Wicked Problems
A reflection on complexity, institutional drift, and the design of better inheritances.
What if the question wasn’t “how do we fix it?” but “how do we move through it?”
As human beings we are trained, culturally and cognitively, to solve. Presented with a problem, we instinctively seek its matching solution. Problem A should yield Solution B. Efficiency becomes virtue, ambiguity becomes waste, and complexity is treated as a design flaw. But not all problems behave…
Some mutate the moment you approach them, others regenerate when partially resolved and many persist not because we lack understanding, but because too many people benefit (politically, economically, or emotionally) from misunderstanding them.
These are what planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber first described in 1973 as ‘Wicked Problems’ - challenges so deeply entangled in competing interests, shifting constraints, and moral disagreement that they defy linear solutions. You don’t fix a wicked problem – you can only just about navigate it. And today, they are everywhere.
From climate change to housing shortages, fertility collapse to misinformation. Rising loneliness, erosion of public trust and generational inequality. And perhaps most ominously, the World Bank’s projection of a sudden global population decline by 2050 not from scarcity, but from withdrawal. Each of these challenges sits at the intersection of values, incentives, time, and power. None belong to a single institution or discipline but rather each cuts across systems that no one fully owns, and that many are incentivised to preserve, even if they no longer serve.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out firsthand while working in the UK’s energy sector. For years, I helped design and finance low-carbon heat networks - infrastructures intended to reduce emissions, lower bills, and modernise our built environment. Yet almost every project was slowed by the same resistance: legacy regulations, misaligned incentives, local planning hurdles, or fear of change. (Almost) everyone agreed that decarbonisation was necessary yet progress stalled not due to lack of knowledge, but because the systems surrounding the problem were not designed to move, they were designed to hold.
Direction, Not Destination
Wicked Problems don’t come with endpoints, they resist resolution because they are not puzzles to be solved, but landscapes to be moved through. Progress, in these cases, isn’t defined by arrival - it’s defined by trajectory. The question becomes not “how do we fix this?” but “which way is better than here?”
This idea runs against the grain of how we are taught to approach challenges, particularly within Western institutions. From politics to infrastructure planning to corporate strategy, the dominant paradigm is one of linearity. We forecast, we model, we optimise and then attempt to craft action plans as if the world were static enough to map.
But wicked problems don’t operate in static environments. They evolve. And the systems built to manage them (electoral cycles, annual budgets, rigid KPIs) often aren’t flexible enough to keep up. Throughout my career I have seen this play out in policy and infrastructure work, where the desire for control often outweighs the need for direction. One client would ask for a 10-year delivery roadmap, yet refuse to shift course when national policy changed. Another would demand predictive models for community impact, then ignore the qualitative complexity that couldn’t be graphed. Over and over, progress faltered not because we lacked data, but because we clung too tightly to the illusion that the future could be reverse-engineered.
What wicked problems require instead is a shift in posture…I’m not suggesting to abandon the structure but instead to rethink what the structure is for, and if it serves us in today’s new and everchanging landscape. The best navigators aren’t those who deny uncertainty - they are those who build systems capable of learning.
Why We Struggle With the Wicked
We are deeply uncomfortable with problems we cannot close. Open loops make us uneasy, and tend to imply vulnerability. So instead of sitting with complexity, we try to convert it into metrics. We want to end homelessness by 2030, achieve net zero by 2050, eliminate NHS waiting lists by next winter. Each goal is presented as if history were a spreadsheet and time a lever we simply need to pull.
But Wicked Problems don’t yield to deadlines… They require timeframes that stretch beyond electoral cycles, trade-offs that offend vested interests, and coordination between institutions that don’t trust each other. None of this maps cleanly onto politics as it is practised today or for that matter in business or media too.
In the NHS, I’ve seen this logic play out in slow motion. A system designed to care and treat illness is now drowning in demand it was never built to handle. Instead of redesigning care models or rethinking upstream causes like housing, loneliness, or food security, we double down on efficiency metrics. Hospitals are rewarded for discharges, not outcomes. GP practices are assessed by access, not continuity. The result is a carousel of interventions that never address the structure itself - just how fast we can move patients through it.
I’ve sat in meetings where decarbonisation targets were discussed in detail (kilowatt hours, carbon coefficients, marginal abatement costs) and yet no one mentioned the fact that the current UK Planning law makes heat network deployment functionally impossible. We spoke in solutions, but lived in avoidance. It wasn’t deception, it was something softer and maybe more dangerous: the quiet delusion that the system could hold, if we just optimised hard enough.
This is why Wicked Problems endure. Not because we’re incapable of addressing them but because doing so would require confronting how much we’ve built on top of denial.
How They’ve Been Faced (or Fumbled)
When systems grow too tangled to reform, societies don’t always reason their way out… they rupture. Revolution is history’s blunt answer to wickedness:
The French monarchy by the late 1780s was paralysed by debt, a rigid class structure, and a refusal to redistribute power. The Estates-General had not been convened in 175 years. Bread prices spiked; tax burdens fell hardest on the poorest. When the king finally did act, it was too late and the legitimacy of the crown had already collapsed.
The Russian Tsarist regime met a similar fate. By 1917, it was haemorrhaging credibility. Years of military failure, economic collapse, and political repression had eroded any illusion of stability. The February Revolution wasn’t sparked by ideology, it began with striking workers and food riots in Petrograd. The Romanovs fell not because of a coup, but because they had exhausted the trust of those who once obeyed them.
The Berlin Wall didn’t fall because of one policy error, it fell after decades of stagnation, censorship, and a growing awareness that the West was moving while the East was stuck. When a minor government official in East Berlin misspoke at a press conference in November 1989, suggesting that border restrictions had been lifted, crowds surged to the wall. The guards didn’t stop them, and the performance of power was over.
Even in the UK, one could argue that Brexit was not a policy decision so much as a pressure valve. A system-wide release of decades of resentment against immigration, inequality and institutional drift compressed into a single binary vote.
But not all wicked problems end in fire or fracture. Some are absorbed, re-patterned, metabolised over time. When societies avoid collapse, they usually do it through one of four means:
Narrative shift — The civil rights movement in the US didn’t begin with policy, but with a change in what people believed was tolerable.
Institutional redesign — Post-WWII Europe rebuilt not just cities, but economic structures, educational systems, and social contracts.
Technological leverage — The internet promised new forms of decentralised participation; its potential remains uneven, but real.
Philosophical renewal — Ideas like degrowth, universal basic income, and mutual aid were fringe not long ago, now they animate serious policy debates.
Personally, I believe rupture is rarely necessary but increasingly likely when redesign is delayed. The longer we defer honesty, the narrower our options become and right now, we are narrowing them daily. You can feel it in the way policy is crafted to avoid offence and in the way reform is repackaged as “stability” - but Wicked Problems do not care for politeness.
So What Do We Do?
The only way forward, it seems, is to stop asking whether these problems can be solved and start deciding how to live alongside them. Wickedness won’t vanish, history makes that abundantly clear. But it can become less harmful when approached differently and not as a flaw to eliminate, but as a reality to engage.
Control may be satisfying in theory, but in practice, it rarely holds. The systems worth building now aren’t those that promise certainty but those that can bend without breaking. That can stretch, adapt, and stay honest under pressure.
That shift from engineer to steward, from fixer to gardener is subtle, but essential. It starts by naming the complexity, not erasing it. Letting go of five-year roadmaps drawn in static ink, and instead asking: What direction makes life more liveable? What path feels more just?
Some places are already pointing the way. In Ireland, citizen assemblies helped break political deadlock on abortion rights - not by bypassing debate, but by grounding it in considered, collective reflection. In Brazil, participatory budgeting turned local politics into something legible and gave real voice to those who usually go unheard. These aren’t perfect models, but they’re proof of something quietly radical: that distributed trust can work. That systems can flex and still function.
Even Wikipedia, flawed, messy, and constantly updated, shows what becomes possible when incentives are aligned and knowledge isn’t hoarded. It’s not that these examples solve wickedness. But they show what it looks like to live with it better.
Whether it’s building andii, a platform to make academic collaboration more human, or rethinking how consultancy can serve rather than extract through Copper Beech Advisory, the through-line is the same: better systems won’t be perfect. But they can be more transparent, more responsive and more generous across generations. A fairer society.
And We Tell the Truth
The truth is, most problems will not be solved in our lifetime. They will shift form, frustrate reformers, outlast governments and resist silver-bullet solutions. In their wake they will leave behind partial answers, and unfinished reforms – but that’s not failure, it’s the nature of the wickedness.
These problems do not simply resolve themselves; instead, they act as mirrors, reflecting back to us the areas we are hesitant to confront and the sacrifices we are reluctant to make. They expose the vulnerabilities in our systems and the rigidity of structures that refuse to adapt. Over time, they compel us to face an inescapable truth: the systems that endure are not those that cling to permanence but those that learn to flex, to accommodate the uncertainties of a complex world.
In their persistence, these challenges demand that we answer a profound and enduring question: what legacy are we building? Are we creating a foundation that provides future generations with the tools to navigate chaos, or are we, knowingly or unknowingly, bequeathing to them only the chaos itself? The answer lies not in grand resolutions or definitive solutions but in our willingness to engage with the messiness, to design frameworks that offer resilience in the face of the unknown.
What we choose to pass on, whether it is clarity, adaptability, or simply the courage to keep asking better questions will shape what comes next. And in that decision lies the power to transform what feels insurmountable into something meaningful.
Something will inevitably be inherited, the question is whether we choose to design it with intention or leave it to chance. This inheritance is not just a collection of systems or structures; it is a reflection of our values, our priorities, and the paths we have chosen to walk. Designing with care means recognising that clarity does not arise from rigid control or perfect foresight but from acts of persistent stewardship. It emerges from iteration, from asking the hard questions, and from embracing the quiet, uncelebrated task of building frameworks that may offer strength and coherence to future generations.
Having spent years engaging with infrastructure, policy, and technology, I have come to understand that progress often begins not with grand solutions but with small, deliberate steps. The systems we craft today are unlikely to achieve perfection, but they hold the potential to be better - more responsive, more inclusive, and more adaptable than the ones they replace. This is not the work of singular visionaries or definitive plans; it is the work of collective attention and sustained care. It asks us to design not for immediate benefit but for a legacy that someone else, perhaps even someone we will never meet, might one day find meaningful.
No one is waiting to hand us a perfect plan. There is no singular, miraculous solution poised on the horizon. Yet, even in the absence of certainty, there remain directions worth pursuing and structures worth rethinking. There remains the opportunity to leave behind something more coherent, more compassionate, and more resilient than the systems we inherited.
This work is not about resolving every problem or untangling every complexity. Instead, it is about acknowledging that the act of designing is itself a form of care - an expression of hope that the future might be shaped not by chaos, but by intention. The challenge lies in recognising the importance of these small acts and understanding that, in their accumulation, they hold the power to transform what feels insurmountable into something quietly remarkable. There is still time, and within that time resides the possibility to create something lasting and meaningful.
- AK x