Two Berkeley professors, Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber defined the problems of planning and wicked problems already in 1969. Here are a few excerpts of their article published in Policy Sciences in 1973.
"A great many barriers keep us from
perfecting such a planning/governing system: theory is inadequate for decent
forecasting; our intelligence is insufficient to our tasks; plurality of
objectives held by pluralities of politics makes it impossible to pursue
unitary aims; and so on. The difficulties attached to rationality are
tenacious, and we have so far been unable to get untangled from their web. This
is partly because the classical paradigm of science and engineering--the
paradigm that has underlain modern professionalism--is not applicable to the
problems of open societal systems.
Planning Problems are Wicked Problems
1. There is no definitive
formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule
3. Solutions to wicked
problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly
6. Wicked problems do not have an innumerable (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
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution
10. The planner has no right to be wrong
Horst
W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber: Theory of Planning
in Policy Sciences 4 (1973), pp. 160-167
