Key Principle
Wicked problems resist resolution because "problem-definition itself is the problem" (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Hill escalates their original concept: these problems are now "really, really wicked" because 21st-century systems are more interconnected than in 1973. Healthcare outcomes depend on urban planning, transport, employment, food systems, education, and retail policy -- none under a single authority. The categorical mismatch between problem structure (networked) and institutional structure (siloed) means every intervention within a single department gets neutralised by dynamics in adjacent ones.
The mechanism of failure is not lack of effort but categorical mismatch: institutions keep solving the wrong problem -- the one that fits their departmental boundaries rather than the one that exists. Hill frames this through his definition of strategic design as "the systemic redesign of cultures of decision-making" -- the unit of redesign cannot be the policy or the service but the decision-making culture itself.
When interconnected systems fail, they fail catastrophically and then snap back to their pre-failure state rather than redesigning. Hill distinguishes good failure (system learns and adapts) from bad failure (system restores its non-resilient status quo). The mechanism preventing learning is the absence of any feedback architecture to convert crisis insight into structural redesign before the political window closes. The same policy-delivery gap that prevents good governance prevents good failure: no feedback loop exists between outcome and intent.
Why This Matters
Governance institutions were designed for bounded, departmental problems. They are now attempting to manage interconnected, wicked ones. The cascade of 2011 crises -- Occupy, Arab Spring, eurozone collapse, UK riots -- are symptoms of this structural failure, not isolated events. The ILO World of Work 2011 report documented significant drops in confidence in national governments across advanced economies (2006-2010) and significant increases in social unrest risk -- data gathered before the 2011 protest waves. By October 2011, 950+ cities across 82 countries participated in coordinated Occupy protests.
Without recognising wickedness, institutions keep solving the wrong problem: the one that fits their departmental boundaries rather than the one that actually exists.
System brittleness compounds the problem. Centralisation and efficiency optimisation strip redundancy from physical systems (unlike virtual ones where redundancy is cheap). When one link in a centralised supply chain fails, cascading effects are immediate and total because there is no local fallback. The deeper failure is what happens after: the "natural, if nostalgic, first instinct" is to rebuild what existed before. Strategic design's value is therefore not just in designing better systems but in designing systems that learn from their own failure -- converting crisis moments into redesign opportunities before the window closes.
Good Examples
Brisbane floods (January 2011): Despite a week of warning, food, power, transport, and water systems all failed within hours. No local agricultural capacity existed despite fertile land. No distributed energy despite near-perfect solar climate. Cost: AUD$10 billion minimum. Afterward, the instinct was to rebuild identically -- a textbook case of bad failure where the system restores its non-resilient state rather than learning. (Chapter: What is The Problem?)
Eyjafjallajokull eruption cascading effects: A single volcanic event shut down three BMW production lines in Germany, cancelled surgery in Dublin, and caused job losses in Kenya -- demonstrating how interconnected supply chains transmit local failures globally. (David Korowicz, 2011, cited in Chapter: What is The Problem?)
Post-traumatic urbanism (Beirut): Adrian Lahoud's concept -- cities where infrastructure unreliability has produced distributed local services (grocers, bakers, tailors replicated per neighbourhood). The system degrades gracefully rather than catastrophically. This resilience pattern has been actively "designed out" of contemporary cities through centralisation and sprawl. The insight: absence of resilience is not a natural condition but a reversible design choice. (Chapter: What is The Problem?)
Counterpoints
Resilience is a design choice, not an infrastructure problem: Hill argues that brittleness is designed-in through active policy. "Sprawl is an outcome of active policy, of design." Without recognising this, resilience appears to require massive new infrastructure rather than a different distribution pattern. (Chapter: What is The Problem?)
Crisis windows close before learning occurs: Kurt Andersen saw the 2008 crash as "a rare limited-time-only opportunity to significantly update and reform the system." Hill's devastating two-word follow-up: "That didn't happen either." Political and institutional inertia consistently defeats post-crisis redesign. (Chapter: What is The Problem?)
No client for the problem: "There are no clients for these problems. Who is the client for climate change, except perhaps the entire human race?" The absence of a clear institutional owner means wicked problems persist not from lack of effort but from structural inability to assign responsibility across silos. (Chapter: What is The Problem?)
Key Quotes
"Just as we never consider the ground beneath our feet until we trip, these glimpses into the complex webs of inter-dependencies upon which modern life relies only come when part of that web fails." -- David Korowicz, 2011, cited in Chapter: What is The Problem?
"There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in the professional's support system lies at the juncture where goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet." -- Rittel and Webber, 1973, cited in Chapter: What is The Problem?
"It has become less apparent where problem centers lie, and less apparent where and how we should intervene even if we do happen to know what aims we seek ... By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems ... and of locating problems." -- Rittel and Webber, 1973, cited in Chapter: What is The Problem?
"I see the gobsmacking crash and resulting flux as a rare limited-time-only opportunity to significantly update and reform the system and the habits of mind that are its cause and effect." -- Kurt Andersen, 2009, cited in Chapter: What is The Problem?
Rules of Thumb
- If a problem has a clear departmental owner, you are probably looking at only one fragment of the actual problem
- Efficiency-optimised systems are brittleness-optimised systems -- redundancy is the price of resilience
- After a system failure, the window for structural redesign closes fast; design the feedback loop before the crisis
- If the instinct after failure is to rebuild what existed before, the system is exhibiting bad failure
- Network redundancy (distributed local capacity) degrades gracefully; centralised systems fail catastrophically
- The absence of resilience is not a natural condition but a design choice -- which means it is reversible
- When you cannot locate the problem, that difficulty is itself diagnostic of wickedness
Related References
- Why Design Thinking Fails: The Consultancy Trap - Why external consultancy cannot address wicked problems (the 5%/95% split)
- Six-Contrast Differentiation Framework - How strategic design differs from engineering and policy-making in its approach to systemic problems