy planning – then you’ve got wicked problems. You may not call them by this
name, but you know what they are. They are those complex, ever changing societal and organisational planning problems that you haven’t been able to treat with much success, because they won’t
keep still. They’re messy, devious, and they fight back when you try to deal with them. This paper
describes the notion of wicked problems (WPs) as put forward by Rittel & Webber in their landmark article “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (1973). It presents the ten criteria they
use to characterise WPS, and describes how General Morphological Analysis (GMA) can be used to
model and analyse such problem complexes.