Strategic knowledge sharing: a small-worlds perspective - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 116

Wicked problems and wicked systems
A wicked problem is defined by Rittel and Webber (1973) as one characterised by the
following:
1. There is no definitive formulation.
2. Any solution is not true-or-false, but rather good-or-bad.
3. There is no immediate and ultimate test of any solution.
4. It is a 'one-shot operation' since there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error.
5. There is no enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions,
nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated
into the plan.
6. It is essentially unique.
7. It can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
8. It results from a discrepancy that can be explained in numerous ways, and the
choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
9. It does not allow the planner the right to be wrong.
Item 8, where the explanation of the problem is crucial to perceptions of how it can be
resolved, is central to the design thinking in this paper. A wicked socio-technical system
is, therefore, one that is made up of people, supported by technology, who appreciate
that they are dealing mainly with these wicked problems. This includes most human
organisations. Although not explicitly mentioned in the list above, these problems are
also dynamic; they change over time due to a mixture of events, including new techno-
logy, new knowledge and possible shifts in participants' perspectives. The design task
is, therefore, to allow actors in a wicked strategic problem situation to self-organise in
order to produce what they see as an acceptable resolution.
This paper will discuss self-organisation and small-worlds phenomenon, providing two
examples of wicked problems.
Self-organisation
The concept of 'self-organising systems' is in danger of losing its effectiveness and be-
coming as vague a term as 'general systems theory' and 'autopoesis', with their abstract
talk of generic open and closed systems. For example, Georges and Romme (1995) define
a self-organising system as one that is both open and closed; evoking the old debate
about what constitutes a closed system. Mingers (1997) definition of autopoesis (self-re-
producing) would appear to subsume self-organising systems. However, doing so may
hide some of the advantages of using the perspective of self-organising systems for
automatic knowledge sharing when wicked systems pose problems that need to be
solved. In order to be able to reproduce, a system needs to be organised, and it may be
hierarchical. A self-organised system, however, is one that does not need a hierarchy to
respond to environmental surprises. It is the assumption of the need for a hierarchy to
direct knowledge sharing that is being challenged here. Self-organisation is not being
used here in the sense of the development of identity in a hostile environment, (such as
the establishment of the early Christian Church, the labour movement or the feminist
movement). Rather, this paper is concerned with how a wicked socio-technical system
might be designed to share knowledge so as to provide an effective response to environ-
mental surprises when there is no explicit internal hierarchy. Ideas about how these
systems might be designed come from analogies with the world of insects. Some swarm,
as in ant nests, and some bee nests have no boss, no corporate plan, and no strategic
planner, but a higher level organisation has emerged that serves to enable the unsuspecting