Wicked Problems.
There is a concept I learned in graduate school that has stayed with me for years. The idea of the “wicked problem,” taught to my cohort by Dr. Rhonda Zaharna at American University.
I’m not entirely sure why it stuck with me so deeply after all of these years, but it did.
I remember visualizing it like one of those children’s toys: you press your finger into one side, and something unexpected pops out on the other. You intervene in one place, and the system responds somewhere else entirely.
Over time, it became a frame of reference for how I considered many things from that point forward: conflict, change, society—and even the choices I made about my life.
The theory doesn’t refer to wicked in the moral sense, but wicked in the structural sense.
A wicked problem is one that cannot be solved in any final or clean way, because it is embedded in human systems: values, power, history, competing incentives, and shifting definitions of what the problem even is.
The term comes from planning theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, who argued that some challenges are fundamentally different from “tame” problems.
A tame problem is something like an engineering question: it can be clearly defined, technically addressed, and finished.
But wicked problems have very different properties:
There is no single agreed-upon definition
There is no clear stopping point
Solutions are not true or false, only better or worse
Every intervention changes the landscape
Trade-offs are unavoidable
Outcomes unfold slowly, ambiguously, and unevenly
In other words: wicked problems are not puzzles. They are conditions.
And this is where sociology becomes foundational.
Because the central issues cultural institutions – and perhaps even all institutions – are navigating right now—public trust, inclusion, relevance, funding models, political pressure, audience fragmentation, cultural meaning itself—are not technical challenges. They are social ones.
They live inside systems of interpretation.
Who defines the problem?
Whose values are centered?
What histories are being carried forward?
What futures are being negotiated?
Which brings me to a related idea I learned years ago while reading works by Thomas Sowell, also another that changed decision making in my life:
There are no solutions. Only trade-offs.
That sentence can sound pessimistic if misread. But I think it’s actually liberating.
Sowell helps clarify that wicked problems persist precisely because their consequences are distributed unevenly: every response produces new trade-offs that must be negotiated rather than resolved.
Wicked problems cannot be “fixed” in the way institutions often feel pressured to fix them. They can only be engaged with:
through clarity about values
through seriousness about consequences
through honesty about what is being gained and what is being sacrificed
through adaptive, iterative strategy rather than permanent resolution
This is one of the most important shifts we can make when considering which of our problems are wicked and which of them are tame:
Moving from a mindset of solution to a mindset of sensemaking.
The work is not to eliminate complexity.
The work is to build institutions that can hold complexity with intelligence, legitimacy, and care. Not asking only what should be done, but first understanding what is actually happening, for whom, and why.
And perhaps the most generative question is not:
“How do we solve this?”
But rather:
“What trade-offs are we making — and for whom— whether we want to admit it or not?”
Because that question alone can change the possibilities of context, creativity, and clarity in considering what steps to take next.
P.S. To go a bit deeper, a few notes and readings that may be helpful:
The foundational scholarship on wicked problems comes from Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s classic 1973 essay, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning—still one of the clearest articulations of why certain social challenges resist definitive solutions.
Thomas Sowell’s framing that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” is another concept that has stayed with me for years. His work in A Conflict of Visions is especially useful for thinking about public life with less utopianism.
And recently, a client shared David Brooks’ parting essay from The New York Times with me, where he returns to a core question: how culture shifts discourse over time, and how institutions quietly shape what societies take to be meaningful, valuable, or true. It’s a reminder—one I touched on in my January note—that institutions are not simply programmatic actors. They are architects of meaning.
And more on wicked v. tame problems from Dr. Zaharna herself below.