Academics Applying Interventionist Research to Deal with Wicked and Complex Societal Problems

Facing up to wicked problems

The complexity and value-laden nature of sustainable development as shown in the previous sections provide examples of wicked problems. Creating solutions to these require new modes of thinking and new ways of working. Here we refl ect on some of the theoretical insights and how these play out in practice. Much of this is in its infancy and the pathways to maturity will take time and considerab...

Competitive Benchmarking: An IS Research Approach to Address Wicked Problems with Big Data and Analytics

Wicked problems like sustainable energy and financial market stability are societal challenges that arise from complex sociotechnical systems in which numerous social, economic, political, and technical factors interact. Understanding and mitigating these problems requires research methods that scale beyond the traditional areas of inquiry of information systems (IS) individuals, organizations,...

Editorial: Leadership when there are no easy answers: applying leader moral courage to wicked problems.

Untangling wicked problems

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Diagnosing Wicked Problems

Horst Rittel defined his wicked problems theory to differentiate wicked problems, which are open-ended and controversial, from tame problems, which have a single correct solution. Rittel identified ten properties of wicked problems but did not indicate if all of these properties needed to hold before something could be deemed wicked. Failure to correctly classify a problem as wicked is likely t...