Social Wicked Problems

An interesting technical look at the application of 'wicked problem' techniques to social problems.  We used the term to indicated difficult to formalize and solve problems of many kinds.  Even this abstract is too convoluted, but here goes:  " ... 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  structure and analyse such problems complexes. ... "