I’ve been investigating and writing about a special level of complexity – wickedness – for about a year. As I’ve said before, wickedness, in this context, doesn’t imply evil—it means unpredictability, interconnectedness, and the absence of clear cause-and-effect relationships. In a wicked world: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” — Louis Pasteur Jean Egmon and I…
We live in a wicked world – a term borrowed from systems theory and complexity science to describe environments that are nonlinear, interconnected, fast-changing, and filled with uncertainty. Wicked challenges rarely have clear boundaries or definitive solutions and decisions made in one part of a system can ripple unpredictably through others. Let’s consider the U.S.–China…
We seem to have an abundance of problems these days. Ponder the following. Short & Sweet PROBLEM? Know that a problem exists. Although it would seem that problems should be “obvious,” that’s not always the case. Sometimes you have to look for problems. PROBLEM! Define the problem. Problems are often obscured by their symptoms. You…
As many of you know, I’ve been writing about the need for all of us to “learn from the past, deal with the present, and intercept the future.” And, as luck would have it, I found some of my notes from about ten years ago wherein I examined some lessons from the past and considered…
A bunch of years ago a large organization asked me to develop a self-study course focused on problem solving. I recently found a quiz that I developed and thought you might be interested in it. The answers follow, but don’t cheat. Quiz Quiz Answer Key Having the skills of a prepared mind is essential to…
Social media is where many of us find news, trends, and conversations. But with endless threads and viral posts flooding your feed, how do you separate fact from fiction? Misinformation and lies can go viral before anyone bothers to fact-check. If you want to stay sharp and avoid falling for clickbait, you need to level…
Remember the fun of word problems from your early school days? Something like the following was either agony or a lot of fun: “Ben is three times as old as John. The sum of their ages is 40 years. How old is each of them?” (Answer below.) Sixth Grade “heuristic” (i.e., steps to follow) 1….
We have a gun violence problem! We have a global warming problem! We have a market share problem! We have an income disparity problem! We have a retirement problem! Etc., etc. We have more problems than we can handle, but they mostly share a common problem – the degree to which they are communicated and…
Do we need more “influencers” telling us what to do, or do we need more people who think and act to resolve our challenges. Let’s see if I can influence your thinking. You’re a sucker if you need to always be right. You will ignore/discount information that you disagree with and, therefore, people will tell…
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