I watched the Hindi movie Satyagraha last night whose story revolves
around a grass-root level anti-corruption movement in India. As I was watching
the movie, following questions came to mind, “Is corruption as a problem
similar to any other problem like e.g. fixing a car or a mobile phone? Or is it
different? And can such a problem be solved in any systematic approach?” The first question reminded me of a lecture by Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton in the coursera course
“Design: Creation of artifacts
in society”. In this lecture Ulrich presents a classification of problems
which I find simple and useful. Here is a summary.
Design vs system-improvement problems: Problems
can be divided into two broad categories: Design and System-improvement. Design
creates new artifacts from nothing and system improvement problems begin with an
existing operating system. For example when Ulrich built a sleeping shack in
Montana (mock-up shown in the picture) he was building it where nothing existed
other than a patch of ground and hence solving a design problem. On the other
hand, if you are trying to reduce infection in hospitals due to increased hand
washing (picture on top right) you are starting with an existing practice in a
hospital and trying to improve it. Hence, it is a system improvement problem.
Selection and tuning problems: If
you are selecting a new accounting system for your organization, you typically
don’t build it from scratch (picture bottom left). You select one from a list
of a few well-known alternatives. So there is a special class of design problems
like the selection of account system which Ulrich calls “selection problems”. Similarly
when you at the problem of attracting more traffic to your website, tools such
a Google Analytics help you with specific parameters such as placement of
words, graphics, search terms etc. It is like setting a bunch of knobs in order
to identify the best performance. Landscape is known and parameters are
understood and your job is to fine the combination of parameters resulting in
high performance. Ulrich calls such system-improvement problems “tuning
problems”.
Crises and wicked problems: Ulrich
presents two more categories of problems which cut across both design &
system improvement problems. The first one is – crises problems – a set of
problems where time is very critical. For example, when Apollo 13 crew had to
build a system to get oxygen from carbon dioxide, it was indeed a design problem.
However, it had to be solved under sever time pressure and hence some solution
quickly weighs much more than a great solution slowly (picture middle right). Wicked
problems are problems where stakeholders have conflicting interest i.e. they
disagree on the criteria of a good solution. For example, problems such as India-Pakistan
conflict, improving public education or healthcare, reducing poverty and of
course, corruption are wicked problems. Unlike a “fixing a car” problem, a solution
to a corruption problem will dissatisfy at least one party (say the politicians
who benefit from corruption).
Now that we have looked at what kind of a problem
corruption is, let’s come back to the second question: Can wicked problems be
solved in a systematic way? Or are there at least some good practices in solving /
making progress on wicked problems? We will explore this in a separate article.
Source:
Lecture 8.2a – “Problem
solving and Design” by Prof. Karl Ulrich in the coursera course “Design: Creation
of artifacts in society”. This is based on chapter 2 of
Ulrich’s book with the same title.
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