Thread by @ArticleGroup

There are two types of creative problems, tame 👼 and wicked 😈, and for wicked creative problems you need special problem-solving tools, so GET READY PEOPLE it’s a thread

1/ 👼 tame problems are simple. Tame problems are bounded. Tame problems are easy to define. You got a horse but need a saddle? That’s a tame problem.

2/ 😈 wicked problems are complex. Wicked problems are unbounded. Wicked problems are *hard to define*.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_pr…

3/ Homelessness is a wicked problem. Social planning is a wicked problem. And so are marketing problems—esp. inside large orgs where the ask is hazy, the stakeholders have diff opinions, and there’s no one “right” answer to the project

4/ Wicked problems were first defined in 1973 by Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber (oddly, no twitter accounts)...

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

...5/ and later refined by Jeff Conklin in his book Wicked Problems & Social Complexity.

cognexus.org/wpf/wickedprob…

Conklin’s defining characteristics are:

6/ Conklin occasionally still blogs at cognex, you should check him out — especially his piece on Breaking Our Addiction to Problem Solving:

cognexusgroup.com/breaking-addic…

7/ But to return to the point, 😈 wicked probs are like that ol’ parable about the blind men and the elephant—when everybody’s talking about a different part of the pachyderm, there’s no shared basis of agreement to form a holistic view

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men…

8/ So! The point! The point about wicked problems is that in order to even begin trying to solve them, you need a method to 👏 define 👏 the 👏 problem 👏 itself 👏 … and that’s where CATWOE comes in

9/ CATWOE is a simple checklist to help anybody define a wicked problem. It defines the problem by *understanding constraints*.

10/ That’s where the acronym comes in. Each letter is a constraint to be defined:

C - Customers
A - Actors
T - Transformation Process
W - World View
O - Owners
E - Environmental Constraints

11/ Who is the customer? They care about changes to products and services. Who are the Actors? These are the employees who will make the change. What is the actual Transformation Process? Let’s list the steps.

12/ What is the World View? That is, who are the different stakeholders surrounding the org, and what influence do they have? Who is the Owner—i.e., the budget holder who can say when a project stops?

13/ and finally, what are the Environmental Constraints? As in, the ethical boundaries or regulations?

14/ CATWOE is best used when an org has multiple or conflicting interests. Helping a large tech company define its messaging on Artificial Intelligence, for example, especially when every department has a different vision for AI — for that, we’d use CATWOE

15/ CATWOE is useful in these situations because the framework attempts to consider all points of view and how any one solution might affect all parties. And it can *really* help you avoid hidden landmines along the way.

16/ For more on CATWOE, I recommend

toolshero.com/problem-solvin…

And, by extension, the wiki entry on soft systems methodology

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_syst…

17/ this has been a thread.

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