Joseph Bentley – Taming Wicked Problems

Sixteen Stretches for Wicked Problems

Joseph Bentley — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 19:29:48 +0000

“The mind, stretched by a new idea, never returns to it’s original dimension,”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each morning when we awaken from sleep, we almost always do the same thing: push down with our legs, reach up with our arms, and often, emitting a loud and noisy yawn, stretch. This unusual and situation-specific action has a name: “pandiculation. We don’t choose to do it. It never occurs to us that it’s time to stretch. Rather, it’s what the body wants and even demands, and in those moments between sleep and wakefulness, the body is in charge. Trying not to stretch has probably never occurred to anyone. In fact, driven by the physical demands of the body, trying to resist stretching would upset the natural rhythms of our physical lives and probably make us feel confused and uncomfortable.

If we could see ourselves in full-stretch, we might be surprised. Our muscles contract and tighten, we thrust our legs downward with a surprising amount of force and our arms upward in an attempt to reach the ceiling. All the while, the torso, caught in the middle between these opposing forces, twists and turns in an attempt keep things aligned. Once into full stretch, our eyes and ears close, our faces scrunch up into a grimace that often morphs into a scowl, our mouths open and what usually comes out is a huge yawn, accompanied by a window-shaking, cry: “Ahaughhh.

Stretching Is Everywhere

Humans are not the only animals which stretch upon awakening. Dogs do it, cats do it, even mice and rats do it. And so do cows, horses, deer, sheep, lions, foxes, and hamsters. Even some insects are stretchers. Get close to a fly that’s settled on a plate after eating its fill, and you may see it stretch one wing and then the other.

When we move outside the boundaries of living organisms, we can discover that “stretch” or “stretching” is a term used to describe a wide range of actions, situations and activities. Baseball pitchers go into a stretch as part of their windup; the fans in the stands rise as one during the “the seventh-inning stretch” and sing “Take Me OutTo the Ball Game;” a large and unbroken expanse is described as “stretch of highway;” at a race track, as horses near the finish line, they are “coming down the home stretch;” during the times of the Inquisition, people were tortured by “stretching” them on the rack; we make things longer by “stretching them;” and after a picnic lunch, we may find a comfortable place to stretch out on the lawn for a nap. When we believe that others have exceeded normal limits, we tell them that they are “stretching my patience to the breaking point.”

In “In the Home Stretch,” a narrative poem published in 1916, Robert Frost, describes the struggles of an older couple as they move from an old home to a new one and settle in. They take a few moments to review the events of their lives together during past years, and reflect on the fact that they don’t have many more years ahead. We can read the poem as a story of two people being stretched by moving, and also coming to understand that they too are “in the home stretch” of their lives.

In recent years, the practice of stretching has moved beyond the physical, metaphorical, and the poetical, and has morphed into a way for people, especially the young, to become more “with it,” either by adopting the latest iteration of social media, or keeping up with the latest fashions in dress and speech. The adoption of new approaches, new vocabularies, and new attitudes requires constant stretching of rules, procedures, categories and behaviors.

A dominant theme for those of us who live in First World societies is the goal of becoming successful, a task which involves for most a continuous improvement of one’s self, and for some, a betterment of society. In 1982, Philosopher Karl Popper placed this theme at the center of his answer to the oft-asked question, “What’s it all about?” The first sentence of In Search of a Better World” is, “All living things are in search of a better world…they are trying to improve their situation.“[1] ) Both goals – improving one’s self, and making society a better place – begin with searching, a practice that can stretch our perspective beyond the boundaries of our present knowledge and experience. For individuals, this often means engaging in programs for identifying their weaknesses and faults, working to be rid of them, and replacing them with new and more productive approaches to one’s problems and opportunities. Improving society is a process of making organizations, institutions, communities and governments more effective, first, by transforming the processes, policies and procedures that make the system what it is, and second, developing the people who work in these transformed systems by encouraging them to hone the talents and abilities they possess, and helping them to acquire new ones. For all of this, stretching is at the center.

Come to the Edge

As part of this process of “developing people” so they can work successfully in transformed organizations and institutions, the concept of “stretch goals” has become part of the armamentarium of leadership. From this perspective, employee goals should go beyond easy or even difficult objectives, and become “stretch goals,” those which require them to move beyond what they are familiar and comfortable with.

In 1997, playwright Tom Stoppard, while addressing a class of drama students in Santa Barbara, California, asked his audience a question, and then answered it himself: “What is the real dialogue that goes on between the artist and his audience?” By way of reply, Stoppard held the microphone close to his mouth and spoke these eight lines by English poet Christopher Logue:

“Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high.
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.” [2]

“There was a surge of applause,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, in a The New Yorker article: “In imagination, these young people are all flying.” [3]

At her inauguration in November, 1997, Mary McAleese, newly elected president of the Irish Republic, not only recited the poem, “Come To The Edge” but also had it embroidered into the silk lining of her evening gown. Come to the edge, she told them, and be prepared to stretch! [4]

We Have Bodies and Minds

In 1855, Punch Magazine published “Shortcut to Metaphysics:”

What is matter? – never mind
What is mind? – no matter.” [5]

Over 150 years later, in an impressive affirmation of the truth of the old saying “What goes around, comes around,” Bart Simpson answers his son’s bedtime question, “What is mind?” with the same words that Punch Magazine printed years earlier: “Relax, What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.”

But answering the question “What is mind?” does matter, first to generations of psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists who have continued to argue the question over the past decades, and second, to the rest of us as well, since it is clear to us that the mind – whatever it is – is hugely important to us. There is work to do. The scientists and philosophers who are in the middle of these arguments do not have an answer to the question,“What is mind?” nor are they ready to answer a related question, “How does it work?” On the first page of the 660 pages of How the Mind Works, Stephen Pinker writes “We don’t understand how the mind works…” and then goes on for the next 660 pages explaining what he means by “don’t understand.” [6]

We will bypass debates over “What is the mind?” and “How does it work?” and turn to a question that is much more relevant for our purposes: “What does the mind do?” And here there is much more clarity: “The mind is designed to solve many…problems,” writes Pinker. [7] It is with our minds that we identify and make sense of the problems that beset us, then use them to figure out a way to solve or manage them. The way we do this is by thinking our way though them, deciding what we should about them, and then addressing the problem by making plans to remove any obstacles that stand in our way.

American philosopher John Dewey took this idea that minds are about solving problems, and turned it on its head. First the problem, he believed, and then the thinking: “We only think when we are confronted with a problem.” [8]

Stretching The Mind

This chapter is not about stretching the body, but stretching the mind, a challenge which, as we will see, is a much more complicated process. It is not an automatic experience as is the stretching of the body, but must be initiated by us, the “conscious we,” which is the way we think and talk about the mind. And when the mind does stretch, there are hardly ever any “Ahaughhh’s. It is generally an internal experience, quieter and more private then the stretching of the body. Here is an example of “mind-stretching” as reported by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. While puzzling over Aristotle’s theory of physics, Kuhn looked out the window, and

“Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new
way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once
Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort that I’d
never dreamed possible. Now I understood why he had said what
he’d said.” [9]

Kuhn did not believe Aristotle’s approach to physics was either accurate or correct, but what he came to understand was how Aristotle understood it. The stretching of his mind occurred when he was able to set aside his twentieth-century ways of thinking about physics and temporarily adopt Aristotle’s world-view, something entirely new for him.

Our Minds Are Ready for Some Problems, Not for Others.

There is no shortage of problems. Psychologist John Gardner wrote that “The problems of life and society as a numberless as raindrops. They are part of the texture of life.” [10] Some of these numberless problems become obstacles that block our way forward toward achieving our goals; finding ways to overcome these obstacles is the sine qua non of experiencing satisfying relationships with others, enjoying the rewards of success at work, and living what we define as a good life.

We excel at solving some of these problems. During the past decades we have sent people to the moon and returned them safely to earth. We have written down in a book the exact dates and times for the next 10,000 years, accurate to a millisecond, when the planet Venus will pass in front of the sun, and how long it will take. In 2021, we sent Perseverance, an unmanned mission to Mars, and after it landed, sent a message to Ingenuity, a small helicopter packed into the module, to fly. And fly it did, rising up and flying across the surface of Mars and taking photographs that were sent back to earth. We have eliminated smallpox, one of the most deadly and feared diseases, from the face of the earth, and we, along with most of the people in First World countries, enjoy pure water and safe food.

Others problems have been more resistant. “We have made advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and aviation,” writes philosopher Martha Nussbaum. “It is less clear that we have done so with respect to partnering, parenting, and choosing political leaders.” [11] We have also been less successful in insuring that all of our citizens have adequate heath care, that all of students are able to take advantage of a quality eduction, or in ending the shame of child sex trafficking or sexual and physical abuse of women.

What must we do in order to solve the problems that resist our efforts? “One of the requirements for solving problems is that we confront them,” continues Gardner, “identity them early, appraise them honestly, and avoid compliance or evasion. We are not good at it.” [12] One reason we are not good at this is that we ignore Gardner’s instructions: we do not confront them, or identify them early, choosing to ignore, evade, or even deny that they exist. And even when we follow Gardner’s advice, some problems remain unsolved. The reason seems to be that our minds are not up to the challenge. Our thinking is flawed. Our capabilities to think about them, and then to take constructive action, fall short of what is required.

Near the end of How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker includes a list of important problems that are too difficult for psychologists to understand, much less solve. “Consciousness” is one, another is Self, followed by Free Will, Meaning, Knowledge, and finally, Morality. “How did ought emerge,” he asks, “from a universe of particles and planets, genes and bodies.” [13] His conclusion is straightforward: Our minds did not evolve so that they could comprehend problems such as these. When we try to think about solving them, “The head spins in theoretical disarray,” writes philosopher Colin McGinn, “no explanatory model suggests itself, bizarre ontologies loom. There is a feeling of intense confusion, but no clear idea about where the confusion lies.” [14] There is a mismatch between these kinds of problem and the capacities of our minds to think them through.

The mind has other work to do than think about unthinkable problems: “The mind is designed by natural selection to solve the kind of problems…that were matters of life and death to our ancestors,” the ones they faced “in their foraging way of life, [and] in particular, understand and outmaneuver objects, plants, animals and other people…”[15] Examples of the problems our ancestors faced are “What plants can we eat, and which plants should we avoid?” “How can we avoid being surprised by our enemies,” and “How can we store food to last us through the winter months?” Either Homo sapiens became good at solving these kinds of problems, or they perished. Undoubtedly, codes of morality emerged which allowed people to live together and resolve their conflicts. But it is doubtful that pre-history peoples gathered around the fire at night and debated the issues of right and wrong.

Intelligence Is The ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles.

Psychologists define intelligence as the “ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles.”[16] Since thinking is problem solving, then intelligence is a matter of being able to think successfully about problems to reach goals. There are at least three important reasons why we fail at this: The first is the mismatch problem discussed above: Given the nature of the problem, the cognitive equipment of the mind is not up to the task. We don’t have a way to think about them that allows us to move forward.

The second reason that some problems are beyond us is that our habits of thinking are out of sync with the problems we are thinking about. We are effective with some kinds of problems, but not for others. When we face problems that have answers, most of us know how to look for them, When the problems have no answers, we are thrown off-stride.

A third reason for our inability to address some problems is sloppy thinking. We lack a foundation in critical thinking skills and spend too much time mucking around with concepts, models and approaches that lack the disciplined thinking that is required to make sense of the world around us. Here are three examples: rushing for a solution before making an effort to understand the problem; insisting that you know what to do without involving others; and choosing “solutions” to the present problem that seemed to work in previous years.

The Minds We Have vs The Minds We Need.

“What got you here, won’t get you there.” [17]
Marshal Goldsmith

We are born with brains which make possible our survival. They are programmed to solve our immediate problems: we can breath, suck, cry, swallow, gag, sneeze, eliminate waste, among other reflexive behaviors. And yet, even with all of these amazing abilities, surviving depends upon other human beings. They are responsible for keeping us safe and making sure that our basic needs are met.

What we are not born with is a mind. Although in most cases, we are born with the capabilities to develop one, the mind begins to emerge as we struggle with obstacles in our environment. Cognitive psychologists believe that we are endowed with an experimental approach to problem solving: try this and if it doesn’t work, try something else. Babies are problems solvers by necessity. But the specific ways they go about behaving in the presence of problems are taught to them by those who first take care of them. Do they push ahead to overcome obstacles, do they throw tantrums, or strike out at another child?

The ways we learn to meet our needs are also taught to us. Our first experiences with food are arranged by those who decide what we should eat. Significant changes in what we eat begin only when we leave the care of our parents, move out into the world, and begin to make our own choices.

When it comes to using our minds to face up to our problems, nothing is more important than being able to talk about them, both to ourselves and to others.Thinking can occur only when we have language with which to think, and here, once again, we depend upon our parents to teach us how to use language to get what we want. It is only when we can name things and then talk about them with others can it be said that we have minds to navigate through the difficult problems we face. Philosopher Rene Descartes is primarily remembered by, “I think, therefore I am.” What he left out was what comes before:“I have language, therefore I can think.” And since I can think, “therefore I am.”

The Minds We Have

From the moment we are born, we become problem solvers, actively engaged in learning how to manage the numerous problems that life sends our way. Most of us learn to solve many of our early problems, a success story which, paradoxically, often makes us unfit to address many of our later ones. How unfit? Many of us believe that if we just work hard enough, all problems can be solved, and, if we do run into a problem that we cannot solve, we assume that there must be an expert somewhere who can; many of us believe that those in authority know the answers to our problems and so we are happy to pass over to them the responsibility for solving them; we often believe that once we solve our problems, we are finished with them and can move on to tackle the next ones; some are are confident that the solution to a problem we faced last is one we can use again this year. If any of these describe ways that your mind works with problems, you may excel with tame problems, but for wicked problems, they are too narrow, constricted, flawed or basically inadequate. Rather than contribute to your effectiveness with problems, skills that work with tame problems get in the way when the problems are wicked.

By the time we leave adolescence and enter into early adulthood, we have solved thousands of problems, an activity that will continue throughout the rest of our lives. Some of us excel at this, others struggle, and still others often fail, but all of us are familiar with the experience of confronting problems. When we come upon a problem, our first challenge is to decide what the problem is, then move on to decide what we should do with it. Hovering above these first steps, however, often unperceived and so unnoticed, is a different kind of problem: a mismatch between the problem itself and our capabilities to address it. Here is American poet, Anne Sexton, describing her mismatch problem: “I’m tall and thin…but my life is square and small.” 18] A paraphrase of Sexton’s insight will give us an understanding of why some problems cause us so much grief: “Many problems are tall, big, and messy, while the way we think about them is small, square and neat.” The problems with which we struggle the most – the big, tall, messy ones – are wicked problems, while the ones our minds are most ready to solve – the small, square and neat ones – are tame. If the problem in front of us is big and messy, and we are prepared only for those that are “small, square, and neat,” we go into the struggle with a serious handicap.

Examples of Match/Mismatch

Here are two examples of how problems are matched and mismatched with people’s abilities:

Fred Singles arrives home from a business trip to discover that he has a problem that he didn’t count on: he is locked out of his house. After considering several possibilities – breaking a basement window and crawling through, going around to the back of the house and kicking in the door – he decides that his best choice is to remove the hinges that hold the front door in place. But to do that he will need a screwdriver, and his tools are locked up in the house. So next, he decides that he will find a hardware store and buy a new screwdriver. But upon second thought, he realizes that at 2:00 am on a Sunday morning, the chances of a hardware store being open in town are slim to none. And besides, the hardware store is five miles away in town – too far to walk with the temperature at 30 degrees – and the taxi that brought him from the airport has long since departed. What about the service station on the highway next to the turnoff into his neighborhood he wonders. Would it still be open? It takes him fifteen minutes to walk to the station only to discover that it closed at midnight. Shivering with the cold, he thinks about his next step. A car going by on the highway gives him an idea. When the next car approaches, he is standing the middle of the highway waving his arms. The car swerves to the right, and speeds away in the darkness. The next car slows down and stops, and a policeman opens the door and steps out. Fred explains his problem. “I’ve seen worse,” the officers chuckles good heartedly. “Get in and let’s get this solved.” Twenty minutes later, after Fred and the officer have replaced the hinges on the door and the police cruiser is turning the corner at the end of the block. Fred, with a small smile of triumph, opens the door and enters his house.

Rene and Alice are at their wit’s end. They have been talking – arguing really – with their son Ken for over an hour, and they were clearly getting nowhere. Ken had called earlier and asked to see them. The news he brought was not good: the bank was going to foreclose on his house unless he brought his mortgage payments up to date. There is a sense of deja vu in the room. They had had this same conversation a year ago, and the year before that. Last year they reached an agreement that they would bail out Ken one last time and Ken would not ask again. And now, here he was, back again, making the same request, Here are some questions Rene and Alice are struggling with: Should they do what they have done before and give him money? Should they insist that before they give any money, he needs to get his act together? Or should they cut him off and let him deal with the consequences” They have no idea what would be the best thing do do. Finally, Rene says. “You can just forget it. I’ve had it. No more money.” “Fine,” said Ken, “that’s just fine. And then Janet and kids will be out on the street. Do you want your grandchildren to be homeless?” “Of course not,” said Alice, almost in tears, “its just…” Rene interrupted: “It’s just you have never been able to manage money. Your make a good salary. What happened to the budget we helped you set up last year?” “O great, here we go again about the budget,“ said Ken, his voice rising and the sarcasm oozing out of his voice. “What I want to know is why you are so tight. You have loads of money.” “It’s not about the money, it’s about you learning how to be responsible and live within your means,” said Rene, his voice rising and his face getting red. Rene and Ken stare at each other for a moment. Finally, Ken says, “So, are you going to help us or not?” Rene answers quickly: “ No more money. You’ll have to figure it out yourself.” “Fine, that ’s just fine.” And with that he gets up and stalks out of the room. After a moment, Alice burst into tears. “It always ends this way,” she said, sobbing. “It always ends this way.”

Earlier we quoted John Dewey: “We only think when we are confronted with a problem.” When Fred Singles discovered that he was locked out his house, he immediately began to think of ways to solve his problem. He came up with one possibility after another, tried one, and when it failed, tried another until he came upon one what worked. His problem-solving approach fit the problem he was struggling with.

On the other hand, Rene and Alice seemed unable to get beyond the accusations, anger and frustrations of their problems with Ken. They didn’t seem able to think about it in ways that would allow them find answers that they could agree on and then work together, helping and supporting each other, to make the situation better.

The Minds We Need

Stressed out? Tense? Anxious? At your wits end? Many of us are. James Champy believes he knows why. The social and cultural revolutions that we are living though bring with them new demands that put pressure on us to see and act differently. Here is his summary:

Nothing is simple anymore. Nothing is stable.

Now, whatever we do is not enough.

Everything is in question.

Everyone must change. [19]

With such pervasive upheavals in the world around us, it is no wonder that we feel stressed and overwhelmed. Mental health experts suggest that one remedy that may help us is to practice meditation. Successful efforts to “quiet” the mind have proven to be helpful. Those who give it a try discover something surprises them. The mind has a mind of its own! It doesn’t like you messing around with what it is thinking, and your efforts to force it to think of “nothing,”and will be actively resisted. What the mind seems to want is to think of something, anything, and it doesn’t seem to matter what that is.

It seems unfair that when we choose a remedy to help us manage our stress and anxiety, we encounter a new problem that only adds stress and anxiety. By trying to reduce our emotional struggles over what is happening “out there,” we find ourselves with a new problem “in here.”

The Minds We Need for Wicked Problems

It is a truism that the present is different from the past. But given the rapidity and the pervasiveness of the changes that are occurring in our lives, this present may be more different from the past than for any other generation in history. W e find ourselves in a predicament: We prefer certainty, closure, security, and predictability, and yet find ourselves in situations where there are no final answers, no closure, little security and few predictabilities. To survive in this kind of world, let alone flourish, we need to learn new ways of thinking about what’s happening and what can be done. Here are some characteristics of the minds we need for what is coming:

Minds that are ready to revolt against their own conclusions.

Minds that are not necessarily prepared for disbelief, but for constant, graceful skepticism.

Minds that are open to any possibility, including impossibility.

Minds of democratic hospitality to other views.

Minds that are profoundly questioning, but also buoyantly hopeful.

Minds that are willing to to bring established processes, procedures and, yes people to judgement. [20]

Three Stretches for Collaboration

On January 25th, 1996, hours after the final dress rehearsal for the musical Rent, composer and creator Johnathan Larsen died of an aortic aneurysm. He was 35. Everyone involved with Rent was devastated. They had worked together for months preparing for the opening and suddenly, with Larsen’s unexpected death, everything was turned upside down. The creative team met to decide what to do, and their decision was to go ahead with the production. It was a decision that paid off: the musical received rave reviews from the critics, won a Pulitzer prize, four Tony awards, and ran for over 12 years on Broadway.

As remarkable as was the success of Rent, equally remarkable was what happened with the cast members after Larsen’s death. Before he died, they had felt connected and involved with the project. Afterwards, a new, stronger spirit of collaboration became part of their experience. Here are three comments from cast members:

“Everyone felt a degree of ownership and responsibility to do their absolute best on his behalf. It ceased being a job and became a calling.” James C. Nicola.

“Our idea was, ‘Let’s do what Jonathan wanted us to do,’ even if we couldn’t know exactly what that was.” Tim Weil.

“From that last dress rehearsal until mid-July no one missed a performance. It seemed impossible. No one could. I don’t say that to brag. I just think it showed our level of commitment. We had do it for Jonathan.” Anthony Rapp. [21]

The experience of the cast members of Rent is an example of what can be achieved if people will forget their own personal issues and direct their energies toward working together.

Collaborating with family members and close friends is often easy and, as we saw with Rent, it can lead to significant accomplishments. Collaborating with strangers, however, is another matter entirely. Since we cannot predict with any degree of accuracy their behaviors or motives, it can seem risky, even dangerous, and so we hold back.

Most difficult of all – and often impossible – is collaborating with our enemies. And yet, according to author Adam Kahane, if we are interested in any kind of progress with our most intractable problems, that is what is required. “We face the same challenges everywhere,” writes Kahane, in Collaborating with The Enemy, “…at home and work, in business and politics, on community and national issues. We are trying to get something done that we think is crucial. To do this, we need to work with…people we do not like or trust.” [22] Here we find ourselves between two alternatives, aware that collaboration is important and yet resistant to the idea. What should we do?

Stretch Collaboration

Kahane’s answer is that we must learn and practice the basic principles of what he call Stretch Collaboration, a process that requires us to move away from our unrealistic beliefs for easy agreement, harmony, and individual choices, and move toward the messy reality of disagreements, conflict, and consensus. It consists of three distinct stretches:

Stretch #1: The first stretch is “to embrace conflict and connection.” Dialogue, while important, is only part of what is needed. Understanding and then accepting the other’s view, and at the same time asserting one’s own position is also important since they make clear where the differences are between them and makes reaching agreement possible.

Stretch #2: The second stretch is to “experiment a way forward.” No one know what will work before trying it. The idea is to learn together by experimenting with different options and alternatives. When everyone can see what works and what doesn’t work, they will more willing to agree on what should come next.

Stretch #3: The third stretch is to “step into the game.” It asks us to give up the roles of observing, commenting, teaching, pontificating and preaching and become a player. Kahane summarizes this as having “less distance and autonomy, and more connection and conflict… it requires us to take the risk of engaging fully in the situation…and requires us to be willing to sacrifice some of what feels known, familiar and comfortable…” [23]

Kahane’s discussions of these three stretches is rich and rewarding and this brief review has not done justice to them. What is important for us, however, is not to master the details of the his three stretches (though that is worth doing) but become aware that the art of collaborating with our enemies is beyond the capabilities of most of us and requires that we stretch our way into it.

Common Mistakes by Square and Small Minds.

What is required for collaborating with our enemies is also true for many other kinds of problems – our minds are not up to the challenge.

Here are some examples for which, if we are to move beyond an unsatisfactory status quo, mind stretching is required:

Many believe that the answers to their perplexing questions – and the solutions to their persistent problems – are like buried treasures, hidden “out there” somewhere to be discovered. It is a profoundly misleading notion. Rather than finding a treasure at the end of our journey, answers come to us only as part of the process of searching and not at the end of it, and even then we must relinquish any claim that these answers are correct or true.

We should be able to solve our problems. If we cannot, then there must an expert who can solve them for us.

When we decide that a problem is finally solved, we can stop thinking about it.

We can depend upon our elders and our leaders to solve our problems.

Technology is the answer.

By attending seminars, reading books, or listening to guru lectures, we will learn how solve our problems.

My problem, since it is mine, must be the problem.

Problems stand alone, unconnected to other problems. When we solve one, we can move on to the next one.

These ways of thinking can be effective with tame problems, but not with wicked ones. For improving our capabilities for addressing wicked ones, we need our minds to be stretched, expanded, and enlarged, able to handle more ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity.

Fifteen Stretches for Wicked Problems

Reviewing a definition of wicked problems can help us understand why minds need to be stretched. Here is how Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, defines wicked problems:

It is hard to say what the problem is, to define it clearly, or tell where it stops and starts. Their is no “right” way to view the problem, no definitive formulation. The way it is framed will change what the solution appearsto be. Someone can always say that the problem is just a symptom of another problem and that someone will not be wrong. There are many stakeholders with their own frames, which they see as exclusively correct. Ask what the problem is and you will get a different answer from each. The problem is connected to a lot of other problems; pulling them apart is almost impossible.

It gets worse. Every wicked problemis unique, so in a sense there is no prior art, and solving one won’t helpyou with the other…The problem keeps changing on us. It never gets definitely resolved. We just run out of patience, time, or money…” [24]

Most of us, most of the time, when confronted with problems like these, feel lost and uncomfortable. Our first impulse is to pull back and move away. When we make this choice, however, things almost always get worse. What is required is for us to move toward them, then actively work to stretch our minds in ways that make us more capable of attacking them.

Here are fifteen stretches that if put into practice, can make success with wicked problems more likely:

Stretch #1: From tame problems that can be solved to wicked problems that cannot.

Is this difference important? “We would be vastly better off,” says Rosen, “if we learned to distinguish between them and regular (or ‘tame”) problems.” [25]

Stretch #2: From “solving problems” to wrestling with predicaments.

It is almost impossible to say or think “problem” without moving quickly to “solve” and “solution.” They are attached at the hip and separating them is difficult. But when the problems are wicked, separating them is what we must learn to do. Puzzles can be solved, computers can be fixed, chemistry experiments have an end, but dysfunctional families cannot be fixed nor the problems that create the dysfunction solved. The same is true for ineffective work teams, or corrupt governments. Rather than “solve,” what we are asked to do is “wrestle.”

Stretch #3: From believing that solving means solved, fixed and finished, to understanding that “solutions” for wicked problems are never permanent but are always temporary arrangements.

Stretch #4 From solvable problems to actionable problems.

While tame problems can be solved, working successfully with wicked problems requires that we transform them into actionable ones, defining them in ways that allow us to work together to improve things.

Stretch #5 From beginnings and endings to “only middles.”

In Robert Frost’s poem, “In the Home Stretch,” an older couple struggles with moving into a new home. The husband says that this will the end of the turmoil in their lives, and they can now can settle in. The wife responds,

You’re searching, Joe,
For things that don’t exist.
I mean beginnings
Ends and beginnings – there are no such things.
There are only middles.” [26]

Stretch #6: From avoiding conflict, controversies or confrontation, to welcoming and encouraging them as essential parts of the conversation.

Stretch #7: From uncovering/discovering the problem to creating it.

With wicked problems, at the beginning there is no problem “out there” for us to discover. There is only a situation that concerns us, one that we think needs to be changed. This concern becomes a problem comes as we share perceptions, observations and experiences with others about what we think isn’t working and needs to be changed. Our to these collaborate efforts, a problem slowly emerges, one that we have created by giving our concerns shape, structure and substance.

Stretch #8: From “we’re finished” to understanding that there are no stopping rules.

Without stopping rules, there is no ending. The best that can be said is, “We’ve made progress, but there is still a long way to go.”

Stretch #9: From “We’ve seen this problem before,” to accepting that each problem is unique.

An excerpt from Mark Strand’s poem “Blood Maps,” captures the essence of this idea:

“Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been before.” [27]

Stretch# 10 From a belief that we all see the problem the same way to the realization that each person in the room sees it in their own way.

For centuries, people relied on one story to explain the world, one told by kings, rulers and religions leaders. But in recent years, our minds have been stretched: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” [28]

Stretch #11 From “getting it right,” to “there is no ‘right’ to get.”

“You have your way, I have my way,” said Friedrich Nietzsche. “As to the right way, the correct way, the only way, it does not exist.” [28]

It is only when we move from “my way” and “your way” to “our way,” can we hope to work together productively .

Stretch #12: From closing the gaps to narrowing them.

When the problems are wicked, goals, while important, can never be fully reached. The gaps between the unsatisfactory present and a desirable future can be narrowed, but never completely closed.

Stretch #13 From answers and solutions that are true or false to ones that are better or best.

With wicked problems there are no true answers or correct solutions, but only some that are better than others. In his novel, The Overstory, Ricard Powers makes clear the nature of answers for important questions. “Answers need to be reinvented, over and over, from scratch.” [30]

Stretch #14 From one person – boss, parent, leader – who defines the problem and names the solution, to everyone deciding together.

It is impossible for a single person to define or describe the problem, or insist on providing a solution. One person’s perspective is limited, narrow and biased. Different perspectives are required to arrive at the definition of the problem.

Stretch #15: From Solving One Problem to Creating New Problems

In the 1990’s, scientists in Tasmania discovered that, due to facial tumor disease, Tasmanian devils were in danger of becoming extinct. In the early 2000’s they attempted to save them by sending 28 of the animals to Maria Island, which was also the home of 3000 penguins. By 2012, the number of Tasmanian devils had increased to 100 animals. The penguins had disappeared. “Every time humans have deliberately or accidentally introduced mammals to oceanic islands, there’s always the same outcome…a catastrophic impact on one or more bird species,” said Eric Woehler of Birdlife Tasmania. [31]

When you attempt to solve a problem in nature as did these scientists, or in a human system – a family, a relationship, an organization, or a community – your efforts will always create new problems. The Law of Unintended Consequences has not been repealed or abridged. Our at

Stretch #16: From a reliance upon Convergent Thinking – arriving at the correct answers by eliminating the incorrect ones – to Divergent Thinking, a process of imagining more and more possible answers and solutions.

The actual process of grappling with wicked problems is more complicated than Convergent/Divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is used to identify many options or alternatives as possible, and then, in order to choose the “best” one, switching over to convergent thinking is required. Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, described this switch as, first, “Let Chaos Reign,” followed by, ”Rein in Chaos.” [31]

Preparing to address wicked problems requires that we move from away the first word in each of the stretches and toward the second. Those who find themselves unwilling or unable to make this effort will be unprepared to think about, understand, or talk with others about the most important problems we face, and be equally unprepared to imagine what should be done to make things better.

Enemies of Stretching

Many obstacles stand in the way and block our way toward the stretching of our minds that is required for wrestling with wicked problems. Here are several of the most important:

Expert Knowledge: Becoming an expert in anything is a long slog, and those who are truly expert in a specific aspect of knowledge usually have earned the praise they receive. At the same time, when considering new ways of thinking, their advanced knowledge can be a disadvantage. “Highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded the they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident – a dangerous combination,” writes David Epstein. [32] As Buddhist teacher Shunrye Suzuki reminds us, “In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Early Successes: Mark Twain was reported to have said, “The worst thing that could happen to a young man [or a woman] is to bet on a horse at an early age and win.” Once people attribute their successes to the way they approach things, they are inclined to repeat them. “Habits of mind engrained by past successes can prevent change,” writes organization theorist Rosabeth Kanter, “and, in fact, can make people want to repeat the pleasurable past rather than question themselves and do new things in new ways.” [33] “Why change a winning game?” is a common argument. Why indeed. The reality is everything is always changing: ourselves, the times, as well as the challenges we face. Confronting new realities by relying upon old approaches and practices is a recipe for losing.

Previous Preparation: In Leadership for Sustainability: Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems, R. Bruce Hull and his colleagues argue that, “Practicing wicked leadership can be challenging if you are a technically training professional or scientific expert.” [34] And paradoxically, those who have been the most rigorously trained in one way of thinking – lawyers, engineers, and military officers are examples – struggle when asked to approach things from a different perspective. In 1914, sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave this problem a name: “Trained incapacity.” [35]

Hubris and Overconfidence: Be wary of those who insist that they are TSPR (The Smartest Person in the Room). If the topic under discussion is narrow enough, it may be true. But if the group is wrestling with a wicked problem, there are no TSPR’s: All perceptions, points-of-view, and opinions are valuable and need to be considered.

“Hardening of the Categories:” We spend the early years of our lives creating mental categories into which we place our experiences: “This is good, this is bad;” “This is useful, this is useless;” These are interesting, these are boring,” and so on. Unfortunately, many of us reach a point when we feel we have the answers, and we spend the rest of our lives living with the categories we created when we were young. And not only living in them, but, when we feel challenged, defending them as well.

Human Weaknesses: As our categories harden, we often begin to feel more settled and secure in what we know. Add this to the predicable challenges of getting older, and we often lose our interest in exploring new possibilities and discovering new ways of doing things. In short, we become satisfied with the status quo and feel that getting out of what could be seen as a rut takes too much energy. Though we may not be aware of it, we may be in trouble. “People wish to be settled,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Only as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Experiences of Mind Stretching

The body decides when it needs to stretch, and once ready, goes right ahead and stretches. It does not consult us – by “us” I mean the minds that are observing the stretch – or ask our permission, We go along, we have no inclination to resist. Stretching the mind is an entirely different proposition. Our minds show little inclination to stretch themselves – or better said, we have little inclination to stretch our minds – and in fact many of us resist all opportunities to stretch, and hold tightly to what we think and how we think it. There are exceptions to this. Often, when people take on a new challenge or responsibility – a promotion to supervisor, director or CEO, the arrival of a baby, marriage, traveling in new country – they often experience an avalanche of new experiences and ideas. Almost before they realize it, they become aware that their minds have been stretched. Some people acquire a desire for stretching that can turn into a life-long pursuit of new ideas or perspectives. And others find that after a traumatic experience – a colossal failure or betrayal by a friend. for example – they can never go back to seeing things as they did before. Others wander into an experience, or stumble into it by accident, and afterwards become aware that they see thing differently. “The first two weeks of class,” wrote Gregg, a student in Advanced Leadership in 2009, a class given over to exploring wicked problems, “I was frustrated. I didn’t see where we were headed. I was also struggling with the idea that some problems can’t be solved, only acted upon. As the course went on, I started to see the greater value in the concepts and how they fit together. I now look at that course as perhaps the most valuable of the entire program, because of the handful of takeaways that that I still use at work and in my personal relationships…”

Another example of stretching the mind is described in a letter from a reader to the editor of a journal that published an article titled “Leadership is a Wicked Problem: “I found the article about Leadership is a Wicked Problem very thought provoking and insightful. I had fallen into the trap of believing that all problems can be solve.d This article caused me to have a ‘aha’ moment.” [35]

In the final pages of, Confessions of a Philosopher, Bryan Magee summarizes his life’s experience with the philosophers who have influenced him: “All these philosophers are so good that if one reads their work with understanding, one’s outlook is never the same again, because what they have to say feeds into one’s own way of looking at things and becomes part of it, enlarges it, complicates it.” [36]

“Becoming Masters of the Situation…”

As we leave childhood and move into adolescence and then to adulthood, we share an unwritten curricula consisting of three subjects: How does the world work? How should it work? and How can I get it to work the way I want it to? Looking back at the end of our lives we may discover that each of these three questions is really the same: “How can we manage successfully the problems we face? “Life is a series of efforts to solve problems,” wrote sociologist F. G. Bailey. [38] Looking back, we will see that while the substance of these problems during our lives changed, the ones that gave us the most trouble were wicked. If we paid attention, we learned that no matter how much effort we expended on them, they never were solved nor did they disappear. All we could do was wrestle them down to the mat, and when they got up – as they always did – throw them down once again.

The implications of this struggle, continues Bailey, are profound: “We are continuously faced with alternative possibilities both between goals and strategies for achieving goals and only by making correct choices do we become masters of the situation…” If we get started with this struggle on the wrong foot, believing that they are tame when, in fact, they are wicked, then we end up mastering nothing. Our efforts will not only be fruitless but also counterproductive.

Wrestling wicked problems to the ground and then keeping them there for as long as we can requires us to be able to think clearly and speak accurately about them. We need minds that are large and flexible enough to take in their complexity, their uncertainty, their wickedness, and make them into something useful. Otherwise, our lives will be excessively limited by what our minds cannot do. “The limits of my language,” wrote philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein over 100 years ago, “are the limits of my life.” [38]

Playing “Unplayable” Music

Joseph Bentley — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 19:31:46 +0000

We are crossing the river by feeling for stones.”

W Deng Xiaoping

“We are crossing the river by feeling for stones.”

Deng Xiaoping

“To dream the impossible dream,” sings Don Quixote, as the curtain falls at the end of the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, “To fight the unbeatable foe, To bear with unbearable sorrow, To run where the brave dare not go.”

” Moving,” “Uplifting,” “Inspiring,” we say to each other at the end of the performance as we leave the theater, humming the eminently hummable melody, “The Impossible Dream.” But not all impossible dreams are acted-out on a stage by actors with fake beards and swords at the ready, and with an orchestra in the pit playing inspiring music. Most of us have had impossible dreams that at one time seemed possible, part of a future life we were seeking. It didn’t occur to at the time to think realistically and realize that they were probably impossible. When people told us to “get real, ” we ignored them. As it turned out, most our dreams were, in fact, impossible. What we lacked was the experience in a world that was not kind to impossible dreams. As we moved on with our lives, they gradually slipped away, to be replaced by the realities of struggling with our increasingly complicated and difficult lives. Now and then we would reflect upon them with a sense of having lost something that at one time had been important and that, in letting go of our impossible dreams, we had also let go of a part of our ideal self. But then we would return to the actual world in which we lived, the one that weighed us down with the minutia and tedium of our day-to-day problems: Keeping our jobs, paying off the mortgage, and doing our best to keep our marriages together and our children clothed and fed. At times we felt depressed, as if we were up against an “unbeatable foe,” and at other times we suffered what seemed to be “unbearable sorrows.” Yet because we seemed to lack the motivation or the imagination – or perhaps we had come to terms with realism – we never were able to find our way back to the excitement and what seemed like the limitless possibilities of the impossible dreams of our youth.

Kristina Brown’s Impossible Dream

Kristina Brown had an impossible dream – becoming a doctor – and in October, 2019, as she contemplated beginning of her fourth year of medical school at Yale, she felt as if she were on the brink of seeing it turn into a reality. Before she could begin the year, however, everything fell apart. She withdrew from school and went home to Colorado. Her mother, seriously ill for over 20 years with multiple sclerosis and unable to care for herself, needed her. Her “impossible dream” of becoming a doctor seemed to be over. During her first three years of medical school her sister had been her mother’s caregiver, but suddenly her sister had found a job that took her away from Colorado, and since her mother’s insurance did not cover the cost of home care, and they could not afford it’s yearly cost $80,000, they were left only one option: She would have to give up her dream of becoming a doctor and become the full-time caregiver for her mother. She notified the school registrar that she was withdrawing from school and was uncertain if or when she might return. She was caught between her dream of becoming a doctor and the necessity of taking care of her mother. A headline in the Washington Post on October 31, 2019, described what she and her sister were facing: “My family faces an impossible choice: caring for our mom, or building our future.” Rather than fulfilling her impossible dream, she now was confronted with an impossible choice. “Without help,” she wrote, “families like mine will be crushed.” Caught between the realities of insurmountable health care expenses on one hand and the reality that only she and her sister were available to stand in the gap on the other, she wrote that “my family has become numb to the sting of dreams deferred.” Her dream of becoming a doctor seemed to have vanished. What was left were the challenges of fighting the “unbeatable foe,” bearing the “unbearable sorrow,” and going where the “brave dare not go,” leaving her little hope that her impossible dream could one day become a reality.

The Attraction of the Impossible

The possibility of achieving the impossible is deeply embedded into our culture. Here is how Dogbert, a character in a Dilbert cartoon that appeared in the Sunday papers on February 7, 2021 made it a part of his medical practice:

Dogbert: “I’m Dogbert, doctor of the impossible.”

Boss: “Does that mean you cure diseases that are believed to be impossible to cure?”

Dogbert: No, that sounds boring. I prescribe treatments that are impossible to follow. When you fail and you don’t get better, you’ll think it’s your own fault.”

The enduring popularity of “Man of La Mancha” goes beyond the timeless story of an old man who rides out on a broken-down horse with a pudgy companion to right the wrongs of the world, and even beyond the compelling drama and incomparable music of its adaptation for the Broadway stage. Much of its staying power is that it led us into an exploration of things that seemed impossible. It connected to one of humankind’s most unusual yet persistent propensities: our fascination with pushing the edge of the envelope beyond the easy, the comfortable, the achievable, and getting to the edge of the abyss. What is it that impels people to go forth into battle against enemies that many consider to be unconquerable. They end up searching for ways not only to solve the impossible problems, but to go higher, faster, deeper and further than anyone else while they are working at it.

By 1942, the slogan of the United States Armed Forces had become “The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer,” a phrase that has been used again and again since at least the 18th century when a minister in the French Court of Marie Antoinette – Charles Alexandre de Calonne – in response to her request for nine hundred thousand lives to pay off some debts, said “Madam, si c’est possible, c’est fait; impossible? cela se fer” (“Madam, if a thing is possible consider it done. The impossible? That will also be done.”) In 1873, a character in a novel by Anthony Trollope repeats it. It is attributed to Lady Aberdeen in 1913 in her book, “The Anti-Alcohol Movement in Europe,” and repeated in 1925 in a speech by Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen in 1925 to the League of Nations. In 1939, philosopher George Santyana is quoted repeating it in an article in the Readers Digest. It seems clear that over the past 200 years, achieving the difficult immediately and the impossible in a little while had become embedded in the language of achieving goals.

Three Impossible Dreams

“It is always impossible until it is done,” said Nelson Mandela. Here are three examples of challenges that everyone believed to be impossible – until someone proved that everyone was wrong:

– Climbing El Capitan;

– A Four-Minute Mile;

– Running a Marathon in Less Than Two Hours.

Climbing El Capitan: From the days of its discovery in the mid-1700’s to the middle the 20th century, El Capitan, a 3000 foot, sheer granite wall that looms over what today is known as Yosemite National Park, was widely seen as impossible to climb. In 1958, George Whitmore, Warren Harding, and Wayne Merry climbed it. It took them 45 days, spread over a year and a half. “This type of climbing had not been done before,” said Whitmore. “We had to improvise as we went.” Their climb was constantly interrupted. They would reach a high point, place fixed ropes they would later use, descend for work or for school, then come back later to continue the climb.

But just because El Capitan had been climbed once, that didn’t mean that the climbers were finished with it. The challenge of Faster, Higher, Further remained. On November 9, 2020, Emily Harrington, her head bloodied and bandaged, pulled herself up over the lip of El Capitan and into the space above the monolith 21 hours, 13 minutes and 51 seconds after she began her solo attempt. She became the fourth person, and the first woman, to scale El Capitan via the Golden Gate route in under 24 hours by free-climbing it – pulling herself upward with her hands and feet and using ropes and other gear only as a safety net. In a previous attempt, Harrington suffered a brutal fall, and during her ascent in 2020, she said “There was a part of me that wants to give up, and the other part of me was like, ‘you owe it to yourself’ to keep going. And then I had one of those out-of-body experiences, like ‘I can’t believe I’m still holding on, I can’t believe I’m still holding on,’ and then I was finished with the pitch.”

Reflecting back on her experience, she thought about her impossible dream: “I never believed I could actually free climb El Cap in a day when I set the goal for myself. It didn’t seem realistic…I didn’t have the skills, fitness, or risk profile to move so quickly over such a large piece of stone. But I chose it exactly for that reason. Impossible dreams challenge us to rise above who we are and see if we can become better versions of ourselves.”

Three years earlier, June of 2017, Alex Honnold began his ascent of El Cap, a climb he thought would take him four days. He did it “free solo” – without ropes – in less than four hours. A year later, in 2018, Honnold and Tommy Caldwell set a speed record, climbing a route known as The Nose, in just under two hours.

A Four-Minute Mile: Perhaps the most well-known example of Faster, Higher and Further occurred in 1954, when Roger Bannister broke through what had been seen as an impossible barrier and ran a mile in under four minutes – 3 minutes, 59 and four tenths second to be exact. In the almost 70 years since Bannister’s feat, over 1,400 male athletes have broken the four-minute barrier for the mile, including Jim Ryun, a high school student, in 1964, and Eamon Coghlan, the first runner over 40 to achieve it. The current world record for the mile run is 3:43.13 set by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco. Perhaps all it took was one man who kept his dream alive until he achieved it to open the floodgates for hundreds more to reach it for themselves.

A Marathon in Less Than Two Hours: An elite corps of international long-distance has for years shared an impossible dream: running the marathon – the 26.2 mile race that commemorated the fabled run of the Greek soldier Pheidippides from Marathon to Athens to announce a victory – in under two hours. For years the fastest time for Marathon had been dropping steadily: from 2:58:50 in the Olympic Games of 1896; to 2:41: 22 in the 1924 Games; to 2:03:02 in the 2011 Boston Marathon; to 2:02:57 in 2014; and the world record of 2:01:39 set by Eliud Kipchoge in 2018. Yet running the marathon in under 2 hours still seemed impossible. Impossible, that is, until the group of elite runners, supported by British petrochemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliff, came together in 2019 to achieve their impossible dream. The headline in the media the morning of October 13, 2019 morning was “Eliud Kipchoge Smashes Running’s ‘Last Great Barrier’ with a Sub-2-Hour Marathon.” “Early yesterday morning,” reported the Atlantic Monthly on October 13, 2019, “in a misty park in Vienna, Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in less than two hours. His time of 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds, is the fastest any runner has ever covered the 26.2 miles. Kipchoge carved two minutes off his own world record.” It was a stunning achievement, a dramatic demonstration of the Faster, Higher and Farther ethos, and heralded by one announcer as a “Neil Armstrong moment.” It was, however a total fraud, planned and organized by those who were anxious to break what had been up to then the impossible barrier, and unable to wait for it to happen in a more natural way. It was, wrote Paul Bisceglio, a “fantasy of perfectionism,” set up from the beginning to succeed. It was run on a flat 9.6 kilometer circuit of tree-lined road, handpicked for the effort. Kipchoge was accompanied by team of pacesetters, a “murder’s row of Olympians” and other long-distance stars, who ran seven-at-a time in a wind-blocking formation devised by an expert of aerodynamics. Kipchoge wore an updated version of Nike’s controversial Vaporfly running shoes; the starting time was scheduled within an eight-day window to ensure the best possible weather. It was, wrote Bisceglio, “The greatest, fakest World Record,” ever. Actually, it was no record of any kind. The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) declined to accept it, calling it a “time trial.” Meanwhile, the real assault on the impossible dream of breaking the two-hour barrier for the marathon continued. Two weeks later an Ethiopian distance runner named Kenenisa Bekele ran a competitive marathon in two hours, one minute and 41 seconds – two seconds away from Kipchoge’s official world record.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“Let’s consider your age to begin with – How old are you?” the Queen asked Alice.

“I’m seven and a half exactly.”

“You needn’t say ‘exactually’,” the Queen remarked: I can believe without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,”she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay, you haven’t much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age. I always did it for half-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’d believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Six Impossible Things Club

Evidently there are those who side with the Queen and believe that believing impossible things is not impossible. Some have formed a club they named “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast Club” and endowed it with a simple premise: Focus on things you have wanted to do [that] over time look more and more impossible..and start believing in them. Alas, a cursory examination of the lists of “Six Things” that Club members posted, failed to find a single one that actually was impossible. (Example: “Get that book written and published!”)

And yet the attraction of the impossible dream continues. In an essay titled “Six Impossible Things” published by the Princeton University Press, science book editor Ingrid Gnerlick lists her six impossible things she has come to believe before breakfast:

1. A woman can be successful in a man’s world;

2. Scientists can write books;

3. Anyone can write a book;

4. Publishers can make a difference;

5. You can write a book;

6. There is no problem that a book cannot solve.

While the first five on her list are not literally impossible – she is, after all, an example of being successful in a man’s world of scientific publishing. The last one, however, is impossible. While she may believe otherwise, it is clear that there are many problems that books can’t solve – the wicked problems we face in the world are, after all, insoluble – and throwing a book at them offers no consolation. Writing and publishing books won’t solve any problems except improve the finances of those who write and publish them. Someone has to read the books, and then apply what they have learned to an actual problem before any “solving” can happen.

Three Composers and Their Impossible Music

Three musical composers evolved in their musical careers toward complexity until they arrived at music that even they doubted that anyone could play. Krzyszotof Pendrerecki, regarded as Poland’s pre-eminent composer for more than half a century, produced dozens of compositions he cheerfully described as “being almost impossible to play.” Early in his career he was widely know for his choral compositions with their massive tone clusters and their disregard for melody and harmony which even he eventually pronounced as “more destructive than constructive” forms of music. His 1960 composition, “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” produced a score that looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation. It forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation.

While Pendrerecki continued to hope that his compositions would be performed, the same was not true of Noah Creshevsky. Early in his career, he decided that his music – “hyperrealism” he called it – was never to be performed live. “We live in a…densely and information-rich hyperrealist…world,” that he believed could only be represented by “wild juxtapositions and fantastical distortions.”

While Pendrerecki and Creshevsky were less than forthcoming about why they would want to write music that no one could play, Brian Ferneyhough was clear. “I didn’t set out to write difficult music,” he said recently. And yet, according to one critic, “His works are the ne plus ultra of musical complexity, in the sense of notational overload, performing difficulty and even philosophical questioning.” Matthias Kriesbert, writing in the New York Times, said “His scores are not for sight-reading; in fact they might induce vertigo in an unwary player. A typical measure presents calibrations of intonations and rhythm, a broad spectrum of registers, dynamics and modes of articulation, detailed phrasing instructions and a smattering of grace notes, all within a few seconds.” It is,” another critic said, “like a film run though at ten times the proper speed.”

Ferneyhough was not seeking to write music that was impossible to play. Rather, “I was interested in music that mediates between the notated score and the listening experience, between our perception of time and a sense of pulse, between our inner self and the world outside.” He was interested in music that “occupies the space between the score and the performer, and between the performer and the listener, between our inner self and the world outside.” Since “we are always in motion, in flux,” he wrote, “in a torrent of self-transformation…music has to reflect this unfixedness.” Actually, with this music, musicians are not expected to perform the notes as written. Rather, Ferneyhough saw a performance as “the start of a dialogue, with the possibilities of what the performer is going to do with the piece and what the listeners will hear.”

The Impossible Task of Playing Unplayable Music

Imagine that you read in the paper that there is a concert tonight by the Dire Straits Quartet playing the music of British composer Brian Ferneyhough. You have long been interested in the avant-garde music and you have heard that Ferneyhough has the reputation of composing music that is interesting. You and your partner decide to attend.

Once in your seats, you open the program and read, “What you will see and hear in this concert are among the world’s most virtuosic musicians pushing themselves to the boundaries of what they can do – and sometimes beyond.”

This is followed by several intriguing quotes from musicians who have performed this music before:

“The music is strangely liberating. It changes the concept of what it means to master a phrase, for there is an infinite depth to perfection.” Mark Menzies
“The music makes an unconditional demand on the performer.” Anthony Burr.
“It produces a psychological effect on the player that creates an ecstatic energy.” Rand Steiger

You lean over to your partner and say, “This is really weird.”

Just then a tall man in a back tuxedo appears and addresses the audience: “Good evening, I am Francis Rucker, 1st violinist of the Dire Straits Quartet, and I am very pleased to welcome you to tonight’s concert. As you know, we are playing three string quartets of Brian Ferneyhough. While you may already know this, his music is widely considered to be unplayable. And we who are about to try and play it, agree. It is ‘unplayable in the sense that no one can play what the composer has written on the page. You may be wondering, “if the music can’t be played as written, why even try?” The answer to your question, may sound strange: What we play at each performance is not Ferneyhough’s music any more. Once it was written, he turned it over to us and said, in effect, “Here, see what you can do with this.” And at that moment, it stopped being just his music and became ours as well. Each time we play it, we are making music that has never been heard before, nor will it ever be heard again. It is a new, challenging, frustrating, rewarding, exiting adventure, and when we begin, we have no idea where we will end up. We have come to relish this challenge. We have learned that there is something wonderful about doing one’s best to do something that is impossible

And one more thing for you to think about before we begin: Ferneyhough wrote this music, then gave it to us to play as best we could. As we perform it tonight, we pass it to you. We hope you will take what we offer, make it your own and participate in the process of creating something that no one has ever heard before.

Thank you for your attention, and I hope you enjoy the concert.”

Unplayable Music as a Metaphor for Wicked Problems

What’s going on here? Musicians doing their best to play music that is impossible to play? And relishing it? If they were to describe their predicament, they might say something like, “We understand what it is to try and play music that is unplayable. But when we try, something wonderful happens: We begin with what’s on the page, but soon we are improvising, simplifying, ignoring this and emphasizing that, discovering new possibilities that the composer may never thought about. We are becoming the “owners” of this new music we are creating together with the composer.

“A Music so demanding That Is Sets You Free,” says The New York Times in the headline of an article about Forneyhough’s music. And the musicians who have done their best to play this music would probably describe this freedom as “wonderful” and “awful” at the same time.

The Dire Straits Quartet doesn’t exist, of course, but the dilemma they faced does. Their choice was to play music that was impossible to play as written, but played it anyway, doing the best that they could, and fully aware that the music they produced was unique and could never be played again. This dilemma is one we face many times during our lives. It is, in a real sense, The Human Condition. From our earliest days on earth, we are given “music” to play we have not seen before, music that others believe we should be able to play. It takes a while for us to realize that it is impossible to play the music as written. What others expect of us is, ultimately, beyond us. In an earlier chapter we quoted German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on doing the impossible: “It is characteristic of being human that human beings are presented with tasks that are too difficult for them, without having the option of avoiding them because of the difficulty.”

What Sloterdijk leaves out is that even if the tasks that are presented to us are too difficult for us to achieve, we still must take them on, moving forward, figuring it out as we go, and doing the best that we can. At some point, most of us begin to question whether the music that we are given to play is music that we want to play. Some of us plunge ahead, making every effort to follow the paths laid out for us while struggling to keep some sense of individuality. Other take a detour from the expectations of family, religion, and society, leave the path that was planned out for them, and venture out into an unmapped and uncharted wilderness. Most eventually realize that it is tough going out there for very long. Eventually, as the weight of making a living makes itself known to us, most of find our way back to the paths that society expected us to follow. We get a hair cut, give up the Goth costumes, work to get our tattoos erased, join the military or get back into school, and move on with our lives.

Shifting the Paradigm: The Challenge of Wicked Problems

In Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, 13-year old Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus, a question: “When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like a picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come togehter again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?”

“No” Sepimus answers.

“Well I do,” continues Thomasina. “You cannot stir things apart.”

Thomasina’s discovery that “You cannot stir things apart,” goes beyond stirring jam into rice pudding: no matter how much we would like to make some things happen, many are impossible.

And yet, as we noted earlier, there is an attractiveness in attempting the impossible. Say that no one can climb the face of El Capitan, and people will try. Say that it is impossible to run a mile in under 4 minutes, and someone will do it. Say that it is impossible to run a marathon in under 2 minutes and people will make it happen. Higher, Faster, and Further. Many people live their lives in pursuit of an impossible dream.

When it comes to wicked problems, however, impossible wins. For them, there is no “solving” in the same way that there is no unmixing the jam in the rice pudding, and no way to play Forneyhough’s music the way it was written. It’s not possible. Atul Gawande, professor at the Harvard Medical School, in an article in The New Yorker in which he named health care as among our most difficult problems, gave us a clue. “Wicked problems,”he wrote, ” are messy, ill-defined, more complex that we can fully grasp, and open to multiple interpretations based upon one’s point of view. No solution to a wicked problem is ever permanent or fully satisfying.” One of the reasons that wicked problems cannot be solved is that people see them and understand them from their own perspective. In a sense, at least in the beginning, there are as many problems as there are people in the room.

For wicked problems, the problem of impossibility lies in the definition. As we learned in an earlier chapter, an important aspect of of wicked problems is that there are no stopping rules. Governments can never be perfected, families never arrive at a stage where there are no problems left to work on, organizations are in constant need of improvements, marriages always need work. When things are improving, the best we can say is, “We have made progress, but there is still a long way to go,” and when they not improving, what we can say is “things seem to be going downhill; we need to try harder, or try differently.” Solutions may be available for problems that can be finished but not for those for which no rules for stopping are available. For them the work goes on.

There are other elements in the definition of wicked problems that make solving them impossible. For, example, for wicked problems there are no “true” or “correct” solutions. Rather, what we may call a “solution” is actually a temporary arrangement that is the “best” we can come up. Later, when we revisit the problem, we may discover an even better “solution” that we didn’t think of before.

Among the many challenges for those who work on wicked problems – which means all of us – letting go of the traditional views of “solve” and “solution” is the most difficult. They are words that we turn to often, perhaps hundreds of times a day, and words that we need for our conversations with others about the problems we face. There are substitutes that are more accurate. For “solve,” we can use grappling, tackling, wrestling, addressing, and managing. For “solution,” the best alternative is “action plan.”

Just because wicked problems cannot be solved, doesn’t mean that people won’t promise solve to them. In the past several decades, hundreds and hundreds of people have adopted the term “wicked problem” as a label for the challenges they are facing. Scores of books have been published, dozens of articles have appeared, and universities and institutes all over the world have offered seminars and created undergraduate and graduate degrees to prepare students to address wicked problems. Unfortunately, deliberately or unintentionally, most make the mistake of claiming that their students will learn to “solve” wicked problems. In an article published in the Florida State University News on February, 2021, a university vice president wrote, “Our faculty are doing amazing things…their contributions are…critical to solving the ‘wicked’ problems of today and will be even more important in tomorrow’s challenges.” Another example is Leadership for Sustainability: Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems, by R. Bruce Hill and colleagues, and published in 2020. Their sub-title is encouraging: “Strategies for Tackling Wicked Problems.” But open to page 1 and you will discover that they veer off-track at once. “Wicked problems are extraordinarily difficult to define,” they write, “and even more difficult to solve.” Difficult to solve? Actually, impossible. “Traditional problem-solving tools,” they continue, “such as technology, expertise, rationality and authority are not up to the task.” The overall approach they take only makes things worse. “Solving wicked problems requires three sets of leadership skills and practice…the abilities to connect, collaborate, and adapt.” While the applications of skills and practices for connecting, collaborating, and adapting can be helpful, at the end of the day the wicked problems remain. While things may have been improved for the better, the problems themselves have not been solved, fixed, or finished.

Two questions: “Is playing unplayable music impossible?” and “Is solving wicked problems impossible?” The answer both is, of course, yes, as long as we attempt to play the music as written. But when we understand, and then accept, the the only way to play unplayable music – and wrestle with wicked problems – is to give up “solve,” and move forward with “Doing our best.” Then what is impossible changes into something else – something that we can manage.

If Not “Solve,” Then What?

In Collaborating with the Enemy, Adam Kahane recounts a story he heard while helping mediate differences between groups in South Africa:

“Faced with our country’s overwhelming problems, we have two options: a practical option and a miraculous one. The practical option is for all of us to get down on our knees and pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and solve all of our problems. The miraculous option is that we work things through together.”

When our problems are wicked, we can expect no band of angels to come down from heaven and solve them. They can only be worked on in the same way that the Dire Quartet played the unplayable music: They picked up their bows, tucked their instruments under their respective chins (except the cello player) and started to play.

Getting ready to play is also important. The first challenge is to understand the problem, and for this, and for everything else that follows, we need all the members of the team to help. Given the fact, as Gawande noted above, that wicked problems are open to multiple interpretations depending upon a person’s point of view, we need the other people who share our concerns to share their perception of what it is that needs to be changed. Once we have defined the problem, our task shifts from Understanding to Doing. We work together to decide what needs to be done in order to make things better. When we have a plan we can support, our next challenge is to implement it. And when we have made ou first try at implementation, we are not finished. When the problems are wicked, no matter what we come up with, there is no solving, fixing, or finishing. Even our best “solutions” are temporary arrangement that may improve things in the short run, can never be expected to solve them into the future. They must be revisited from time to time to see what needs to be added to or subtracted from the procedures and processes that we earlier put in place.

What we cannot do, and should not do, is promise to solve them. We need to give up the idea of “solving” and concentrate on “tackling, struggling, addressing, or managing,” fully aware all the while that there is no finish line. For wicked problems, the Impossible Dream changes from achieving it, to finding the best plan we can agree on and then work together to implement it.

We Are Crossing the River by Feeling for Stones

Deng Xiapeng, former leader of the Chinese Communist Party, used a memorable image to describe how the Party planned to make its transition from a Command and Control economy, to a socialist market economy: “We are crossing the river by feeling for stones.”

When confronted with wicked problems, our choice is the same as the Chinese Government, and the same as the Dire Straits Quartet when they play Forneyhough’s unplayable music: Learn as much as possible about what is coming; carefully organize the resources available; find other people who are willing to help, then carefully and cautiously step out into the river, feeling for a stone that offers solid footing, then feeling for the next, and the next one after that, making our way together until we reach the other side of the river. And still we are not finished. Nelson Mandela, on the last page of his autobiography, makes it clear that there is always more to do:

“I have walked the long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter. I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered that after climbing a long hill, one only finds that there are more hills to climb. I have taken a moment to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vistas that surround me, to back on the distance that I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”

“Life in the Messy Middle”

Joseph Bentley — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 19:14:08 +0000

“Our Covid-19 polarization will only get worse. We need to find a balance.”

Gary Abernathy [1]

“The balancing of individual liberty and public health may be among the most contentious issue in American life.”

Dhruv Khullar [2]

“Her genius was to find that balance.”

H. Resit Akcakaya, about Georgina Mace [3]

We live in troubled – and troubling- times, yet it is clear that we are not the first nor will we be the last generation to sense this. All times are new those who live in them, and, uncharted as they are, they are unpredictable and often surprising. Each comes with its own variety of troubles. Yet modern times seem to bring a different order of troubles. “Each day things get just a little more complex,” wrote Bill Dauphinais and his colleagues in 1996. “Each day there are new contradictions. Each day new paradoxes emerge. Each day edges forward what feels more like chaos.” [4] More complexity, new contradictions, new paradoxes, more chaos. Since they wrote these words in the 1990’s, no evidence has emerged that suggests that the times have shifted into reverse, from complex to simple, from chaotic to orderly, from contradictory to consensual.

What are we to do? Over a hundred years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. offered a suggestion: “I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations – one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it – you will regret both.” [5] While Holmes’ tone was ironic, he was on to something. When we are facing a choice, no matter which of the alternatives we choose, the consequences that follow that choice must be addressed. And, face-to-face with the contractions, complexities and paradoxes of our lives, and uncertain of the consequences of choosing one alternative over the other, we hesitate to decide. And so, a new challenge: “We must all face something for which we have…not been [prepared:] life in the messy middle,” insist Dauphinais and his associates in The Paradox Principles. [6]

What Is Required to Succeed in “Messy Middle?”

Begin with courage.

Courage is a word we know well and use often, usually to praise the actions of individuals who, when confronted with danger, go beyond what is expected of them. It made its appearance early in our lives when we were frightened, and our parents reassured us and told us to be brave. It was at the center of the stories they read to us at bedtime. It continued to appear in the books and movies we enjoyed as teenagers and young adults. As we grew older, courage became less obvious, often appearing as context in the books, movies and plays that we enjoyed. Through all this, we learned that society values courage, and when people act courageously, they are honored and held up as examples to be emulated.

Courage is defined in the dictionary as “a quality of spirit that allows you to face danger or pain without showing fear.” This does not suggest that courageous people do not feel fear, only that they do not show it. Most of daily life does not require courage. It is held in reserve and only makes an appearance when we contemplate taking actions that challenge us and, at the same time, generate fear. Among the questions that brings courage to life is some variation of, “Who is the person who will confront evil and defend and protect loved ones, the community, or the nation?”

A Poet’s Courage

Philip Booth’s poem, “Sixty-Three,” begins with a question:

“Man I thought I knew well,
feeling his age, asked me
outright, What do you believe?…

I thought of my daughter
in her hard time;

“I know,” I said, “without love
there is no music. No music left
to lift hard weathers, to lend
old courage its greatest gift;
to keep believing in love. [7]

Love comes, says the poet, and fosters the music that sustains the courage to keep believing in love. It is all of a piece, and courage is the core.

Aristotle’s “Desirable Middle”

Understanding courage is complicated. The dictionary defines it as facing danger while not showing fear, while the poet believes it is courage the makes possible the human experience of expressing and receiving love. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, approaches it from a different perspective. Fear is peripheral to courage, and love plays no part. He begins by identifying courage as one of the four cardinal virtues – the other three are prudence, temperance and justice – and, according to the New World Encyclopedia, proposes that all virtues, including courage, exist as a desirable middle between two extremes, one being excess and the other deficiency. Aristotle’s view of courage, then, is a balance between two extremes: recklessness on the one hand and cowardice on the other. Before taking action, a courageous person decides that what she is about to do is worth doing and not just a reckless impulse. And while she may feel fear, she does not give in to it as a reason for choosing not to act.

Decisions at the Center

Making decisions is at the center of much of what we do day-in and day-out. Former Dupont CEO Chad Holliday once remarked “Dupont has over six thousand managers, each of whom must make four or five decisions a day.” [8] If they make four decisions, then every day they will make 24,000 decisions; if five, then their combined total will be 30,000. Clearly, at least from Holliday’s perspective, decision making in Dupont is huge!

Holliday’s frame of reference for the thousands of decisions made each day at Dupont was undoubtedly “Decisions that are part of working at Dupont.” Once we pull back from the business setting, however, the total number of decisions made by any one individual in a day will be significantly larger, perhaps by a factor of 200 or so.

Actually, trying to estimate the number of decisions that a person makes in a day is a fool’s errand: Almost everything we do involves making a decision. “Shall I have eggs or cereal for breakfast?” “Should I choose the brown suit or the blue one?” “Should I take the freeway or the back roads?” “Is today the day to bring up the human resource problem in the meeting or wait until next week?” “Which is best, supporting John or Peter.” We can’t get through fifteen minutes without making a number of decisions,

Most of the decisions we make are trivial, quickly made and easily forgotten. Usually, we are unaware that we are making a decision. They blend in easily with the normal flow of everyday life. It is only when decisions are difficult and suggest the possibility of serious consequences that may follow if we make a bad one, that our attention is aroused. Sociologist F. G. Bailey’s perspective is helpful: “Life is a series of problems. We are continuously faced with alternative possibilities, both between goals and strategies for achieving goals, and only by making the correct choices do we become masters of the situation and of our own destinies.” [9] The advantage lies, not in choosing, but in making the correct choice. And with this, a new problem: We believe that any decision we are about to make is the “correct choice.” Otherwise, we would not make it. It is only later, with the benefit of hindsight, that we can know if it was good or bad.

Decisions Begin as Problems

Decisions do not appear fully formed and waiting for us to choose. Making a decision requires a structure which, once in place, makes choosing possible. This structure begins – or should begin – with the awareness that all decisions have their roots in problems. Someone decides that something isn’t working as it should, or that the performance of an individual, a team or an organization falls short of expectations, or someone is experiencing distress. What we end up calling a problem, then, begins as a signal that something needs our attention. And this leads to more decisions: what should be done and who should do it? Rushing to make changes based upon an emerging awareness that something needs to be done is a mistake and usually makes things worse. Nothing should happen until there is a clear understanding of what the problem actually is, why it is a problem, and and who wants to see changes made.

When important decisions are being considered that affect our relationships, our careers, and our lives, the problems that lie behind the decisions need to be identified and defined before any decisions are made to make things better.

In summary, then, good decisions must begin at the beginning: what is the problem that needs to be addressed the requires a decision? Until that question has an answer that those involved can agree with, there is little that can be done except complain, whine, or blame others, behaviors that inevitably create a set of new problems. Being worried, upset, or angry can serve as the beginnings of a problem, but until they fit into the framework of a problem – what is the problem and what should be done about it – they are not yet problems. When someone says, “I have a problem, I’m really worried,” it is important to remember that being worried is not a problem.

Good Decisions Require Good Alternatives.

An individual or group making a choice between two or more alternatives is the sine qua non of a decision. As we suggested earlier, however, not all decisions are good decisions. For them to be good, two conditions, among others, need to be addressed: the problem that is the source of the discomfort or misunderstanding, and that is driving the decision forward, must be identified and defined; and two or more viable options need to be in place which permit a choice. If you wish to buy a shirt, and all of the shirts for sale are blue, then no decision about color is required.

Choosing one of two alternatives is often described as an Either/Or decision. In a later chapter in this book -“Huck Finn Messes With Mr. In-between” – we describe Huckleberry’s predicament: send a letter to Miss Watson informing her where she can find Jim, her escaped slave who has floated on a raft down the Mississippi with Huck, or forget Miss Watson and continue to help Jim escape. He must choose one or the other, but cannot choose both.

Other decisions have a different structure. For Both/And decisions, rather than choose one of two alternatives, the decision maker is expected to choose both at the same time. As we shall see, struggling with Both/And decisions makes the process of decision making much more complicated.

An example of a Both/And decision was discussed in CEO Daily, a newsletter authored by Alan Murray. In the November 12, 2020 edition, Murray quotes Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM: “Purpose and profit go together, reinforcing each other. I’d actually argue if you don’t have a purpose as a company, you will be less successful from a results perspective.” [1o] Leadership in business, then, involves making money and defining a purpose for the organization that goes beyond profits. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, quotes a twenty-something who said that his generation, “requires a whole new way of leading…We demand that our leaders not only provide direction, but they also tell us why. And it needs to be a ‘why’ that’s much more than maximizing profits for shareholders.” [11]

Either/Or Decisions Can Be Difficult. Both/And Decisions Are Worse

“The way of paradoxes is the way of truth.”

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Playwright, Toast of London, Convict

Some decisions are easy and require little effort. Others can be difficult, especially when the two choices in an Either/Or decision are equally attractive or unattractive. Even more difficult, however, are the Both/And decisions. They are often framed as paradoxes, statements or propositions that are seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense, yet, upon a deeper examination, may contain more complicated levels of truth. Examples of paradoxical demands for leaders and managers in business organization are listed in Rosabeth Kanter’s When Giants Learn to Dance and identified as the “The new game” in business:

– “Be entrepreneurial and take risks, [and] don’t cost the business
anything by failing.”

– “Continue to do everything you’re currently doing even better [and]
spend more time communicating with employees, serving on teams,
and launching new projects.”

– “Know every detail of your business [and] delegate more responsibility to others.”

– “Speak up, be a leader, set the direction [and] be participative, listen well,
cooperate.”

– Communicate a sense of urgency and push for faster execution, faster results
[and] take more time of deliberately planner the future.”

– “Succeed, succeed, succeed [and] raise terrific children.” [12]

Another set of problems that require Both/And decisions is reported to be on the office wall of every leader and manager of Lego, the Danish toy maker. Here are several examples:

“Every manager in Lego Systems, Inc., should be able to:

– Build close relationships – and keep a suitable distance.

– Trust one’s staff – and keep an eye on what is happening.

– Freely express your own point of view – and be diplomatic.

– Be dynamic – and be reflexive.

– Be sure of yourself – and be humble.

– Be able to lead – and hold oneself in the background.” [13]

Neither list of demands offer the manager the opportunity to choose one or the other, but clearly expect that both goals will be met. While Kanter’s are abstractions distilled from interviews with leaders, the Lego list can be seen as a set of directives: guidelines, norms, expectations or, depending upon how seriously they are taken, rules. Yet how managers are supposed to go about achieving both goals at the same time is not made clear. Success in achieving any one of these directives can be daunting. “Be able to lead,” for example, is sufficiently vague and ambiguous that leaders could argue that almost anything that they do is evidence of their ability to lead. Adding its opposite side – “and hold oneself in the background” – complicates things and can make any attempt to do at the same time seem to be impossible. In her book, Kanter acknowledges the difficulties involved. After listing the 11 paradoxical demands that business leaders must address, she adds this disclaimer: “These demands come from every part of business and personal life, and they increasingly seem incompatible and impossible.” [14] Yet incompatible or not, they also seem to be part of how things are expected to be accomplished. In The Age of Paradox, Charles Handy makes the case that no matter how fervently we wish that these paradoxes would vanish, they are here to stay: “Paradoxes I now see to be inevitable, endemic and perpetual. [We] can and should reduce the starkness of some of the contradictions, minimize the inconsistencies, understand the puzzles in the paradox, but [we] cannot make them disappear, solve them completely, or escape from them.” [15]

The Friedman Doctrine and the Business Roundtable

Most personal and organizational goals are singular. A problem is identified, followed by setting a goal, and then choosing actions that will achieve the goal and “solve” the problem. Changing times, however, bring changing expectations; increasingly, as we have seen, in order to solve a problem, some goals become plural. People are expected – or required – to achieve two or more seemingly competing goals at the same time.

In 1970, economist Milton Friedman published an essay in the New York Times titled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility for Business is to Increase Its Profits.” His argument was that a company has no social responsibility to it’s employees, the public, or to society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders. In other words, the purpose of business is to make money for those who own shares. “Insofar as [a business executive’s] actions in accord with his ‘social responsibility’ reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money,” he argued. He ended his essay by stating, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…” [16]

The Friedman Doctrine – known as Shareholder theory – has had a significant impact in the corporate world. In 2016, The Economist called it “the biggest idea in business,” adding, “today shareholder value rules business.” [17] In 2017, Harvard professors Joseph Bowers and Lynn Paine wrote that “it is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights…” [18]

For CEO’s, the Friedman Doctrine served to reinforce a traditional goal: make money. In 1997, the Business Roundtable, the most powerful lobbying group for big business, adopted Stockholder Theory as a company’s driving purpose: “The paramount duty of management and boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders.” [19]

Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century and everything has changed. In August, 2019 the same Business Roundtable published a new manifesto:

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:

– Delivering value to our customers.

– Investing in our employees…We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.

– Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers.

– Supporting the communities in which we work.

– Protect[ing] the environment.

– Generating long-term value for shareholders.” [20]

“It’s time for a new kind of capitalism,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, and a member of the Business Roundtable, “stakeholder capitalism, which recognizes that our companies have a responsibility to all our stakeholders. Yes, that includes shareholders, but also our employees, customers, communities and the planet.” [21] Howard Schultz, emeritus chairman of Starbucks, made clear that this new kind of capitalism is Both/And: “We wish to be an economic, intellectual and social asset in the communities where we operate,” he wrote in 2020. “We would do this not at the expense of profits, but to grow them.” [22]

Balancing and Navigating

For business leaders to move from a single, predominant goal to the new challenge of addressing six goals at the same time – delivering value, investing in employees, dealing ethically with suppliers, supporting the local communities, protecting the environment, and generating profits for shareholders – is not only an abrupt and dramatic shift from the classic Either/Or, to Both/And ” (and in this case to “Six/And”), it is an uncharted, in-between land for most leaders of business organizations. Fully aware of the challenges of confronting an altered landscape, BSG CEO Rich Lessor makes a case for balancing the demands and navigating the in-between space: “For CEO’s right now, the challenge is how does one convey a sense of community and humanity…when there is so much disgust and division. That’s the balance many of us are trying to navigate right now.” [23]

Struggling in The In-Between

While balancing the competing demands of Both/And goals, and navigating the space between competing demands, is difficult is all aspects of life – life choices, personal relationships, and organizational and business decisions – it is the political arena that offers us the most dramatic examples. In the weeks following the 2020 presidential elections, most of the nation was gripped by the question, “He lost. When will he admit it and leave?” For Vice-President Pence, the question went beyond politics and became personal. His dilemma was painfully clear: While it is widely believed that Pence plans to run for president in 2024, he can’t move until he learns what Mr. Trump is planning. A headline in The New York Times on November 12th, captured Pence’s dilemma: “Pence Tries to Balance His Loyalty to Trump Vs. His Own Political Path.” [24] For Pence, serious balancing and navigating is required.

Other politicians face similar challenges. Another headline in The New York Times two weeks after the election was decided reveals the dilemma of many Republican politicians: “Many G.O.P. Governors Avoid Stating Plainly That Biden Won,” it read. They seemed willing to admit it privately, but in the public arena they were faced with the complicating factor that most of their constituents voted for Trump, and Trump continued to insist that he had won the election. “Most were operating in the murky middle ground in which they neither gave full credence to the president’s claims of fraud nor affirmed Joe Biden’s victory.” [25]

Here are some other examples of people struggling in the “murky middle ground:”

Between a Rock and a Hard Place in Montana: On July 15, 2020, Steve Bullock, Governor of Montana issued a directive requiring face covering at indoor public spaces and at large public gatherings. Small business owners in Hamilton, Montana – Nicki Ramsier, owner of the River Rising Bakery, Randy Lint, owner of the Big Creek Coffee Roasters, and Shawn Wathen, co-owner of Chapter One Book store – were relieved. “The Governor’s order was supposed to handle [the mask problem] for us so that we could focus on staying open as a business, right”? added co-owner Mara Lynn Luther.

Wrong. The sheriff in Hamilton, backed up by the Ravalli County commissioners, chose not to enforce the order, saying individual rights took priority. “That decision left small business owners stuck in the middle of a monthslong national conflict over mask wearing,” wrote Amy Haimerl in The New York Times on October 23, 2020, “as they try to keep staff safe and their doors open without alienating customers.” But many customers were alienated. After Ms. Ramsier of the River Rising Bakery decided that her staff would wear masks, several customers berated them. One customer told a member of the staff that she was“bending the knee to tyranny.” The in-between dilemma with which the owners struggled was summarized by one of the owners of the bakery: “At one level, I feel like I should push for more masks,” he said. “But on the other side, I feel like, at what cost? For us to survive, we need everyone as customers.”

Michele DeGroot and her daughter, Marlena, owners of Big Sky Candy, made their decision. They took down the “masks required” sign and replaced it with this:

“BASICALLY
It’s up to you.
You do what you feel is right
for you. We will not judge you.
The rest of the world
does enough judging. We
don’t need that here. We love
each and every one of you.” [26]

Between “Truth” and “Truthiness:” The play, The Lifespan of a Fact, begins with an email projected on a scrim curtain from a magazine editor asking for a volunteer to fact-check a recently submitted, non-fiction article about a boy’s suicide in Las Vegas, and ends with the three characters in the play – John D’Agata, Jim Fingal and Emily Penrose – sitting on a couch facing the audience. Penrose, the editor is in the middle, Fingal, the fact-checker, on the left and D’Agata, the author, on the right. They look out at the audience, a mixture of frustration, resignation, and anger on their faces. The 90 minutes in between are filled with a titanic struggle between Fingal and D’Agata, managed and refereed by Penrose.

From a 15-page article submitted by the author, Jim, the fact-checker produced a 130-page spreadsheet containing hundreds of exaggerations, misstatement and what can only be called lies. John, the author of the essay, however, dismisses the concerns of the fact-checker. “I’m not interested in accuracy, “ he says, “I’m interested in truth,” What he means is not the “truth” as seen by the fact-checker, which has everything to do with accuracy, but what he refers to as a”higher truth” – the “music” and the meaning of the boy’s tragic death.

Here is an example of where they disagree: In the first sentence of the essay, the author mentions that there were, “thirty-four licensed strip clubs in Vegas.” When the fact-checker discovers that, in fact, there were only thirty-one, the author replies, “…the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in the sentence that ‘thirty-one,’ and so I changed it.”

And here is another: D’Agata writes that the boy “jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel at 6:01:43, hitting the ground at 6:01:52.” The fact-checker counters with different numbers. “According to the Coroner’s Report, Levi Presely’s fall supposedly took only eight seconds, not nine. So the actual time frame would be more like 6:01:43 – 6:01:51.” D’Agata response was “Yeah, I fudged that. I needed him to fall for nine seconds rather than eight in order to help make some of the later themes in the essay work.”

At the end of the play, the three characters, having spent the night struggling to decide which facts of the boy’s suicide they should accept and which they should reject, await the decision of the editor to publish the revised article or cut it. Their positions on the couch represent not only the issues of the play they struggled with, but also the realities of many of our struggles to make decisions: The fact-checker at one end who stands for a fact-based version of truth; the author at the other end who insists that what is important is creating a powerful story even if it means using literary and artistic freedoms to embellish and even modify the facts; and the editor in the middle, the problem solver, who has struggled all night in the “murky middle ground” of the wicked problem of trying to find an acceptable way forward between the two. [27]

Finding a Balance

URGENT! SUBTLE! CONCISE! ROBUST!
Words posted on a studio wall of artist Lucian Freud. [28]

A headline in the Washington Post on November 18 identified the problem: “Our covid-19 polarization will only get worse. We need to find a balance.” The story that followed was not about the recent spike in Covid-19 cases that the country is struggling with, but about the differences of opinions between two groups of people: those who insist that the only way forward is to increase the use of masking, hand washing, social distancing and, unless the curve begins to flatten out once again, closing down schools and businesses, and those who have decided not to follow these instructions and take their chances. “Most Americans who chafe at covid-19 restrictions understand science,” says the author of the article, Gary Abernathy, “but not everyone worships at its altar. They balance the science with other lived principles such as faith, family, and freedom.” The serious problem of the pandemic has, for a number of reasons, divided itself into two: A divide in the county between those who believe that urgent and wide-spread action is needed to stop the virus from spreading, and those who resist the idea of buckling under to restrictions imposed by governments. “The disagreements are heartfelt,” says Abernathy. “Finding a balance that everyone will accept will require respect and compromise – two things in short supply in the United States right now…”

Skilled Navigators

Most problems are singular in nature. We define a goal, make a plan to reach it. and then begin to organize, and mobilize in order to implement the plan. When two or more goals are involved, things become more complicated. Is one goal more important that the other? If we focus on one, is there a risk of losing sight of the other? Do we have people available who are experience and skillful in reaching both goals? What does it mean to be in the space in-between the two goals?

In these “In-between” territories, two words appear regularly: balance and naviatge. Earlier we quoted BCG’s CEO Rich Lessor’s rhetorical question: “the challenge is how do you convey a sense of community and humanity,” as well as make money, is a “…Balance many of us are trying to navigate right now.”

Between Patience and Pressure: In 1958, Fred Hills, a graduate student in English at Stanford, was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco and came across a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita. He read the first sentence and, according to his obituary published on November on 20th in The New York Times, “was so electrified that he paid the full price of $5 for the book.” Hills always remembered that first encounter with Nabokov with great fondness. Later, astonishment was added in as Hill became Nabokov’s editor at Simon and Schuster, editing half-dozen of his books and Nobokov’s original screenplay for Lolita, which he reduced from nine hours to two. In 1974, Hills found himself in Zermatt working with Nabokov on his last novel, Look at the Harlequins and, during breaks, hunting butterflies with him in the foothills of the Alps. His admiration for Nabokov never waned. “Having worked with many other writers,” he said in 2019, “I believe that Nabokov was the most dazzling of them all.”

As an editor for several New York publishers, Hills had a remarkably successful career. During his four decades as an editor, he edited over 50 New York Times best sellers and once set a record by producing nine Times hardcover best sellers in one 12-month period.

His abilities in working with writers were legendary. “In Mr. Hills’ hands,” wrote Katharine Seelye in his obituary, “an author was safe from the scratching of a pointed red pencil and instead would be nudged by gentle persuasion.” His great talent, wrote author, Daniel Yergin, was his ability to find an “inimitable balance between patience and subtle pressure.” When trying to persuade others to move toward his suggestions, Hills’ ability to navigate the fine line between patience and pressure payed dividends for the publisher as well as the authors. [30]

A Rabbi Who Excelled with Both/And Decisions: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and widely honored as an important voice on the role of religion in the modern world, died on November 10, 2020. Between 1991 and 2013 he was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the United Kingdom, but his death was mourned not only by Jews, but world-wide by Muslims and Christians of all denominations as well.

While his religious home was Orthodox Judaism, his voice was inclusive. In The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, published in 2002, he wrote, “God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims. No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth.” He added, “God is greater than religion. He is only partially comprehended by any faith.” In a 2013 study of his work titled Universalizing Particularity, the editors commented upon his great ability to manage skillfully the space in between different positions and points-of-view: “Sacks possesses a rare ability to hold in delicate balance the universal demands of the multicultural world with the particularism associated with Judaism.” Holding in “delicate balance” two competing religious and intellectual perspectives is a rare ability, one worthy of praise and admiration. [31]

Between Black and White: In 1955, in the midst of the rising tensions of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, Robert S. Graetz accepted the position of minister of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Montgomery, Alabama, an event that attracted an unusual amount of attention because Graetz was a white man and all of the worshipers in the church were Black. The Ku Klux Klan also noticed, and threats, attacks and bombings soon followed. Reverend Graetz was undeterred. Shortly after his arrival, the Montgomery bus boycott began. Graetz would preach on Sundays that the members of his congregation should not ride the buses, and then during the week he would drive them to work, often modifying his driving routes to thwart attackers. As reported in the New York Times on September 22, 2020, he “toggled seamlessly between foot soldier and field general in civil rights and social justice causes for over seven decades.”

He was in contact danger. “If anything, a white person who was helping a Black person was seen [by the white community] as worse than the Black person.” In August, 1956, the parsonage was bombed, leaving a 15-inch-deep crater on the lawn.

Yet he never wavered. “We feel that God has given us the unique privilege of standing with one foot in the Black community and one foot in the white,” he wrote in A White Preacher’s Message on Race and Reconciliation, published in 2006. “It may not be comfortable, but that is where we are. And until God tells us it is time to slow down, we intend to to keep pressing ahead with our
witness.” [32]

Coming Back to Courage

“Courage is at the center.”
The Paradox Principles

We are united in a common cause: we want to live what we believe is a Good Life however we define it. In fact, the philosopher John Kekes insists that “Living a good life is the most important of all human activities because the importance of everything else derives from it.” And yet, he observes, that while everyone is trying to live a good life, “not everyone is good at it. Many lives are bad,” he continues, “because [it] is difficult and there are formidable obstacles.” [33]

Living a good life, then, comes down to “formidable obstacles,” to problems, many of which are wicked ones, and whether we have the courage to confront them. Living such a life depends upon how skillful and how willing we are at finding and overcoming the difficult problems that stand in our way. Many of these require little of us. Because we have the experience and resources to solve or fix them, we take them in stride, seeing them as little more than part of the routines of our everyday lives. Other problems, however, are not routine at all, and involve risks and even danger to our well-being. We often feel overwhelmed by them, and, at times, turning away to find another path can seem to be a better choice. Yet if we are to find our way to the Good Life that we seek, turning away is a bad decision. A better choice is to find the courage to walk up to the problems on the path in front of us and pitch into them as best we can.

“Pressing Ahead”

The dictionary’s definition of courage is “a quality of spirit that allows you to face courage or pain without showing fear.” Facing up to the evil of racism in Montgomery, Alabama Reverend Graetz “pressed ahead with his witness” regardless of the threats and the bombings. Was he afraid? Of course, and yet he wrote, “absence of fear is not the point…We often had good reason to be afraid…[but] what you do when you are afraid is what makes the difference.”

Philip Booth, the poet came at courage from a different perspective. Courage was what was required to “keep believing in love.”

Rabbi Jonathan’s Sack’s attempts to create a “delicate balance” between the expectations of the Orthodox Jewish community in the United Kingdom and the demands of the modern, multicultural world required courage. Some in the Jewish community accused him of heresy, and insinuated that he was not worthy of being their leader, yet Rabbi Sacks pressed ahead. “God has spoken to mankind in many languages,” he wrote in The Dignity of Difference. “Through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims. No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth; no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.” [34]

“Fly The Middle Course”

In Greek mythology, Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth for King Minos, ended up a prisoner of the king so he could not share the secrets of how he built it. He decided to escape by building wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son, Icarus, and fly out. As they launched themselves into the sky, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too high where the sun would melt the wax that held his wings in place, or too low where the sea spray would soak his feathers and weigh him down. “Fly the middle course,” instructed Daedalus. Once in the sky, however, Icarus ignored his father’s advice and abandoned the middle way. Soaring upward toward the sun, the heat melted the wax holding his wings in place, and he fell into the sea and drowned. [35]

Flying the middle course is almost always the more difficult choice, one that requires wisdom, discipline and courage, and yet for many of our most difficult and important problems, especially our wicked ones, it is the best one. No one will claim that life in the “messy middle” is simple, straightforward, or easy, but if we hope to make things better, it is where we must be. Learning to live there when we must, and flourish there when we can, is not only among our among our greatest challenges, but often turns out to be among our most important opportunities. Perhaps this is what Robert Frost meant when, in his narrative poem, “A Servant to Servant, he wrote, “…the best way out is always through.” [36]

Chapter Two Endnotes

1. Gary Abernathy, “Our covid-19 polarization will only get worse. We need to find a balance,” The Washington Post, November 18, 2020.

2. Dhruv Khullar, “The deadly cost of American pandemic politics.” The New Yorker, December 8, 2020.

3, H. Resit Akcakaya, in John Schwartz, “Georgina Mace, Who Shaped List of Endangered Species is Dead at 67.” The New York Times, December 2, 2020.

4. The Price Waterhouse Change Integration Team, The Paradox Principles: How High- Performing Companies Manage Chaos, Complexity, and Contradictions to Achieve Superior Results. Chicago: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1996, 5.

5. Quoted in Price Waterhouse, 5.

6. Price Waterhouse, 8.

7. Philip Booth,“Sixty-Three,” Pairs. New York: Penguin Books, 70.

8. Michael Marquardt, Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solution by Knowing What to Ask. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014, 139.

9. F. G. Bailey, The Tactical Uses of Passion. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993, 34.

10. Alan Murray, The CEO Daily, Fortune, November 12, 2020.

11. Alan Murray, November 12, 2020.

12. Rosabeth Kanter, When Giants Learn to Dance. New York: Touchstone. 20-21.

13. Esther Cameron and Mike Green, Making Sense of Change Management. New York: Kogan Page Limited, 5th Ed. 2020, 3

14. Kanter, 20

15. Charles Handy, The Age of Paradox. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1994, 12.

16. Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine – The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The New York Times, September 13, 1970.

17. “Analyse This,” The Economist, 31 March, 2016.

18. Joseph Bower and Lynn Paine, “The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership,” Harvard Business Review, 95 (3) 50-60, June, 201.

19. Tom Poldre, “The Friedman Doctrine at 50: Happy Birthday and R.I.P.” https://medium.com/reinventing-business/the-friedman-doctrine-at-50-happy-birthday-and R-I0P/

20. Business Roundtable, “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans.” Business Roundtable, August 19, 2019. wwww.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the -purpose-of- business-to-promote-‘An-economy-that-serves-all Americans’/

21. Marc Benioff, “A Free Market Manifesto That Changed the World, Reconsidered.” The New York Times, September 11, 2020.

22. Howard Schultz, The New York Times, September 11, 2020.

23. Alan Murray, CEO Daily, Fortune, November, 5, 2020.

24. Annie Karni and Michael S. Schmidt, “Pence Tries to Balance His Loyalty to Trump vs. Own Political Path.” The New York Times, November 12, 2020.

25. The New York Times, November 18, 2020.

26. Amy Haimal, “Mask Mandate? In a Montana Town, It’s Put Us at Odds with Customers.” The New York Times, October 19, 2020.

27. John D’Agata and Jim Finkle, The Lifespan of a Fact. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. 16. 19. The play, The Lifespan of a Fact, by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell opened on Broadway on October 17, 2018.

28. Robert Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings. Revised Edition, Port Melbourne, Australia: Thames & Hudson, 1997. 22

29. Gary Abernathy, November 18, 2020

30. Katherine Q. Seeley, “Fred Hills, Editor of Nabokov and Many Others, Dies at 85.” The New York Times, November 21, 2020.

31. Ari L. Goldman, “Jonathan Sacks, 72, Chief Rabbi of the U. K. Who Promoted Including Dies.” The New York Times, November 10, 2020

32. Alan Blinder, “Robert S. Graetz, Rare White Minister to Back Bus Boycott, Is Dead at 92.”The NewYork Times, September 22, 2020.

33. John Kekes, The Art of Life. Ithaca, New York: The Cornell University Press, 2002. 3.

34. Jonathan Sacks, The New York Times, November 10, 2020.

35. “Daedalus and Icarus,” Wikipedia, “https://eb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daedalus&oldid=982469071, 8 October 2020.

36. Robert Frost, “A Servant of Servants,” Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. New York:
Library of America. 1995. 65

Parenting is a Wicked Problem

Joseph Bentley — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 18:23:52 +0000

“As much as you love your baby, you’re going to ask
yourself, What the hell did we do? It doesn’t mean
that you love your baby any less, but this new life
is a scary adjustment…nobody can truly prepare you.” New mother

“We feed children in order that they may soon be able to
feed themselves, we teach them in order that they may
soon not need our teaching. This heavy task is laid upon
Gift-love. It must work towards it own abdication.”

C. S. Lewis
The Four Loaves

“We believe that the world is a place of beauty, harmony and love,” write Joseph Bentley and Michael Toth in the introduction to Exploring Wicked Problems, published in 2020. “We also know that it is a place of confusion and discontent, contention and conflict, failure and sorrow. Life acquaints us not only with goodness but with disappointment, pain and disorder.”

While there are many explanations for a world that is at the same time both lovely and harmonious and full of contention and conflict, among the most instructive is one offered by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk: “It is characteristic of being human than human beings are presented with tasks that are too difficult for them, without having the option of avoiding them because of their difficulty. ” The world is beautiful to us because, at times, we are able experience it as beautiful because our genes and our culture help us see it as beautiful. It is also difficult and depressing because it also demands more from us than we can give, and yet does not excuse us from making the effort.

Five Adults in a Room

Five adults are in a room: Two couples – Betty and Josh are in their mid- 80’s, Lucy and Max are in the middle 60’s, and Peter is 35 or so. They make up three generations of the same family. The older couple, Betty and Josh, are the parents of Lucy, which makes her husband, Max, their son-in-law. Lucy and Max are the parents of Peter, which makes him Betty and Josh’s grandson.

Problem solving has been going on in the room for over an hour, but the reality is that it has been going on for years. During the past 15 years or so, Peter has been struggling with a personal problem that he has been unable resolve. In the past, his parents and grandparents have made numerous attempts to be helpful, usually by long distance – letters and phone calls – and with little success. They have also contributed financially to helping Peter find a solution. This three-generational meeting has been arranged by Lucy, Peter’s mother, who is hopeful that the experiences and wisdom that the older couples bring to the meeting will be helpful. As they talk, all five share the same assumption: that the problem they are wrestling with is Peter’s and it is Peter that needs help. Yet in ways that are only dimly understood by them, the problem is not just Peter’s. Each of the adults in the room is also experiencing the problem but in different ways. Everyone in the room is struggling.

Peter’s dream is to spend his life writing fiction. His success at an early age led him to the conclusion that he had talent. While he was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, he wrote and published a book for young adults – Sisyphus’ Triumph – that was not only widely praised but won the Blueberry Award for the best book for young people published that year. When he graduated his advisor told him that he had a special talent and, if he would work hard and dedicate his life to writing, he could be an author of the first rank. At graduation that year, his fellow students voted him as the “Most Likely to Be Famous by 40.” Yet 15 years later, approaching his 40th birthday, he was far from famous. Since graduation he has written four novels, all of which had been rejected by the publishers to whom he had sent them. In spite of working hard and making what seemed to his wife and family, endless sacrifices, it was clear that he was not going to be famous by the age of 40. His agent, perhaps sensing that he was backing a loser, had recently informed him that he was dropping him as a client.

Peter felt that he had reached a crossroads: either continue to chase his dream, or give up and try something else. He had discussed his dilemma with his parents. If he continued to try and become a renowned author, he would need financial support for him and his family for the next two years he would need to finish a new novel. His parents, struggling with financial pressures of their own, had turned to Lucy’s parents for help.

And so, on a warm, sunny day in late October, five adults meet in a room to try and help Peter as he struggles with his difficult decision.

Here is what each one is thinking:

Betty, his grandmother: “Peter must not give up. He has a wonderful talent and sooner or later will break through. I’m in favor of continuing whatever it takes to support him as long as it takes, even if it means using our retirement funds.”

Josh, his grandfather: “He doesn’t have it, and it’s time for him to give it up. He can’t seem to face the fact that he will never be a great writer. Four rejections should make that clear. It’s time to sell insurance.”

Lucy, his mother: “For all of these years I was Peter’s greatest fan. Now I’m confused and really worried. If he decides to quit, what will he do. He has over 15 years invested in this dream.”

Max, his father: “I now believe that he isn’t the writer we all thought he was. But I would continue to support him, except that we’re out of money. We took out a second mortgage to support him for two years the two years it took to write his last novel and nothing came of it. We can barely make ends meet as it is.”

Peter: “I feel torn between pushing on and giving up. I had pretty much decided to quit until last week when I talked to my graduate advisor. He said I shouldn’t quit. He told me again the same story he told me almost 15 years ago: that I have a great gift that I shouldn’t waste. But how it is that others don’t seem to agree?”

The two older couples are also thinking some variation of this: “I love Peter and what him to be happy. Yet we have been struggling with this for over 10 years. Why are we doing this all over again? I thought we would be through trying to solve our children’s problem twenty years ago and could go on to other things. Yet here we are.”

The room is filled with love, pain, admiration, despair, concern, and frustration, all at the same time.

One Challenge After Another

“Marriage presents one challenge after another,” wrote marriage therapist Daphne de Marneffe in The Rough Patch, “and so we need to bring our best resources to it…Three of the biggest challenges – children, sex, and work – pervade the emotional climate of marriage.” Among our “best” resources for dealing with these three challenges, two stand out above the rest: First, adequate and relevant knowledge about what should be done to deal with the challenges of children, sex, and work; and second, having the necessary skills to translate this knowledge into successful actions and behaviors. The quantity and quality of these resources can make the difference between a successful marriage or relationship or a failed one.

Time Marches On – And Drags Us Along

With the passage of time, the challenges people face in relationships change. Some fade into the background while new ones emerge and take center stage. For example, most people in their 70’s, are surprised about how much they talk about their health problems. And most people who stay together into their 70’s and beyond learn that both the tensions and the satisfactions of their sex lives are moderated either by familiarity and habit, or by the inexorable timetable of biology. “As one gets older, litigation replaces sex,” wrote British novelist Martin Amis. And if not litigation, then golf, soap operas or naps in the afternoon.

The importance of work as a source of both tension and satisfaction also tends to diminish with the passing of time. Either people experience a leveling-out of ambition and drive, or an increasing reduction in energy, or both, and, begin to think about their lives beyond work. By the time most people reach their early 60’s, they have begun the psychological transition from “My job is really important to me,” to “Perhaps it’s time to think about retiring.”

While the challenges of managing sex and work tend to recede into the background, the same does not seem to be true of the challenges involved in raising children. Parents raise their children, help them get started with their own lives, and then are often surprised with the continuation of a parent-child relationship not unlike the one in earlier years, and one that continues to be both involving and compelling. “Once a parent, always a parent” is a constant for both parents and children.

Tasks That Are “Too Difficult” for Parents.

Earlier we quoted philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who wrote that the dilemma for human beings is having to grapple with tasks that are too difficult for them, and yet having no choice but to try. Being a parent is clearly one of these tasks.

In 2001, scholars from MIT and Harvard published a report titled Raising Teens: Project on the Parenting of Adolescents. In their introduction the authors state that “The report is written for all those who work with on and on behalf of parents, adolescents and families.” In a previous chapter titled “The ‘Wickedness’ of Adolescence,” our focus was on the ten developmental tasks that were identified in the report as being crucial for adolescents to master as they made the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. In this chapter, we shift the focus from the wicked problems that belong to adolescents to the equally wicked challenges that parents face as they try to help their children move from childhood to adulthood and beyond.

The Five Basic Tasks of Parenting

The MIT and Harvard scholars concluded the basis of effective parenting consist of five basic
responsibilities :

I. Love and Connect:

– Children need parents to develop and maintain
a relationship with them that offers support and
acceptance.

II. Monitor and Observe

– Children need parents to be aware of their
activities through a process that, over time,
involves less direct supervision and more
communication and networking.

III. Guide and Limit

– Children need parents to uphold a clear
but evolving set of boundaries, maintaining
important family rules and values, but
but also encouraging increased competence,
maturity and separation.

IV. Model and Consultant

– Children need parents to provide ongoing
information and support around decision
making, values, and navigating the larger
world, teaching by example and ongoing
dialogue.

V. Provide and Advocate

– When children are young, they need parents
to make available not only adequate nutrition,
clothing, shelter, and health care, but also
when they are older, a supportive family
relationship and a network of caring adults.

“Ay, There’s the Rub”

Like most lists of desirable actions, attitudes, approaches and behaviors, it is one thing to write them down, it is quite another to put them into practice. Here are four obstacles that stand in the way of parents implementing these recommendations:

First, even if parents were to become aware of these or other guidelines and recommendations, putting them into practice, may be beyond their capabilities. For example, how does one learn to go about “develop[ing] and maintain[ing] a relationship that offers support and acceptance?” or how is one to master the skills of “upholding a clear but evolving set of boundaries?”

Second, people become parents without having received any helpful information or instruction about being an adequate, let alone an effective, parent. When parents take a new baby home, someone may step in to help – the grandmother, a neighbor, or a friend. But once a baby has survived its first few months, parents usually rely upon doing what their parents did as they were growing up. Even learning what the desirable practices and behaviors consist of is beyond them, let alone learning to do them.

Third, even if parents are trying their best, what they lack in order to become more effective is useful feedback about what seems to be helpful and what is not. Even though parents may be open to learning better ways of raising their children, without timely and consistent feedback, no change can be expected. Their young children are unable to tell them, and as children grow older, there are no norms. mechanisms or traditions for a conversation which begins with the child saying, “Mom, Dad, I have some suggestions that you might try in order to do a better job of all of this.”

Fourth, over time, the responsibilities for parents toward their children evolve, becoming more simple and more complicated at the same time. What many parents do not expect nor plan for is that as they age, the bonds between them and their children continue to make demands of both parents and children. For some, these bonds eventually stretch beyond the breaking point and are severed, but for most parents, they continue in force as long as they live. Regardless of how the relationships play out over time, trying to withdraw from being a parent is like attempting to change one’s identity: people may think it is a good idea, but have no idea how difficult it is. Love it, tolerate it or deny it, no one ever really stops being a patent to their children.

It May Be Getting Worse

Research for the MIT and Harvard report that identified these five basic tasks of parenting was conducted during the last decade of the previous century. Since then, there is reason to believe that the challenges for parents have become even more difficult and demanding. Here are the titles of five recent articles:

-“Where Went My Empty Nest?” by Charles Blow was published in the New York Times on August 19, 2020. After Blow’s children left home, his friends asked him if he missed them.
Actually, what he felt was the opposite. “I told them I free I felt, how I felt I was entering
a new life of my own…But, now that the children…have moved back into my house as they
search for jobs…I will say the things we are not supposed to say: What happened to my empty nest?”

-” Stressed, Tired, Rushed: Portrait of the Modern Family,” by Claire Cain Miller, published in the New York Times on November 5, 2015. Children are much more likely to grow up in a household where both parents work, and unlike previous decades, nearly half of all two-parent families today, both work full time. “What hasn’t changed: the difficult of balancing it all,” writes Miller. “Working parents say they feel stressed, tired, rushed, and short on quality time with their children, friends, partners, of hobbies.”

– “Stress, Exhaustion and Guilt: Modern Parenting,” by Claire Cain Miller and published in the New York Times on December 25, 2018, explains that the stress and guilt that parents are experiencing today with the observation that “Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding.”

– “For Parents, a New Level of Big-Picture Anxiety,” by Chris Colin was published in the New York Times on October 6, 2020. Surveying the challenges of raising children in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chris Colin observes that “Worry is devotion curdled into fear,” caused by the incredible speed with which new crises replace the old ones without any noticeable resolution. It’s as if things are piling up until they threaten to overwhelm us. ” What does it all mean?” he wonders. “I suppose this is why we worry in the first place,” he writes, “- we know so little. The world unspools a little each day and we strain to see over the horizon, but it never works. We’re just left to wonder.”

– The pandemic infects our lives with false choices writes Nancy Gibbs in an article titled “Why parents now face an impossible choice” published the Washington Post on July28, 2020: “Save lives or livelihoods? Defend freedom, or wear a mask? Protect the old, or teach the young?” But the choice about sending children back to school is anything but false she writes. “Everybody wants it,” insists President Trump, but the dilemma is not only what one wants. It is also it costs. “What is it worth to see the classrooms open?” asks Gibbs “- and how can parents possible do that calculation.” The answer is, of course, they can’t. It’s not a calculation that yields a number or a formula that can be used to provide an answer.

Parenting is a Wicked Problem

In Aging Thoughtfully, Martha Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, writes “We have made advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and aviation. It is less clear that we have done so with respect to partnering, parenting and choosing political leaders.” And why is this so? It is because these last three problems “are moving targets that are not conquered over time through incremental scientific progress.”

In other words, partnering, parenting, and choosing our political leaders are wicked problems.

While Nussbaum is probably unaware of it, she has reinforced an observation by former Secretary of State, George Schultz, “that some problems can be solved, while others can only be worked on.” Improving the way we partner, parent, and choose our leaders, are challenges that will never be solved – nor will they ever be finished – but can only be worked on.

In “Wicked Problems: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in Exploring Wicked Problems, Bentley and Toth identify over 50 problems that academics and authors have identified as wicked problems. Among them are aging and dementia, AIDS, dysfunctional relationships, social justice, forest management, terrorism, and food and water security. Also included among them are nurturing relationships and marriage, successful parenting, and unresponsive governments, three examples of wicked problems that correspond to Nussbaum’s examples of “moving targets” that cannot be successfully addressed by science or technology.

In 2017, in New Strategies for Wicked Problems, Edward Weber and his co-authors propose that wicked problems are defined by three characteristics: “They are unstructured, crosscutting and relentless.” By unstructured they mean that causes and effects are extremely difficult to identify, “thus adding complexity and uncertainty and engendering a high degree of conflict because there is little consensus on the problem or the solution.”

When they say that wicked problem are crosscutting, their observation is that in the “problem space,” there are multiple and overlapping problems and concerns which result in the people involved bringing to the conversation “different perspective[s]” and “different ways of knowing.”

And their use of relentless to define wicked problems emphasizes their conclusion that while many wicked problems are urgent, “…the problem is not going to be solved once and for all despite all the best intentions and resources directed at the problem…”

Parenting is Relentless

In an article published in December of 2018 in the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller published an article titled “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.” She begins her article, “Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding that it used to be.” The primary reason? The pressure upon the parents to raise their children in ways to help them be successful in an increasingly complex and uncertain world never stops. “Social scientists,” she writes, “say that the relentlessness of modern parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety.” For the first time, she concludes, it is as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents.

Earlier we described the attempts of five adults sitting in a room to do their best to be helpful to the youngest one present. The problem they were grappling met the conditions of being wicked: It was unstructured, crosscutting, and relentless. It had had troubled them all for years, and yet kept coming back. No matter what they decided to do, it would be a continue to be a presence in their lives.

Important Defining Characteristics

Beyond being unstructured, crosscutting and relentless, there are five additional characteristics of wicked problems that can help us understand why parenting is a wicked problem.

I. There is no immediate or ultimate way to approach a wicked problem.

1968, sociologist Alice Rossi examined this life-changing experience of having a child in a paper titled titled “Transition to Parenthood.” When it comes to becoming parents, she noted, there is no equivalent to courtship, which helps one get ready to enter into marriage, or job training, which is common when people begin a new job, or basic training, the six-month training period before becoming a soldier. The baby simply appears, “fragile and mysterious” and “totally dependent.” and is handed off to young people who are not ready for the responsibility. There is no single approach to guide them, but instead, an infinite number of choices parents can make when it comes to raising their children.

II. Any proposed solution for a wicked problem is not true or false but can only be bad, good, or best.

Looking back on the experience, few parents would claim that they were ready for it. When they were finally given full responsibility for the new baby, they may have had a set of rudimentary ideas of how to go about being adequate if not good parents. Now it was up to them to discover what would be “best.”

III. Every wicked problem is unique.

When a second baby arrives, all parents discover that he or she is very different from the first. Much of what they learned with the first baby no longer seems to apply. All babies are unique in that they bring with them their own characteristics and temperaments, and must be treated differently. And it is not only that the baby is unique, but the circumstances in the newly-expanded family are also unique.

IV. Wicked problems are never static. “… parenting …is [one of several] moving targets” that do not respond to the same techniques or approaches.

As children grow from infancy to childhood, everything changes. What finally seems to be effective when the child reaches 6 months, no longer is helpful by the time the child has had its first birthday.

V. For wicked problems, there are no stopping rules. As a result, no one can claim that a wicked problem has been solved, fixed or finished.

As most are aware the term “empty nest” has nothing to do with birds, but is reserved for parents who send their last child out into the world, either to work, to college, to the military, or to marriage. Associated with the idea of “empty nest” is that the parents have met their obligations to their children and are finally free to move on with their lives.

It rarely turns out this way. Recent economic downturns have sent many children back to live with their parents in order to make ends meet. And even if there is an “empty nest,” most parents quickly learn that there is still a “nest.” Biology and culture conspire together to keep alive the fact that parents are parents to their children, and that their children are still their children for all of their lives.

Not Ready/Never Ready

Although becoming a parent is not a surprise for most – they have had nine months or so to get used to the idea – finally “being” a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes human beings can experience, especially with a first child.

In the beginning of the chapter, we quoted a new mother’s observation about her experience with her new baby: “no one can truly prepare you.” The key word here is “truly.” Many young people have been baby sitters, or older sisters or brothers who have taken care of younger siblings. But the realization that “now we’re the ones who are really responsible,” comes only after a new baby has arrived and serves to increase the realization that “we’re not ready for this.” As Alice Rossi observed in her 1968 article, for new parents there is no on-the-job training program or “boot camp” experience. And few couples have live-in grandmothers who could be helpful. What is required of them is to get into the middle of it all and do the best that they can.

For parents, there is yet another surprise in store, one that slowly dawns on them during the 30 or 40 years after their children leave home to make their way in the world. And it is a surprise for which they are, once again, unprepared. Their children, now grown with children of their own, are still children themselves, not in age but in how they define themselves with respect to their parents and vice versa. The parent-child bonds remain in place, and though many expectations have changed, the basic structure of parent-child remains in place.

Eventually, many experience a dramatic and at times painful reversals of roles. Now it is the grown children who must adopt the role of being parents to their parents, and it is the parents, increasingly infirm and dependent, who must become the children. This transition is often stormy and difficult – no 85 year-old has been known to give up driving a car willingly – and one for which no one involved is hardly ever prepared.

“Something Wicked This Way Comes”

In 2012, Atul Gawande, a prominent surgeon at Harvard, published an article in the New Yorker titled “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Borrowing the term from the greeting the three witches on the heath extended to MacBeth, Gawande wrote that the “wicked problems” that are coming are “messy, ill-defined, more complex that we can fully grasp, and open to multiple interpretations based on one’s point of view…No soltution to a wicked problem is ever permanent or fully satisfying.”

The phrase, “something wicked this way comes,” is a useful one to describe what is about to happen to a couple awaiting the arrival of a child. It is important to recognize, however, that it is not the child who is wicked, but the process of raising the child. While the child is the cause of the “double, double, toil and trouble” that is about take over the home, it is the relentless experience of being a parent – one that is never finished or fully satisfying – that is wicked.

“What The Hell Did We Do?“

“We would be vastly better off,” wrote Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, in This Will Make You Smarter, “if we understood what wicked problems are and learned to distinguish between them and regular (or “tame”) problems.” Understanding what wicked problem are and what makes them wicked will not solve them, but it will get us started in a constructive direction in grappling with them. And equally important, especially for parents, it will help answer the question of the new mother we quoted earlier: “What the hell did we do?”

Huck Finn Messes with Mr. In-between

Joseph Bentley — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 21:21:31 +0000

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

Huck Finn

During the hot, confusing, and frustrating summer of 2020, individuals, families, schools and colleges, business organizations, and governments found themselves facing a range of unusual situations that required difficult and complicated decisions.

Many of these problems grew out of the public health crisis of Covid-19. Here is an example as reported by Bloomberg News on August 21, 2020: “College towns face a dilemma: They worry about the risk of bringing students back – and the economic devastation that awaits if they don’t.” In the August 21 issue of The Atlantic, Jacob Stern wrote, “Californians face an impossible choice: Those who flee the wildfires’ risk infection from Covid-19. Those who stay risk incineration.”

Here are other examples of public officials and citizens struggling with difficult decisions as they tried to navigate their way through the confusing choices brought on by Covid-19:

– Governors have been faced with the difficult choices often referred to as “pork chops or people:” moving from lockdowns to opening businesses, or, attempting to “flatten the curve” by keeping them closed.

– School administers have struggled to make plans for opening the schools which make sense academically, and at the same time, protect the health of their students.

– Nursing home administers have been uncertain when or how to allow family members to enter their facilitlies to visit their families.

– And a newspaper headline on August 26: “Teens struggle to balance school, work amid outbreak.”

In-Between Problems

What these problems had in common is that they were “In-between” problems: People found themselves in situations where they were faced with essentially two choices, both of which could be equally desirable or undesirable, and realized that in order to move forward, they would have to choose one.

“In-between” problems are not new. They have long been identified as among our most pressing and complicated challenges, often with ethical or moral dimensions. They have been part of our lives long enough for us to have given them names. We find ourselves, “Between a rock and hard place,” or, “Between the devil and the deep blue sea.” Part of the difficulty of these decisions is that no matter how we decide, we often end up “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” We would prefer avoiding these “In-between,” decisions, but soon discover that most of the time we have no choice: we must decide.

In 2020, many of these “In-between decisions” were difficult because, rather than private decisions made in secret, leaving individuals with options about how much to share with others, they were public in nature, with most of the discussions and arguments open for all to see. And since the issues that were discussed, debated and eventually decided, included more than individual preferences and concerns but were issues that directly affected communities, organizations, institutions and societies, disagreements, conflicts, and controversies were quick to surface and often threatened to take over the process. This made difficult decisions even more difficult, a complication that quickly expanded to include all attempts to implement them.

Here are several more examples of In-between problems that people struggled with during the summer of 2020:

– A 16-year old disobeys his father and sneaks out and joins a Black Lives Matter protest. There is no clear recipe for deciding between protesting injustice and obeying one’s father.

– Police departments all over the country are struggling to find a balance between teaching their officers to be compassionate problem solvers, and also respecting police culture and traditions which stress the importance of being aggressive warriors.

– A headline in a Politico story on August 26, 2020 reads: “Trump’s trusted sidekick prepares to walk a MAGA tightrope,” an account of how Vice President Pence has attempted to manage the space between the positions of President Trump, and the broader interests of the Republican Party.

Right vs. Right Choices

In How Good People Make Tough Choices, Rushford Kidder, calls these In-Between dilemmas “Right vs. Right Problems,” situations in which positions on both sides of an argument can be seen as objectively “right.” He offers four examples where people can often be caught between two alternatives: Truth vs. loyalty; Individual vs. community; Short-term vs. long term; and Justice vs. Mercy. There are times, writes Kidder, when individuals can argue the case for showing loyalty rather than telling the truth (and vice versa), where individuals should favor their own interests rather than those of the community (and vice versa), when short-term interests are superior to long-term ones (and vice versa), and where justice should prevail over mercy (and vice versa). While these “Right vs. Right” situations are different in substance, they are similar in form: In each case, individuals attempting to make difficult decisions find themselves “in between” two alternatives, each of which, under certain circumstances, can be the right one.

“Accentuate the Positive”

Frequently, when faced with complex and complicated moral and ethical decisions, we turn to religious advisors for advice. An example appeared over 80 years ago in Here Come the Waves, a movie starring Bing Crosby as Father Devine, a religious advisor played in blackface by Crosby. While guiding his flock toward righteous living, he issued this advice: “You’ve got to accentuate the positive,” he counseled, “Eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative.” Good advice, of course, yet confusing, since in Right vs. Right situations, it is impossible to determine which of the alternatives should be accentuated and which one should be eliminated. And not only should we accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, continued Father Devine, we should never, never “Mess with Mr. In-between,” which in the absence of additional information, we understand to mean not messing around in the space between the affirmative and the negative.

As it turns out, however, when it comes to Right vs. Right choices, “messing” with Mr. In-between is exactly what is called for. If people are to make the best possible choice between two alternatives, each making a claim to be “right,” they must become acquainted with the issues and positions on both sides. They must get down into the middle of the problem, examine the evidence and listen to the arguments on both sides, review carefully the differences between them, apply the rules of common sense, and finally, make an attempt to imagine the consequences of choosing one over the other. In other words, they must “mess around with Mr. In-between” before choosing one side over the other.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain was not quite 50 when, in February, 1885, he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, according to critic David Ulin, “changed American literature.” The poet, T. S. Eliot, said that it was the only one of Twain’s books that could be called a masterpiece. And as for Huck Finn, the central character in the novel, in the introduction to the 1950 Chanticleer Press edition, Eliot wrote, “…we come to see Huck himself in the end as…not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Hamlet and other great discoveries that man [sic] has made about himself.” And while most authors write books that never seem to measure up to their aspirations, Eliot wrote that “In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote a much greater book than he could have known that he was writing.”

Ernest Hemingway was equally effusive. In the Green Hills of Africa, published in 1935, Hemingway wrote

All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing came from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

What was it about The Adventures Huckleberry Finn that led Eliot, Hemingway among many others, to see it as one of the great American novels? If you read the book when you were young, you probably enjoyed it as a story about the exciting adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a boy of 13 or 14 who was trying to escape from the tyranny of an abusive father, and Jim, a slave from Huck’s town who had decided to escape from the tyranny of slavery. They find themselves floating down the Mississippi River on a raft, and come upon one episode after another which require them to be brave, clever, and creative.

If, however, you read the book as an adult, you may discover that it is really about much more than the adventures of a white boy and a black man floating on a raft down the Mississippi River. It is about friendship, sacrifice, commitment, loyalty, trust, freedom, and especially about race and slavery. And in a deep and profound way, it is the quintessential American Story of people on the move, searching for a better life.

Huckleberry Finn’s In-Between Crisis

The critical moment in the book, which critics have called the “moral climax” of the novel, and which for many is the key to its greatness, occurs when, after scouting around shore for news, Huck returns to the raft and finds Jim gone. “I set up a shout,” says Huck, “and then another one, and run this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching; but it warn’t no use – old Jim was gone. Then I set down and cried.”

He learns from a boy he encounters on the shore that Jim had been sold to a neighbor for $40 by a “stranger,” who was actually one of two scoundrels who had traveled with Huck and Jim for several weeks on the raft.

Huck returns to the raft and “set down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn’t come to nothing. I thought until I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble.”

He finally comes to the conclusion that since Jim was once again caught up in slavery, “it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was.” So he decides to write a letter to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, and tell her where Jim was so she could come and get him.

He soon gives up this idea when it it occurs to him that it would be bad for Jim and also for him when word got around that Jim had tried to escape and Huck had helped him.

As he pondered what to do, he began to feel guilty about helping Jim escape: “…my conscience went to grinding me and the more wicked and lowdown and ornery I got to feeling.” At last, he decides that it was God who was making him feel so terrible: “It was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know that my wickedness was being watched all the time up in heaven.” And this led him to the conclusion that he needed to pray and “see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down,” he said, “but the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use trying to hide it from Him.”

After struggling with his feelings of guilt and fear, he comes to a decision. He would write a letter to Miss Watson “and then see if I can pray.” And suddenly, everything changed: “Why it was astonishing, the way I felt light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone.”

So Huck found a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote a letter to Miss Watson, telling her where Jim was and how she could arrange to have him returned. “I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life,” wrote Huck, “and I knowed I could pray now.”

But instead of rushing off to mail the letter, he laid it aside and began to think, “…thinking how good it was that all this was happening so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.” And then, he continued, “…[I] got to thinking over our trip down the river, and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight and sometimes storms, and we a floating along talking, and singing and laughing.”

And before long Huck was in a different kind of trouble. His “solution” to the grindings of his conscience and the raspings of his feelings of guilt began to fade as he remembered that Jim had been kind and loving to him, had protected him, and defended him, had let him sleep when it was his turn to stand watch. And he couldn’t get it out of his mind that when Huck had saved Jim by telling slave hunters that the only other person aboard the raft was his pap who had the smallpox, how Jim had been so grateful, and “said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.”

He looked around and saw the letter he had written and it came to him that he was now between two choices: Take Miss Watson’s side by sending her the letter, or stand with Jim by not telling her where to find him. At this moment, as Huck struggled between these two choices, Huck’s world underwent a powerful transformation:

“It was a close place,” Huck said. “I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling because I’d got to decide, however, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied it a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then I said to myself: All right, then, I’ll go to hell” – and I tore it up.”

The two things that Huck was “betwixt,” were, first, his duty to society in accordance with God’s principles as taught him by Widow Douglas, who had adopted him had tried to “civilize” him. What this required him was to send the letter to Miss Watson so justice could be done: An escaped slave should be captured and returned to his rightful owner. The other side of the “betwixt” would be to not send the letter, and since that would meant helping a slave to escape, it would also mean being consigned forever to hell. It is important here to understand that, according to the critics and scholars who have studied the religious world views of those who lived in those times, going to hell was not an imagined consequence of willful sin, but something that people- including Huck – believed would actually happen.

“A Stout Heart and a Deformed Conscience”

In later years, Twain made clear that he meant this moment to be the emotional as well as the moral center of the novel. During the lecture tours that took up most of the remaining years of his life, Twain described Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a stout heart comes into collision with a deformed conscience and the conscience suffers defeat.”

The deformed conscience that Twain was describing was one he knew well, for it was part of the society he knew as a child. Among its most salient principles were centered on race: that black people were inferior to whites; that in some ways they were subhuman creatures; and that keeping them as slaves was part of the natural order of things. Important to this worldview was that if slaves attempted to escape, all methods were legal in catching them and returning them to slavery.

Twain’s reference to a “stout heart,” was something new. In the context of the novel, Huck begins the trip with a conscience that had been formed by the society in which he had lived up to that time. However, during the weeks that followed, as he and Jim spent time together on the raft, his belief’s about black people that were part of Huck’s “deformed” conscience began to be replaced by a different understanding of who Jim was. As Huck struggled with the decision to send the letter, he paused: “..I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night time, and sometimes moonlight, and sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking and singing and laughing.” His words help us see what is happening: ” …and I see Jim before me…” – not a black man, nor a slave, or even more serious, an escaped slave. Slowly, he begins to see Jim as a human being, a person, one who laughs and cries, a father who misses his children ever since they were sold as slaves “down the river,” a husband who loves his wife and who, when free, wants to earn enough money to buy her out of slavery, and a friend who had been kind and loyal to him. Because of these experiences, a “stout heart” begins to emerge in Huck, gains strength, and begins to collide with his deformed conscience. And finally, when Huck must choose between “doing what’s right” according to societies’ principles, or disobeying and going to hell, he obeys his stout heart: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

And not only does he choose to go to hell. As he makes clear with his next words, it’s going to be”wickedness” all the way down:

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said: and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would go and do that too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

Property Rights vs. Human Rights

In 1953, Ralph Ellison, American novelist, literary critic, and author of Invisible Man, an award-winning book about the black experience in American, wrote that “Huck has struggled with the problems poised [sic] by the clash between property rights and human rights, between what the community considered to be the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and his knowledge of his humanity, gained through their adventures as fugitives together. He has made his decision on the side of humanity.”

“Property Rights vs Human Rights” are primarily 2oth century words and reflect 2oth century controversies. They would have meant nothing to Huck. What he did come to understand while rafting down the Mississippi with Jim, was that no matter what they had tried to teach him in Sunday School, it no longer made sense to see Jim as property. On the raft, Huck was gradually able to let go of the “truths” that were part of his deformed conscience and replace them with a new truth: Jim was not property, but a human being like himself.

Getting to the Simplicity on the Other Side

“I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Holmes’ words can help us think about how to live our lives. Finding the path toward living a Good Life requires that we must move away from the simplicities on this side of complexity – biases, prejudices, distortions, and untruths – and move toward the simplicities on the other side, a passage that takes us into the middle of and through the confusions, controversies and complexities that are part of this life. What Holmes failed to tell us was how we are to do this.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we discover that Mark Twain has offered us a way. From his book, we can identify three ideas that can help with this journey: First, we know that the book is a work of fiction, created entirely by the fertile brain of Mark Twain. But what is also known to all readers of good fiction, is that great novels contain profound truths. Twain has given us some profound truths to consider. Second, what is clear to us now as we read Twain’s book, was that Huckleberry was not only escaping from his “Pap,” but he was also making a journey toward becoming a fully-realized human being. And here, Huck needed to find a way to rid himself of the racial distortions and untruths that were part of his deformed conscience and replace them with more accurate and enlightened principles. And finally, Mark Twain arranged for this to happen by putting an ignorant, prejudiced, boy who was determined to escape from his own experience of slavery, on the same raft with an uneducated black man who was “owned” by another human being, and who also had decided to escape to freedom, and send them off together down the Mississippi River. Eventually, Huck found himself in a desperate struggle between two opposing views: That Jim was a slave attempting to escape vs. that Jim was a human being like all other human beings. By tearing up the letter, and accepting that by so doing he would go to hell, Huckleberry Finn discovered and then embraced an important truth on the other side of complexity.

Messing With Mr. In-between

We are not characters in a novel. There is no author to write us into a story which include problems demanding enough that, in order to get to the simplicity on other side, require us to seriously “mess with Mr. In-between.”

Not to worry; it’s all taken care of. While we are not characters in someone else’s novel, we are characters in our own stories, human beings trying to find the best way through our lives that are crowded with challenges, dilemmas, conundrums, and problems of all kinds. As Samuel Florman observes in The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, many of these problems come from two sources: other people and nature. “Men [sic] are imperfect and nature is often unkind, so that unhappiness, uncertainly, and pain are perpetually present.” Add to these unpredictabilities and uncertainties inherent in human behavior and nature, the demands from society that we conform to specific and often arbitrary expectations, norms, and rules, and it becomes clear that we will always be struggling with one problem after another.

While Nature, other people and society, are contributors to the troubles we grapple with in our lives, they are not responsible for all of them. We must also look to ourselves. “Contemporary man [sic],” writes Florman, “is not content because he wants more than he can ever have…[There are] too many people wanting too many things.” Living in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction can often lead to making unwise, and even stupid, choices which then, predictably, lead to unpleasant consequences.

As we make our best efforts to live Good Lives, we should not be surprised to find ourselves repeatedly on “metaphorical” rafts, doing our best to navigate through white and uncharted waters. Eventually, we will find ourselves “between a rock and a hard place.” Then we must do what Huck did: Mess with Mr. In-between until it becomes clear what is the right thing to do – and then do it.

The “Wickedness” of Adolescence

Joseph Bentley — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 18:43:55 +0000

We are calling them ‘wicked,’ not because [they] are ethically deplorable. We use
the term ‘wicked’ in a meaning akin to than of ‘malignant’ (in contrast to ‘benign’)
or ‘vicious’ (like a circle) or ‘tricky’ (like a leprechaun) or aggressive (like a lion, in
contrast to the docility of a lamb).

Horst Rittle and Melvin Webber

Azlyn Hobson, a student at Rich Middle School in Laketown, Utah, was happily anticipating the Valentine Dance coming up at school. “She was excited about this dance,” said her Mother. “She was telling me about it for two weeks. There was a boy she liked, she wanted to dance with him. She was going to have the best time ever.”

And then, for Azlyn, disaster on the dance floor: a boy she didn’t like, and one who she said made her feel uncomfortable, asked her to dance. So she said no. Then, according to a February 20, 2020, story in the Salt Lake Tribune, the principal rushed over and took charge. “He was like,” Azlyn recalled, “you guys go dance. There’s no saying no here.” He then shooed them onto the dance floor for what was for Azlyn a painful and awkward three minutes: “I just didn’t like it,” the 11-year-old said. “When they finally said it was done, I was like ‘Yes!'”

But it wasn’t done. When Azlyn told her Mother about her unpleasant time dancing with the wrong boy, her Mother emailed the principal: “She ALWAYS has the right to say no,” she wrote. “Boys don’t have the right to touch girls or make them dance with them. They shouldn’t. If girls are taught that they don’t have the right to say no to boys, or that saying no is meaningless, because they’ll be forced to do it anyway, we’ll have another generation who feels that the rape culture is completely normal.”

Kip Motta, the principal, offered the other perspective: “We want to protect every child’s right to be safe and comfortable at school,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. “We believe in that 100%. We also believe that all children should be included in school activities. The reason for the policy as we have had it…[in the] past is to make sure no kids feel like they get left out.”

Azlyn’s mother had a point: Young girls should not be forced to dance with boys that they don’t feel comfortable with. And the principle had one as well: No student should be left out of school activities. It is an example of the most difficult kind of problem: Right vs.Right.

And Azlyn? She was caught in the middle. She found herself in “Mr. In-between land.” On the one hand her mother was adamant: Azlyn, or any young girl, should not be forced to dance with someone she didn’t want to. And yet, since the students in her school were required to include all student in the the school activities, she was not permitted to say no.

Azlyn, her Mother, Kip Motta and the unnamed boy who asked Azlyn to dance, and all the other students caught up in the middle school dance problem, found themselves grappling with a complex and difficult problem: It was right for Azlyn to say no when she didn’t want to dance with a particular boy. And it was right for the school to have a policy to ensure that all students were included in the school actives. Trying to navigate between two alternatives, both of which are “right” is tricky and complicated. Few teenagers, and parents or teachers as well, are prepared to mange it successfully.

The Mine Field That Is Adolescence

Stop the first 20 adults you see walking down the street and ask them what was they most difficult time in their lives. Eighteen of the 20 will say middle school, or junior high school.

This is just a guess, of course. We have no idea if it is accurate. And yet for many people, the adolescent years, seen in hindsight, were difficult and often unpleasant. Caught between wanting to be admired, most often by the members of the opposite sex, assailed by strange and unfamiliar feelings and desires, subject to infusions of hormones which relentlessly go about their tasks of changing bodies from children to adults with no accompanying instruction book on how they are supposed to work, rebelling against parents, and occasionally all authority, overcome at times by convictions of being worthless, or unattractive, or not having a “good personality,” and required to attend school for up to six or seven hours a day when much of what is taught neither makes much sense nor helps with the real problems they are grappling with. Add to all this a multitude of complex and often contradictory societal expectations and rules about how to dress, talk, and act, with essentially no helpful information as to why they are important or clear instructions about how to follow them, and it should come as no surprise that adolescence is for many a confusing, frustrating, and often unhappy time. It’s as if the forces of society and nature have conspired together to make sure that the years between 13 and 19 are as difficult as they could possible be.

As Azlyn moves further into her adolescent years, she has no idea what problems lie in wait for her. She will soon discover, however, that the problems she will face day in and day out are much more challenging – and important – than trying to arrange dancing with one boy and avoiding another at a school dance. And there’s more: like all 11 – and 12- year olds, she is unprepared for what lies ahead. When she runs into new problems, she will quickly discover that she has no idea what she should do to make things better. Most teen agers avoid talking to their parents, but if they do, most learn that their parents’s advice is hopelessly out-of-date, or that they are as confused as are their children. Combine these issues and dilemmas into what turns out to be an impossible puzzle for your people to resolve, and the claim we make in this chapter, that adolescence is a wicked problem, becomes more persuasive.

The Raising Teens Project

We feel confident in making the categorical statement that Azlyn – and most all other teenagers as well – is both unaware of her coming problems and and unprepared to deal with them. We say this because we have consulted two sources of information: First, ourselves: though our memories may not be entirely dependable about many things in the past, we can remember clearly how the problems we struggled with as we passed through those years were huge, traumatic and unintelligible on the one hand, and how uncertain we were about what we should do with them on the other.

And second, at the end of the last century, scholars at MIT’s Work-Life Center and Harvard’s Center for Health Communication joined together in a research project designed to identify the nature of the problems that young people face as they struggle to make the transition from childhood to early adulthood. Their project, titled the Raising Teens Project, reviewed the findings of over 300 research studies and found a” surprising degree of consensus among experts” as to what the challenges of adolescents were. They distilled their findings into these “Ten Tasks of Adolescent Development:”

1. Adjust to sexually maturing bodies and feelings;

2. Develop and apply abstract thinking skills;

3. Develop and apply new perspectives on human relationships;

4. Develop and apply new coping skills in such areas as decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution;

5. Identify meaningful moral standards, values, and belief systems;

6. Understand and express more complex emotional experiences;

7. Form friendships that are mutually close and supportive;

8. Establish key aspects of identity;

9. Meet the demands of increasingly mature roles and responsibilities;

10. Renegotiate relationships with adults in parenting roles.

For each of these developmental tasks, the researchers added a paragraph which described in more detail the specific things that teenagers had to learn learn in order to be successful with each task. For example, here is the paragraph for the first, “Adjust to sexually maturing bodies and feelings:”

“Teens are faced with adjusting to growing bodies and newly acquired sexual
characteristics. They must learn to manage sexual feelings and to engage
in healthy sexual behaviors. This task includes establishing a sexual identity
and developing the skills for romantic relationships.”

And here is what they wrote for #4, “Develop and apply new coping skills in areas such as decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution:”

“Teens begin to acquire new abilities to think about and plan for the future,
to engage in more sophisticated strategies for decision-making, problem-solving,
and conflict resolution, and to moderate their risk-taking to serve their
goals rather than jeopardize them.”

Other specific skills and behaviors from other categories are:

“Having learned to ‘put themselves into another person’s shoes,’ they [must] begin to take into account both their [own] perspective and another person’s at the same time.” (#3)

“…develop a more complex understanding of moral behavior and underlying principles
justice and caring for others.” (#5)

“…shift toward an ability to identify and communicate more complex emotions, [and] to
understand the emotions of others is more sophisticated ways…” (#6)

“…take on the roles that will be expected of them in adulthood…learn to acquire the
skills and manage the multiple demands that allow them to move into the labor market
as well as meet the expectations regarding commitment to family, community and
citizenship.” (#9)

The “Wickedness” of Adolescence

Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, has argued that it is crucial for us to understand what wicked problems are so that we will be better prepared to deal with them. “We would be vastly better off if we understood what wicked problems are and learned to distinguish between them and regular (or ‘tame’) problems.” Everyone associated with the travails of adolescence – the young people themselves, their parents, teachers, and society itself – would appreciate and benefit from being “vastly better off” by understanding what wicked problems are. The reason for this is not complicated: Most of the most important problems that teenagers face are wicked ones. Learning about wicked problems, then, is an important first step in grappling with the challenges of “raising teens.” Among the characteristics of wicked problems that were identified by Horst Rittle and Melvin Webber and described in an earlier chapter, are three that are particularly relevant for a discussion of the wicked problems of adolescence: First, for wicked problems, there are no stopping rules. They are never completely resolved or finished and so are never “solved.” The development tasks identified by the scholars and researchers as crucial will continue far beyond the time when teenagers become adults. There is no moment when young people – or anyone for that matter – will be able to say, “I have now finished with the task of understanding complex moral behavior and the underlying principles of justice and caring for others.” It is also true that the struggle with learning to manage sexual feelings and engage in healthy sexual behavior never ends nor do the tasks of acquiring the coping skills of effective decision-making, problem solving and conflict resolution. Teenagers will spent the rest of their lives wrestling with these issues.

Second, every “solution” to a wicked problem is never true or false, but good or bad, better or best. Determining what is the “best” possible solution to a wicked problem is in itself, a wicked problem, one that requires a serious attempt to work through the complexities inherent in deciding what is the best thing to do, and then learning how to do it.

And third, people see wicked problems from own perspectives, and since there is no methodology available (as there is in science) that will provide a objective and agreed-upon definition for a problem, there can never be a single definition for it. All attempts to define the problem will be influenced by a person’s values, preferences, personal history, and biases, as well as their position in society. Is premarital sex a problem? To a religious advisor or a parent, perhaps it is, but to a therapist helping a young person navigate the difficult terrain of healthy sexual behavior, perhaps not.

In summary, the “wickedness” of adolescent problems is a consequence of the existence and interactions of five interrelated factors: First, the nature of the problems themselves. Setting aside for the moment who it is that is grappling with them – teens, adults or senior citizens – wicked problems present obstacles that are almost impossible to surmount. They are by definition wicked and not tame, and so have properties that make any attempt to grapple with them tenuous, complex, and incomplete.

Second, the inability of the adolescent mind to comprehend just what it is facing. Teens seem to be singularly unprepared to imagine either causes or consequences. Peering into the future and asking, “What difference will this make later on?” is as unusual as choosing to listen to Bing Crosby rather Eminem or Adele.

Third, there are few sources of accurate and helpful information which, put into the context of the lives that teenagers are living, would be helpful making decisions. As a result, their sources of information about the problems they are facing in life necessarily come from each other, the internet and the street. Making things worse, few if any adolescents have any idea that wicked problems even exist. If they happened to hear someone use the term, or read in somewhere, their conclusion would undoubtedly lead to ideas of bad or evil rather than complex and difficult.

Fourth, since many of their parents are still struggling with their own issues around sexuality, justice, decision making, conflict resolution, and the management of their own complex emotions such as anger, jealousy, and prejudice, they are frequently unable to to help their children.

And finally, society, including the media, education, politics, and the adults who are singled out for praise and honor, sends out an endless stream of confusing and contradictory “memes,” images, and scripts that often lead away from rather than toward the chances of successful work with wicked problems.

“We Fear and We Are Fearful”

Successful passage through the fraught years of adolescence requires facing up to problems that are “malignant” “vicious,” “tricky,” and “aggressive,” and, which, in turn, creates situations that are confusing, demanding, frightening and frustrating. In short, adolescents must contend with and confront a large and imposing number of wicked problems. With no rules for stopping work on them, and with no way to know if or when they have been successful, the contending and confronting goes on and on. Social scientists have been successful in identifying from the research literature the development tasks of adolescence. What they have not been able to offer are instructions as to how the young people should go about navigating their way through them. No one should be surprised at this. Beyond cliches and platitudes, no one is sure what to recommend. There are no correct answers or true solutions to any of the problems that are included on their lists. Adolescents are left with limited alternatives for making choices and taking action: trial and error, making mistakes and then trying to learn from them, figuring it out, muddling through, avoiding and denying, to mention only a few. In the midst of all this, there is a frightening number of young people who, lacking the coping skills which could help them manage the confusion, discouragement, and depression, make attempts to end their lives. The lucky ones may have a parent who is both present and skillful, or find a role model, mentor, teacher or even a peer, whose presence and support can make a huge difference. But no one can count on this.

As part of an introduction to Raising Teens, author A. Rae Simpson wrote:

“As a society, we both fear adolescents and fear for them. We fear their rashness, their rudeness and their rawness; and we fear for their safety, their future, and their very lives.”

Our fears are justified. After all, what these rash, rude and raw adolescents are struggling with are endless problems – mostly unknown and anticipated – that they don’t understand nor know what to do with, and, if handled badly, can seriously threaten their safety, their futures, and in some cases, their lives. For some, there is tragedy ahead. Most need help. Where will it come from and who will offer it remains for all involved a serious – and wicked – problem.

Leadership is a Wicked Problem*

Joseph Bentley — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 17:49:33 +0000

Among the many things that human beings have in common is a desire to be better off, to find or create a better future than the one they presently inhabit. In 1982, philosopher Karl Popper gave voice and substance to this desire in, In Search of a Better World. The first sentence spells out his premise: “All living things are in search of a better world…They are trying to improve their situation.” Since this is a desire of all living things, and not just human beings, it is clear that it is a universal motivator.

For Popper, however, the search for a better world is not only about seeking a better life in order to be more comfortable or satisfied. He believes that our survival depends on a successful search. Popper explains this belief by going back some 4 billion years when life first appeared on the planet. Whatever the form of that earliest life, he suggests that it’s survival was constantly at risk. Like all forms of life up to and including the present time, in the beginning life was confronted with threats to its continuing existence. It’s future depended upon being able to address those threats successfully. “We can see that life…brings something completely new into the world,” wrote Popper, “something that did not previously exist: problems and active attempts to solve them.” Nothing has changed in this regard during the past 4 billions years. Problems exist today and threaten our existence as they have through history. During the eons of time up to the present day, the survival of all forms of life on the planet has depended on success in acquiring the capabilities to identify the problems that threaten them and make successful attempts to solve them. Those that are successful, continue to live and to evolve. Those that are not, disappear.

All Life is Problem Solving

This logic – that problems exist, and because they exist, our well-being, and even our survival, is threatened – seems to have led Popper to broaden his emphasis beyond just searching for a better world. In All Life is Problem Solving, published in 1994, he expanded his attention to include what was required to find this better world: the “completely new” set of skills for finding and solving problems. Since “all life is problem solving, he concludes that the only way to be successful in our search for a better world to be good at problem solving, to be able to confront successfully the myriad of problems that we will encounter along the way. Life demands that we solve the ones we can solve and manage the ones we cannot. All actions of human beings, he believes, begin as attempts to solve problems. Popper’s response to this demand is gratitude: “I owe everything to my beloved problems,” he wrote. “I really fell in love with my first problem…and after I obtained a solution, I fell in love with my various other problems.”

The Essence of Leadership

Not only are human beings everywhere attempting to find ways of becoming better off themselves, but leaders are also expected to contribute, directly or indirectly, to the well-being of the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people that either report to them or work in the organizations and institutions which they lead. They are expected to ensure that there are profits for their shareholders; for creating and maintaining effective organizations and institutions in order to make that happen; for contributing to the well-being of the society which makes possible their very existence; and for helping the people who work in these organizations find a better future for the organization as well as for themselves. The way leaders are supposed to make all this happen is to be alert for the problems that stand in the way of progress, then find ways to solve them. Philosopher and economist E. F. Schumacher sums it up this way: “To live means to cope, to contend and keep level with all sorts of circumstances, many of them difficult. Difficult circumstances present problems, and it might be said that living means, above all else, dealing with problems.” In Schumacher’s view, grappling with problems rises to the position of “above all else,” making it the most important means of ensuring success in one’s search for a better world.

Most Fall Short

While there is an almost infinite number of skills, talents, and capabilities that leaders must acquire and master in order to be successful, finding and solving problems is the meta-level ability: Every challenge that leaders face, in one way or another, is either a problem or connected to one. And most of them are wicked. Yet even a cursory examination of the performance of most leaders leads one to conclude that most fall short. Author and consultant Mike Myatt is less generous. In an article published in 2013 in Forbes Magazine, Myatt writes, “Let’s cut right to the chase – The biggest problems leaders face is problem solving itself…[and] most leaders are woefully inept when it comes to problem solving.” Being “woefully inept” means that few problems are managed or solved successfully. And as a result, progress toward finding a better world is compromised.

“Vastly” Better Off?

Since it is a given that there is no one way to become better off, but rather an infinite number of choices available, are there some ways that are superior to others? Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at New York University, thinks so. In an article published in 2012, he named one way that he believed should be on everyone’s list: “We would be vastly better off,” he wrote,” if we understood what wicked problems are and learned to distinguish between them and regular (or “tame”) problems.” Rosen makes the explicit connection between gaining an understanding of wicked problems and becoming better off. But not just better off, but vastly better off. Why vastly? It’s not complicated. Since most of the serious problems we face at work, in relationships, and in our lives, are wicked and not tame, it is wicked problems at the center of most of “sturm und drang” that interfere with our search for a better world. Once we understand what wicked problems are and how they are different from tame ones, we are much better prepared to do something about them. With this knowledge, making things better becomes a real possibility. In other words, until we understand what wicked problems are – and what they are not – we are severely handicapped in our efforts to get to a better place. Without a fundamental understanding of wicked problems and without the tools needed to take appropriate action to address them, we remain wedded to efforts that not only are largely unproductive and futile, but, often make things worse

Peanut and Jelly Sandwiches vs. The Executive Committee

As we know, almost all problems can be placed in one of two categories: tame or wicked. Among the most fundamental differences between them was identified in a comment by Former Secretary of State George Schultz quoted earlier: There are huge differences, he said, between “problems you can solve [and] problems you can only work at.”

This fundamental difference between “solving” and “working at” becomes clear when we examine two problem situations that affected two different groups of people. In February of 2015, the best team in professional basketball, the Golden State Warriors, had a record of 44 wins and only 5 losses. While flying back to California after a game, an important post-game ritual for the players on the Warriors team was indulging in an astonishing number of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Imagine their surprise and frustration, when they discovered after a hard fought victory, that there was no peanut butter or jelly to found anywhere on the plane. The players were at first mystified, and then furious. “Other teams have real problems,” sniffed Ben Cohen in the Wall Street Journal, “and the Warriors have peanut-butter-and-jelly problems.” Actually, for the Warriors, the absence of peanut butter and jelly was a real problem.

As it turned out, the problem originated with the owners of the team. After winning the NBA championship in 2014, they looked for every way to improve in 2015. They bought in new health and fitness coaches who decided that peanut butter and jelly had to go – too much fat and too much sugar. What they forgot was to involve the team members in the decision. When Steve Kerr, the superstar of the team, quickly made clear that the sandwiches would not be banned, they miraculously reappeared on the team post-game menu. Problem solved!

An example of a problem that could not be solved but only worked on occurred in 2014 at the Executive Team meeting shortly after Satya Nadella was named as the new CEO of Microsoft. “What is the purpose of this team?” asked Nadella? “Why does it exist? Are we adding value to this company? And if yes, what is it? If no, what should it be.” Nadella’s questions identified issues, while extremely important, that had no correct answers, and since he offered questions, with no answers, it became clear that he expected that the team would come up with it’s own answers. And while, these answers would no be correct in any objective sense, they would be their best efforts.

After what must have been interesting and probably intense discussions. the team answered Nadella’s questions. As Nadella put it, “The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity.?” While there were undoubtedly hundreds or even thousands of different answers to Nadella’s questions, none would “correct” in the traditional way of defining correct. Yet, for that executive team, they were “correct.” For Microsoft, these values also represented goals to be pursued, goals that could never be fully reached but only worked on. Microsoft would never be finished with the challenges of increasing clarity, alignment or intensity in the company.

On the Nature of Wicked Problems

Flying home without peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, while important, was a tame problem and the Warriors quickly solved it. On the other hand, determining what is the value of an executive committee for a company is a wicked one. As we learned in an earlier chapter, wicked problems not only have no correct answers, but the “best” ones is the best that can be done.

Other important characteristics of wicked problems that have been previously discussed and are important to keep in mind are:

– There are no stopping rules. For wicked problems in families, marriages, teams, organizations, and governments there is always more to do. Work goes on until people grow tired, lose interest, when budgets are cut, or when they die.

– Without any rules for stopping, there is no ending to be reached. If “solving” means that an end the problem has been reached and they people are finished with it, then wicked problems are never solved.

– The most accurate statement that can be made is, ‘While things are improving,
there is more to be done.”

– There is no way to know whether a “solution” for a wicked problem is useful
until it has been implemented.

– Solutions can only be understood as temporary arrangements put in place to improve things. Since situations change, all solutions must be revisited and revised in order to expect continuous improvement.

– Every “solution” to a wicked problem is a one-shot operation. There is no”trial and
error.” Every attempt counts.

– Every wicked problem is unique. No one has ever seen it before.

– There is no finite set of possible solutions; they are infinite, limited only by
one’s imagination.

– There is no single “root cause” for a wicked problems, but a multitude of causes. Every wicked problem can also be a symptom of another problems.

– While tame problems have beginnings, middles, and ends, wicked problems are, as Robert Frost once wrote, “only middles.”

– Those who choose to work on wicked problems, or are assigned to work on them, have no right to be wrong. If they do not get it right the first time, they are usually punished.

A summary of these and other characteristics of wicked problems makes clear why they are so difficult: Since those who are involved will see the problem differently, there is no single or correct way to view or define it; since it is almost impossible to say what the problem is or to define it clearly, the perspectives from which it is seen and the way that it is framed will change the nature of the problem as well as the proposed remedies available; there are inevitably many stakeholders, each with skin in the game, and each wanting a different outcome.

Larry Cuban, research scholar at Stanford, defines wicked problems this way:

Wicked problems are ill-defined, ambiguous, complicated, interconnected
packed with potential conflict. In organizations [and elsewhere] wicked
problems arise when people compete for limited resources, hold conflicting values,
and wrestle with diverse expectations held by others about what [we] should
be doing.

If people find themselves working with others in situations where there are limited resources, conflicting values, where people hold diverse expectations for each others, then the chances are very good that they are in the middle of a wicked problem.

Leadership is a Wicked Problem

The primary and most important purpose of leaders, be they in families, teams, organizations, or nations, is to identify the important problems that are interfering with successful movement toward goals , and then make sure they are addressed successfully. Everything leaders do is connected in one way or another with this critical responsibility. If there were no problems – if things worked and worked out as they should or as we wanted them to – there would be no need for leaders. This idea may seem strange in a society where leaders occupy the highest rungs of prestige, power, and economic reward. Yet the omnipresence of leaders, their importance, and the deference and ecomonic rewards we offer them, is evidence that we have problems for which solutions are needed, but that we, as individuals, have no way of finding them or how to put them in place. Few things work as we expect them to – education, health care, work teams, business organizations, and governments are examples – and so our hope is that our leaders will find ways to solve our problems.

Increasingly, academics and practitioners are becoming aware that the most of the problems that we expect leaders to solve are wicked and not tame. Here is John C. Camillus, professor at the University of Pittsburg: “In business, some problems are easy, some problems are hard, and some problems are so complex, so intractable…that they are best described as “wicked.” Wicked problems, Camillus writes, are basically unsolvable, making the usual tools problem solving in business “virtually impotent.”

Author and consultant Marty Neumeier relies upon a biological metaphor: “The world’s wicked problems crowd us like piranha,” he writes, forcing their way into our lives and threatening us with disaster. This is especially true in the world of business, where leaders and managers must face such wicked problems as “breakneck change, omniscient customers, balkanized markets, rapacious shareholders, traitorous employees, regulatory headlocks, and pricing pressure from desperate competitors with little to lose and everything to gain.”

British professor and organizational theorist Keith Grint makes a case that wicked problems are the core challenges of leadership: “Management might be focussed on solving complex but essentially Tame problems in a unilinear fashion: applying what worked last time. But leadership is essentially about facing Wicked problems that are literarily ‘unmanageable.'” And not only unmangeable, he adds, but unsolvable as well. Since there is no rule for stopping work on a wicked problem, “we often end up having to admit that we cannot solve wicked problems.”

In May of 2015, newly appointed provost at the University of Southern California, Michael Quick, challenged the Board of Trustees, the faculty, and the students by posing a crucial question: What is to be USC’s contribution to the community, the nation and to the world? He then answered his own question: We must tackle the most important problems facing us in the 21st century. “These are called wicked problems,” he said, and include “poverty, food and water security, obesity, social justice, cancer, sustainability and climate change, terrorism, cyber security, aging and dementia. These are the big, complex problems facing the 21st century.”

The leaders and authors quoted above have discovered something important. As the 21st century progresses, we can expect to encounter more difficult and complex problems, and most of them will be wicked. Our leaders will be expected to deal with them. Will they be ready?

Leadership Qualities for Wicked Problems

Complicating this issue is a paradox: even as we hope, expect, even demand that our leaders solve our problems, the problems we assign to them are wicked and therefore cannot be solved. Addressing this paradox with some measure of success will require people with special knowledge and skill. Here is Jay Rosen’s view of some the talents and abilities they must possess:

Wicked problems demand people who are creative, pragmatic, flexible, and collaborative…
They know that there’s no right place to start, so they simply start somewhere and see what happens. They understand that they’re more likely to understand the problem after it’s solved than before. They don’t expect a [correct] solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough. They’re never convinced that they know enough to solve the problem so they’re constantly testing their ideas on different stakeholders.

Carly Fiornia, CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, added several additional qualities that she saw as important for effective leadership: “Leadership…is about problem-solving and making progress and changing the order of things for the better, which means it’s about humility and empathy and collaboration.”

Since most of the problems leaders face are wicked and not tame, leaders who have acquired these abilities and talents and are able to apply them, greatly increase their chances of success. Yet here, once again, many leaders fall short: Many prefer individualism to collaboration, dogmatism instead of flexibility, certainty in place of humility, ruthlessness over empathy, linear thinking instead of creativity, and, as a final nail in the coffin, they believe that they have the answers to what the problems are and what should be done about them and so are disinclined to listen to others.

Adding Value

Each day, not only leaders but all human beings, are engaged in trying to “change the order of things for the better.” Because of the knowledge, skills and personal qualities that some possess, they are are able to make important contribution: they add value to the situations in which they find themselves. Others who lack relevant knowledge or skills, instead of adding value, often subtract it, leaving situations worse off than before. Over time, those people who are seen as adding value are invited to stay and continue the game. They are the first ones chosen to be on the team. Those who regularly make things worse can expect to be marginalized, ignored or dismissed.

Leaders Adding Value

Leaders – and employees as well – are expected to add rather than subtract value to the organizations which they lead and in which they work. High on the list of ways that leaders do this is to take the lead in setting and reaching goals. Without clear goals and the means to address them, there can be no progress, only random and directionless activities. Once goals are decided upon, however, new problems emerge: first, serious obstacles stand in the way, and second, the problems these obstacles present are almost always wicked. It follows, then, that the most important way for leaders to add value to an organization is be proficient in grappling successfully with an endless parade of wicked problems.

Once leaders become aware of the existence and nature of these wicked problems and gain confidence and skill in dealing with them, their value to the organization increases exponentially. Not only are they more capable of grappling with them themselves, but they are are also prepared to teach others to find ways to increase their own confidence and skill.

Here are several of many critical insights about wicked problems, when passed on to others and put into practice, increase the organization’s capabilities to address wicked problems:

– Leaders have no special knowledge that will permit them to define problems or determine the solutions. They must rely on others.

– Neither are there experts or consultants who can solve them. What emerges from this is an awareness that “we are the ones we are looking for, and we the ones who do something about our wicked problems.”

-Giving up the idea of “solving” the problem and replacing it with the idea that what is possible is “continuous improvement” can be both discouraging or energizing. Yet it is what it is.

-Replacing the idea of “solution” as an end to problems with the understanding that what is available are temporary arrangements put in place to make things better and is an important contribution. What follows, then, is in the future, these “solutions” must be revisited and redesigned.

-Problems are not “discovered” through analysis or experimentation. They must be “created” and defined by those who are knowledgeable about the problem situation and committed to working together to make things better.

-In order to work successfully on wicked problems, it is important that a wide range of ideas, preferences, and opinions are openly shared. People should be prepared for the appearance of disagreement, conflict, controversy and even confrontation, and be able to take advantage of these in order to move toward consensus.

Making a Difference

Business organizations are inevitably overrun with problems. When a team leader brings one to the table, the first question should be, “Is this a tame problem or a wicked one?” The answer to this question is crucial and leads to a next series of questions: What should be done? By whom? When? For how long? How will we know when we are finished? The answers to these questions will determine everything that follows, and set in place all the possibilities for success or failure.

Many of the problems that leaders grapple with each day, and will continue to grapple with into the future, are wicked. This is no small thing, nor can it be ignored: “The narrow-gauge mindset of the past,” writes Marty Neumeier, “is insufficient for today’s wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.”

* Adapted from Bentley, Joseph C., (2019). “Leadership is a Wicked Problem.” Graziadio Business Review, Vol 22, Iss 3. Accessed at https://pepperdine.edu/2019/12/leadership-is-a-wicked-problem/.

A Knack For Problems

Joseph Bentley — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 20:30:53 +0000

January 21, 2020

“All right Sergeant, there won’t be any changes. We’ll run it like you’ve been running it until I get the knack.” The year was 1945, the place was the Italian mountains that overlooked the Po River Valley, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during World War II, the goal was to drive the German troops out of Northern Italy, the “I” who didn’t have the knack was Bob Dole, newly-commissioned second lieutenant and the new leader of the 2nd Platoon in I Company, 3rd Battalion, 85th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, and the Sergeant to whom Dole was talking was Sgt. Carafa, who had led the platoon after the death of the previous commanding officer. “I was easy to spot as the new guy,” wrote Dole many years later. “I was the one with a clean uniform.”

The word “knack” Lt. Dole used is familiar to most of us. Defined in Merriam-Webster as “An ability, talent, or special skill,” it is an old word, first appearing in English in 1580 as “krak,” and meaning a “sharp blow.” These days, when we say someone has a knack, we mean that they are especially capable at something. While often used in a positive sense (“She has a knack for making people welcome”.), it is also used to make a judgement about negative behaviors (“He has a knack for getting into trouble.”) Either way, people who demonstrate a knack for something are capable of knowing what to do, when to do it, and doing it well.

When Lt. Dole – who survived the war and went on to acquire a knack for politics – took command of the 2nd Platoon, he was acutely aware that he didn’t know how to lead an infantry platoon in battle. He didn’t have the knack for it. If he were to be successful, he would have to learn it. And not just learn it, but then – even more difficult – put it into practice. The lives of the men under his command as well as his own were on the line.

Having a Knack

The play, The Traveling Lady, described by the critic Terry Teachout as, “Among the most tenderly poignant of the soft-spoken studies of small-town life in which Horton Foote specialized,” opened on Broadway in 1954, failed to attract an audience, and closed after only three weeks. During the next several decades, it struggled through difficult times. In 1957, it was adapted for TV’s Studio One, and in 1965, it was unsuccessfully made into a film for Steve McQueen titled Baby, the Rain Must Fall.

The play’s future looked bleak until the playwright, Horton Foote, revised it in 2004, reducing it from three acts to one. In 2019, the new version opened Off Broadway in a production directed by Austin Pendleton and became a great success. “Pendleton,” according to Teachout, “has a knack for making smart things happen in small theaters. He’s done it again. I feel certain that Mr. Foote himself would have delighted in the perfect stylistic unity of this lovely revival.”

After a long journey to nowhere, the play found in Mr. Pendleton a person with a knack for making it into an unqualified success.

“Comedy Tonight”

Theatre director Michael Blakemore once said that when the first act curtain opens on a play, the audience has a problem: Who’s who, what’s what, what’s important and what isn’t. “Audiences really like to be told a definitive story in a compelling way,” said Mr. Blakemore. “It has to have captivating characters, an exciting challenge for them to solve, and the solution that’s worthy of the time [they’ve] taken to watch it.” Failing to close the deal on any of these requirements leaves the audience with the tensions of unresolved problems. Ultimately, it is the director who is responsible for addressing the audience’s problems, and in order to be successful, a good director must have a knack for understanding the audience’s problems and for addressing them. If the director fails in this, chances are good that the play will be a flop.

A director who was able to help the audience solve its problems occurred with the 1962 smash hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Except that when it opened on the road in New Haven, Connecticut, it was not a smash hit, but a colossal failure. It got bad reviews and played to mostly empty houses. There was a problem lurking in the play that threatened to sink it before it got to Broadway, but, since no one knew what it was, no one knew what needed to be done to save it.

The premise behind the musical was simple: The producers, writers, and director, planned it to be a hilarious romp through ancient Rome which would generate unending waves of laughter. But, as author Jack Vertel in The Secret Life of the American Musical,” wrote,”…it was actually much brainer and more sophisticated in its construction than it pretended to be. Its authors were not only smart,” he wrote, “but they were also smart-asses.” They were too clever when being clever wasn’t what was needed.

Panicked by its failure, the producer and director, who had between them seventy years of experience in the theatre, were at a loss to know what to do. They looked for someone who had the knack for finding and fixing problems with musicals which were on their way to oblivion. So they turned to dancer, choreographer, and director Jerome Robbins who shortly thereafter traveled from New York to Connecticut and took a look. He spotted the problem at once – it was the opening number. The show began with a charming song called “Love is in the Air.” “It was a sweet, soft shoe number about how romance tends to drive people nuts,” wrote Vertel. “It’s a honey of a number but it tells us nothing about where Forum is headed.” People in the audience, anxious to learn what was coming, heard the number and expected that what would follow would be sweet, gentle, and tender. Instead, what they got was vaudeville in spades: raunchy humor, sexy insinuations, skimpy costumes, pratfalls, double takes and old jokes crammed into new situations. They were discombobulated to say the least. Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics and the music, was charged with writing a new opening number, and after some resistance, delivered “Comedy Tonight,” a song that informed the audience that “Something convulsive, Something repulsive” was coming. It would have “Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns/Bring on the lovers, liars, and clowns,”and ended with a list of what they would soon see:

“Pantaloons and tunics,
Courtesans and eunuchs,
Funerals and chases,
Baritones and basses.
Panderers,
Philanderers,
Cupidity,
Timidity,
Mistakes,
Fakes,
Rhymes,
Crimes,
Tumblers,
Grumblers,
Bumblers,
Fumblers.”

After hearing all this, the audience was ready and raring to go. And when Forum opened later that year in New York, it was a smash success, winning several Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Author (Musical).

But without someone who had the knack for finding problems on the stage and fixing them, Forum would have died an ignoble death in Connecticut.

Lacking The Knack

Imagine for a moment it is 1935, that your name is Patricia Edwina Victoria Mountbatten and you are eleven years old. One day your mother, Lady Edwina Ashley Mountbattten, wife of Admiral of the Fleet, the 1st Earl of Mountbatten of Burma, tells you that you and your nine-year-old sister, Pamela, must leave your home at the British Naval Base on the island of Malta and travel to Hungary and stay there for a few weeks. She tells you that you are going because of “international tensions” in Europe, an explanation that makes no sense to you. Within weeks, you and your sister arrive in Budapest, accompanied by your mother, a nanny, and Bunny, whose real name is Lt. Col. Harold Simmons of the Coldstream Guards, and who is also your mother’s latest lover and, for many years, a member of your household. Within a few days your mother finds a small hotel two hours outside of Budapest that she is comfortable with, settles you and your sister there, gives you both a peck on the cheek, then she and Bunny are gone. Four months pass, and as summer turns into fall, you are still at the Keles Szalio Hotel. Even though your nanny has sent many messages to your mother – she has run out of money and the hotel owner wants the account settled – there has been no reply. When you left the Mediterranean in July your nanny packed clothes suitable for the summer. Now winter is coming, and the weather has turned cold.

Several weeks later, you are surprised to find your mother and Bunny downstairs in the hotel lobby. At last, they have come to get you. What took them so long was not the “international tensions” in Europe, but that your mother couldn’t remember where she had left you. In July, as she and Bunny were leaving, she wrote down the name of the hotel and then promptly lost it. For over four months your mother had no idea where you were or how to find you.

Once you were “found,” however, your parents weren’t quite sure what to do with you. Their problem was solved when after a week or two of being reunited with your mother and Bunny – your father was away at sea – it was decided that you and Pamela would stay with your great-aunt and great-uncle in Darmstadt, Germany, while your mother and Bunny spent the next year traveling around the world. Christmas came but no parents came with it. “It was strange being away from our parents that Christmas,” wrote Pamela in her memoir, Daughter of Empire. You and Patricia celebrated the holidays in Darmstadt, while your mother and Bunny were still on their world tour. And your father? “Poor Daddy spent Christmas Day alone in Malta, his meal leftovers from the staff lunch.”

Most first-time mothers lack the knack for motherhood. Humans are not endowed as are other species with strong instincts for taking care of their young, and so for their newborn children to survive, at least one parent – usually the mother – has to acquire a knack for watching out for them. An essential requirement for learning a knack for anything is a desire to learn it. Edwina seemed to lack any desire for caring for her children, either newborns or as they grew up. After all, not many mothers “misplace” their children for months at a time, and instead of frantically searching for them, decide instead to go off on a holiday with their live-in lover. “As a young child,” wrote Pamela, “I rarely saw my mother. Even in 1924, when my sister Patricia was born, she partied in the South of France, leaving her baby daughter home at just a month old. It seemed she couldn’t stop indulging in…the endless adventure and travel that so thrilled her.”

Their father, on the other hand, never turned away. Pamela wrote that it was their father, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who made family life possible: “It wasn’t until years later…that I realized that it was his complete lack of jealousy that prevented our family from fragmenting and how, in so many areas of his life, he sought a practical solution to life’s tricky problems.”

Endless Problems at the Center

Lord Mountbatten acquired his ability to find practical solutions to “life tricky problems” the same way we all do: He learned it. At birth we are programmed with a limited number of reflexive behaviors necessary to sustain life: breathe, suck, sneeze, cough, cry, poop and pee, plus a few others that are built into our nervous systems. Acquiring a knack for learning the skills required for dealing with the rest of “life’s tricky problems” is a challenge that begins almost at once. From our birth to our death, having a knack for problems is crucial for one major reason: problems are at the center of our lives. “From a birth no one chooses, to a death few desire, we have to cope with endless problems,” wrote philosopher John Kekes in The Art of Living. “To fail is to suffer. And what is gained from success?…some pleasure, a brief sense of triumph, perhaps a little peace of mind. But these are only brief interludes of well-being because the difficulties never cease.” If we are to experience a desirable level of satisfaction and success in our lives, coming to terms with our “endless” problems is required.

Acquiring a Knack is The Key

Even though the unbidden and unwelcome problems that enter our lives are endless, we are not helpless. By acquiring a knack for understanding them, then expanding our knowledge by learning the skills for solving them, we can enlarge our sense of triumph, increase of our peace of mind, and expand the interludes of well-being. The endlessness of the problems we must face is mostly beyond our control. What is under our control is how we go about confronting them.

Where can we start to get a knack for problems? Our best option is to turn to other people who know more than we do. Suppose you are interested in learning to write poetry. “How hard could it be,” you say to yourself, and pick up a pencil and a piece of of paper and begin. Two hours later you examine the “poem” you have written and conclude that it is pretty lousy. “This is much harder than I thought,” you say to yourself. But if you are really serious about poetry, help is available. In 1992, two renowned poets, Steven Dunning and William Stafford wrote, Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises. Their book has helped thousands of high school students learn to write poetry. The authors are not shy about their purpose: “Our modest aim for Getting the Knack,” they write in the Foreword, “is to help you change your life, for the better.”

We agree. Getting a knack for writing poetry can change one’s life for the better. And so can learning a knack for any worthwhile endeavor: teaching children in school, giving speeches in public, cooking gourmet meals, managing conflict and disagreement, working as a psychiatric nurse, forgiving those who offend us, leading a large business organization, negotiating solutions that benefit all sides, listening with empathy and compassion to those who are suffering, and on and on. For all of this and more, having a knack for it is the key.

Lt. Dole Gets The Knack for Leading in Battle

We find another example of seeking help from other people in Lt. Dole’s attempts to learn to lead a platoon of soldiers into battle. When he reported for duty in Italy in 1945, he arrived with an important advantage: He knew he didn’t have the knack to be a platoon leader, and so did the men in the platoon. Yet the evidence is compelling that within a few weeks, Lt. Dole was well on his way toward acquiring the knack for leading troops in battle.

How did he do it? In 1945, during the fierce fighting in Italy, there were no books available titled “How to Lead Men in Battle” with 20 exercises. He had to learn it, as they say in Spanish, “sobre la marcha, “- on the march, – and he had to learn it mostly from the men that he commanded.

As reported by those who served under him, here are eight ways that Dole went about acquiring the knack for leading the platoon:

He knew who he was and what was expected of him.

“He wasn’t like some of those ninety-day wonders, graduates of the Benning School for Boys, who thought they owned the world because they got a strip of brass on their collars,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in Bob Dole. A lieutenant of infantry was the man with binoculars and a map case and a target on his back, something that Dole learned quickly. German snipers aimed at the lieutenants, knowing that by killing them, they could disrupt the chain of command and throw their unit into chaos. Yet not once did he shirk from the responsibilities of command.

He made personal connections.

“I introduced myself to each man,” Dole wrote in his memoir many years later. “I’m Lt Dole. I’m going to be leading the platoon.” Then after a brief pause, “Dole. Like the pineapple juice.” The men always smiled. “Hey, this guy’s ok.” When Dole arrived, there was a lull in the fighting. “[It] gave me an opportunity to get acquainted with the men,” he wrote, “joke around with them a bit and establish some rapport. I purposely tried to stay out of the command tent as much as possible, eating with the guys…talking casually with my new comrades, allowing then to get to know me, and learning something about their capabilities.”

From the beginning it was not “I” but “we.”

When Lt. Dole reported to 2nd Platoon, he was aware that he had no clear idea about what to do or how to do it. He understood that to avoid getting himself and his men killed, he had to learn quickly. He was also aware that he could only learn it from the soldiers in the platoon. But would they help? When he said to Sgt Carafa, “All right soldier, there won’t be any changes. We’ll run it like you’ve been running it until I get the knack,” he sent two important messages: “We’ll run it,” not “I’ll run it,” and, “There won’t be any changes” until I learn how to do this. The soldiers who were watching breathed sighs of relief. They’d had their fill of newly commissioned, second lieutenants who swaggered in and threw their weight around, bringing more problems than solutions. As Dole became more active in leading the platoon, he told Sgt Carafa that if “he thought something needed to be changed, we’d talk about it.”

He didn’t push himself forward or call attention to himself.

“He wasn’t an outspoken person,” said one soldier. “He just quietly did his job…He wasn’t out there to prove anything.” “He was not like those ninety-day wonders… who thought they owned the world because they got a strip of brass on their collars,” said another.

He asked for help.

“He asked what we thought, and I was happy to work with him,” said a soldier, “because not all officers are like that.”

He listened.

“He listened to the non-coms, the senior enlisted men, who had more experience than newly commissioned lieutenants like himself,” said another.

He valued those who knew what to do and showed respect for them.

“[Sgt Carafa] was a good seasoned soldier, one who had been serving his men well,” wrote Dole in his memoir. “I had no desire to usurp his position in the platoon. I was not the guy in charge. [Even though] I had a strip of brass on my collar, this man was golden.”

He was brave. He led by example.

When his platoon went on patrol, the noncommissioned officers told him, “It would be better if you stayed in the center of the platoon. That’s what most of the lieutenants do.” Dole demurred: “No, I’ll take the point,” he wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t know much about leadership at the time, but instinct told me that a leader must be out front. He must be willing to endure the fire, rather than hide from it or let someone else take the brunt of the blows.” The lieutenant was brave,” said twenty-year old Deveraux Jennings. “When Dole’s platoon came under fire from the Germans, he’d walk out to [the] men on post even though he did not have to.”

His success in becoming an effective platoon leader is best expressed by his men: “I thought he was the best officer I’d seen,” said one soldier in the platoon. “The men loved him,” said Sgt Carafa.

Four Steps Toward Getting a Knack

Often, however, there are few people to whom we can turn for guidance and advice. We find ourselves up against problems that are mostly alien and unknown to ourselves and to the others who around us. We are pretty much on our own. Here are four steps that can help one get a knack for addressing important problems:

Master the concepts, principles and guidelines. Learning the different languages of problems is the first step, one that is achieved primarily by reading and studying. It is a necessity that cannot be skipped. If someone attempts to address a problem with little or no understanding of its nature or substance, things will go downhill rapidly. As someone once said, “There is a profound difference between getting it and getting it done” The sequence is inviolate: first we must “get it,” and only then can we move to “getting it done.”

Moving from “learning about” to “learning to do” is next. While “getting it” is necessary, it doesn’t take us very far. The central idea behind grappling with any problem is to “solve it,” which means making changes for the better in relationships, teams, organizations, societies and lives

For this crucial step in Dole’s case, there were other people he could rely upon. Dole asked the men in his platoon for help, and then listened when they shared their experiences. By showing respect for his men, they became his willing teachers and avid supporters.

Here are some suggestions for finding others who can help: Find someone who is good at solving problems like those you are struggling with and ask them for suggestions and ideas; seek out mentors who “know the ropes,” then find ways to take advantage of their experiences. Acquiring a knack for problems is not only learning new concepts and behaviors, it is also ridding yourself of counterproductive attitudes and behaviors and replacing them with attitudes and behaviors that will help you reach your goals. Finding a coach who can offer helpful and timely feedback is among the most effective ways to move toward gaining a knack for problems.

Follow Isaac Stern’s advice: A number of years ago, while Isaac Stern, then America’s premier violinist, was walking in New York City, a man stopped him and asked, “How to I get to Carnegie Hall?” Stern’s answer was both simple and profound: “practice, practice, practice.” Solving easy problems is easy. Solving the complex and complicated ones that trouble us is exceedingly difficult, and if one is to excel at it, endless practicing is required.

Examine ruthlessly the consequences of your actions. Among the innovations that have helped organizations become more effective is one that was pioneered by the U. S. Army: the After Action Review (AAR). After ending a training exercise or a battle, the officers of the Brigade, Division or Army would address several questions in depth First: “What did we do that was successful? And then, “Let’s make sure we continue those successful practices in the future.” The second question addressed the other side of the coin: “What did we do that was shoddy, sloppy, or ineffective? Let’s be sure to identify them, understand why they happened, and work to get rid of them next time.” Adopting a personal After Action Review is the best way – and may be the only way – for one to make improvements in how things are done. It involves examining the consequences of one’s actions, determining what worked and what didn’t, then using this knowledge to make changes into the future. And making the process “ruthless” is not optional.

Mastering Life’s Tricky Problems

In her memoir, Daughter of Empire, cited earlier, Pamela Mountbatten honored her father, Lord Louis Mountbatten, for his abilities to “bring practical solutions to life’s tricky problems.” And with these words, Ms. Mountbatten has identified a task that we all share: Finding practical solutions to “life’s tricky problems.” No one is excused, no one is exempt, no one gets a free pass from dealing with these problems, which in addition to “tricky,” are often messy, ambiguous, demanding, and confusing. Like it or not – and most people don’t – all sorts of problems will arrive at our doorsteps and demand to be let in.

Three Flawed Strategies vs. Competence and Confidence

Many attempts to deal with these endless, tricky problems rely upon three flawed strategies: Denial, procrastination, and blaming others. All are losing propositions. Denying that tricky problems exist may seem to work temporarily, but the problems always return, and often with a vengeance; relying on procrastination is a losing tactic since by the time we get back to the problems (if we ever do), they almost always will have become worse; blaming others for our problems does nothing to make things better, and those who got the blame are not pleased. When they get a chance, they are happy to reciprocate in kind: take their turn to blame us for the problems they are struggling with. People who blame others for their problems will end up with a new problem: the enmity of the ones that they blamed.

Surprisingly, some people are not only ready to confront their endless, tricky problems, but actually enjoy the struggle. They have no need for denial, procrastination or blaming. Rather, they confront their problems directly with a realistic understanding of what they are up against. They have acquired valuable perspectives and skills which will serve them well in many situations. In short, they have acquired a knack for solving problems. They have become competent in facing up to problems and confident in moving towards rather than away from them. For life’s tricky problems, a combination of competence and confidence is, to use Lt. Dole’s term for Sgt. Carafa, “golden,” and almost always results in moving the ball closer to the goal.

In sum, gaining a knack for problems is a very good idea indeed.

Success Story: Robert Fulghum vs. Beethoven

Joseph Bentley — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:17:16 +0000

“Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed,
To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need.”

Emily Dickinson, 1859

The poet is undoubtedly right – success is most highly valued by those who seek it and fail. Yet we should not underestimate the importance of success for everyone: those who are waiting their turn in line to make their attempt; those make efforts and fall short; and those who actually reach their goal of becoming successful however they define it.

Success is high on everyone’s list. It is defined in the dictionary in three ways: as “an attainment that is successful;” as “an event that accomplishes its intended purpose;” and a “state of prosperity or fame.” However it is defined, there are problems with it. When we reach what we thought we wanted, we often discover that it is empty and meaningless, leaving us with the bitter taste of ashes in our mouths. And even when it seems we have accomplished something important, the good feelings don’t last. They soon fade, and we before long we are looking for new mountains to climb.

Begin With a Dream, Then Set a Goal

All efforts to achieve success begin with a dream. Yet if success is to become a reality, dreams are ephemeral and insufficient; something tangible must be accomplished. They must be translated into specific goals that can actually be achieved. Unless we can show that we have reached our goal, no claim of success is credible. And even then, for success to mean anything, the goal we reach must be difficult. While it is possible for a person to become accidentally successful, smooth and easy paths to small goals have little value. The more difficult the goal, the greater the honor and recognition that come from reaching it, and the sweeter the feelings that follow.

Many believe that they can only be successful when what they accomplish is as close to perfection as possible. They tend rely upon an “excellence standard:” the better the quality of a poem, the more positive the critical evaluations of a novel, the more impressive a profit/loss statement, or the longer a friendship has continued, then the more substantial is the claim of success. Products, presentations or performances that are full of errors, goofs, falling scenery, loose ends, and uncrossed t’s, do not permit much in the way of claiming success for the authors, actors or performers.

Yet there are times when the excellence of a performance or a product is less important that the story of how the performance came to be. Robert Fulghum’s struggle with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is such a story. Its importance – as well as its wonder – is not about the excellence of the performance itself – two of the three performances were abysmal – nor is it entirely about success since it includes hubris, egotism, and selfishness, at least in the beginning. These are not an auspicious set of qualities to rely upon when making a claim for success. But this case is one in which other criteria than excellence must be included: courage, faith, learning, growing love, and community. Any judgement of Fulghum’s success while conducting Beethoven must take into account these values as well.

Find a Celebrity Conductor

A number of years ago the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony was in serious trouble. Problems abounded and no one seemed to have solutions. Its founding conductor had been fired by the board, key musicians had resigned in protest, the musician’s union and the symphony board were in difficult negotiations to finalize a new contract, and finding a new conductor was proving to be more of a problem than anyone had imagined. In spite of the chaos and turmoil, survival depended upon the symphony staff finalizing plans for the new season and they had to do it without the leadership or support of the new conductor and music director.

Someone on the staff – just who is unknown – must have come up with a great idea: “Why don’t we start the season by bringing in a celebrity who will conduct the first concert? That should get people excited and help sell tickets.” And someone else must have added, “Not long ago I read in Robert Fulgham’s book, “All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten” that his fantasy was to rent a hall, hire an orchestra, recruit a chorus and conduct the last movement of Beethovon’s Ninth Symphony. Why don’t we invite him to conduct it at the opening concert?” And someone else must have chimed in and said, “What a great idea!”

Fulghum Says Yes

And so it came to pass that Robert Fulghum, author, minister, and home-spun philosopher, but definitely not a musician nor a conductor, received what he called “an astonishing call” from the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony: Would he be interested conducting the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the opening concert of the Symphony’s upcoming season? In Maybe, Maybe Not, published in 1993, Fulghum wrote of his surprise: “I assumed that they knew what they were doing or they wouldn not have asked.” And after all, he mused to himself, how difficult would it be to conduct a live orchestra? All that was required was to give the downbeat, wave your arms around in time to the music all the way to the end, then turn to the audience and take a bow. And Beethoven’s Ninth? On many occasions he had conducted it while standing in his living room. “Of course. I could do it.” he told himself. “On behalf of my new self-image as the Legendary Fuljumowski, I accepted.”

When the new symphony conductor was finally appointed, the program for the year was already announced and ticket sales were brisk. When he learned who was to conduct Beethoven on the opening concert of the year, he was appalled. The first thing he did was travel to Seattle to visit the Legendary Fuljumowski.

His first question was if the guest conductor knew how to read an orchestral score. “I don’t read music at all,” Fulghum answered. “Is that really going to be a problem?” This was followed by a long pause in the conversation. At last the new music director and conductor of the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony told him that the Ninth was so difficult that most conductors would not attempt it until they had years of experience; that in the final movement alone, there were at least thirty-one places where the conductor had to stop the orchestra, then start it again in a different tempo; that the Minneapolis Concert Symphony was not actually a symphony at all – there were only 26 regular members – and that for the last movement of the Ninth they would have to bring in another 25 or so temporary musicians, meaning they had never performed together before; that there would also be 100 members of the chorus plus four soloists; and that even though all were professional musicians, few had ever played in a performance of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Finally, the conductor said, “What you want to do is…is…is..so…completely…” Words failed him.

Then Fulghum said “But I really want to do this,” a comment that was followed by another long pause. “Well then,” sighed the real conductor, “we are in deep doodoo, (though to be accurate he used another word to express his despair).

Eventually they negotiated an agreement: Fulghum would work for six months to master the difficulties of the music and if by then he knew he shouldn’t try it, he would become “catastrophically ill” a week before the performance and not show up at all.

A week before the first performance, having decided that, “This was a must. A crazy, unimaginable, no-way-out must,” Fulghum showed up ready – or so he thought – to challenge Beethoven.

Success

They were all there, ready for the first rehearsal: the orchestra, the chorus, the soloists, and the guest conductor. “I stood at the podium,” said Fulghum, “raised my hands, and with crazed confidence, gave a hopeful downbeat.” And to his great surprise, they played! “It wasn’t great – we stumbled and fumbled and lurched along, but we hung together and it was done.” Everyone was stunned, including the real conductor, who was dumbfounded. They had actually played and sung one of the greatest and most difficult pieces of music in the Western Canon, and managed to end together. On the other hand, Fulghum was finished, ready to pack up and go home. Completely spent, the thought of three more rehearsals followed by three performances seemed impossible.

Less Than Successful

But the Legendary Fuljumowski stayed, and somehow made it though the rehearsals and to the opening night performance. It didn’t go well. In Fulghum’s opinion it was neither good, consistent or even competent. Under the influence of a series of adrenaline rushes (this was, after all, the realization of one of his most important life goals), he lost control. “My problem,” he said, “was that every time we came to a change of tempo, I…came in waving my arms at a speed about ten beats faster than normal…We got though the Ninth in record time.” One of the music critics called the performance “crisp.”

A New Perspective

The final performance, a black tie affair, was packed with people who had come to witness the the Legendary Fuljumowski conduct the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Bringing in a celebrity as a guest conductor had worked beyond the staff’s wildest dreams. But there was a problem. A serious one. The Legendary Fuljumowski didn’t think he could do it again. Not only was he drained and exhausted by the the previous two performances, but he had begun to question his motives. Now that he understood what the “Ode to Joy” was really about, how could he possibly do it again? Was satisfying his ego reason enough to stumble though a mediocre performance at best, and a farce at worst. It began to feel to Fulghum that trying it again was an insult to the music, the composer, and to the musicians, many of whom would never again have a chance to be part of one of the great experiences in classical music.

As the lights dimmed in the auditorium, Fulghum rose from his seat in the second row (a gimmick to give the appearance that anyone could lead an orchestra), slowly climbed the stairs to the stage, took his place at the podium, and looked at the waiting members of the orchestra. He paused. No, he thought to himself. I can’t do it.

In that moment of expectant silence, Fulghum turned to the audience and spoke to them of his struggle. He began describing the great YES! that was in this music; how this music had been played all over the world in honor of freedom and human solidarity; about Beethovon’s deafness out of which the music came and how he had never heard it himself. He told them of a wannabe conductor named Fulghum who had jumped at the chance to conduct for all of the wrong reasons. He talked about the members of the orchestra who had put up with him and yet had given their very best to the music. “I can’t dishonor this man or this music or this spirit,” he told the audience. He signaled for the conductor to come to the podium, then turned to the orchestra and told them to give it their all. And then, a rustling behind him caused him to turn. To his surprise, he saw that the audience had stood as one, ready to play their part in the performance.

And what did Fulghum do? He moved to the rear of the stage and joined the chorus. Even though he knew no German, nor had ever sung the music, he sang!

Beethoven Wins!

And then, because Robert Fulghum, celebrity conductor, had come at last to understand that the music and the composer deserved better than he could give them, the orchestra, the audience, the music and the composer got what they deserved: an impassioned, emotional, skillful, exuberant, joyful and heart-felt performance of Beethoven’s” Ode to Joy.”

Here are Fulghum’s words describing the final concert:

“It was the orchestra’s finest night. The musicians were finally united. The chorus and orchestra poured out a mighty sound. For a time, all of us in the hall could believe in the power of the human spirit to overcome evil. Beethoven lived. We lived. Nothing grander could be said or done at that moment in our lives. At the end…people cheered their lungs out, pounded their hands together, hugged each other, threw flowers and wept. What a night – what a world – what a life! YES!”

Pursuit of Happiness, Pursuit of Success

The words most often quoted from The Declaration of Independence – arguably the most important of Ameria’s founding documents – are these: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Since it was first published in 1776, the phrase “All men are created equal” has become for many the central belief that sets America apart from all other nations. And also during those years much has been made of the word “pursuit.” We can not expect happiness to come to us willy-nilly without effort; we must pursue it.

The same is usually true of success. If we wait passively for it to put in an appearance, we will be disappointed. Usually, we must put on our shoes, get up out of chair, open the door and go after it until we catch it. And even then, no matter the effort or sacrifice, many are never able to realize their dreams of success.

“They Also Serve…”

What then are we to make of Robert Fulghum’s misguided efforts to fulfill his dream of conducting Beethoven’s Ninth and then ending up, if not with complete failure, then with an event of resounding mediocracy? One conclusion worth remembering is that Fulghum began his term as conductor with a serious flaw: It was all about him. He forgot that there were others involved – the orchestra, the chorus, the soloists, and especially the composer. All were as much a part of the performance of Beethoven’s stirring and sublime music as was Fulghum.

And what of his next decision to turn away from the honor and the glory that could come from conducting the last performance? The answer to this question turns the traditional view of how to be successful on its head. When the Legendary Fuljumowski became aware that he was the obstacle standing in the way of reaching the success he had dreamed of; when he decided to stop pursuing success as he defined it and remembered that there were hundreds on the stage and thousands in the hall who were just as interested as he was in being part of a successful performance; when he was able to put aside his ego and understand at last that the music was greater than any human desire to be recognized for conducting it; and when he was able to step aside and let others do what they could do and what he could not, it became possible for something extraordinary to happen. And it was then that Robert Fulghum experienced the success that he had so assiduously sought.

There is a moral to this story: When we are involved in a collective effort – a symphony performance, an athletic competition, an executive team in a large organization, a search for excellence in our community – it is not possible for one person’s definition of success to reign. When it does, plan for failure.

“…Who Only Stand and Wait”

John Milton’s Sonnet 19, “When I consider how my light is spent,” is among his most personal. He has lost his sight,and because of his blindness, is overcome with worry that he will be unable to find a way to serve his Maker.

“Patience… soon replies,” he writes, and sets him straight:

“God doth not need…that man’s work or his own gifts…
Thousands at his bidding speed…
post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

What was Robert Fulghum’s most important contribution to the success of the performances of “Ode to Joy?” Not when he was at the podium pursuing it by waving his arms around with little understanding or appreciation of what he was doing.

It was when he gave up the podium, moved to the back of the stage, and joined the choir.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” wrote John Milton. And while they are standing and waiting, if they can also join in the singing, so much the better.

A Poet at Twenty?

Joseph Bentley — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 17:09:35 +0000

February 28, 2019

“To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty; but to be a poet at forty is to be a poet.”

Eugene Delacroix

All generalizations are flawed, including the one above. Yet they can also useful. In addition to containing elements of truth, they help us transform seemingly unrelated events and experiences into ideas and then into sentences. That, in turn, allows us not only to gain an understanding of the patterns that lie below the surface, but also to use them to share those insights with other people.

The generalization from Delacroix quoted above is flawed – some poems written by poets in their 20’s have endured – yet it is also true. Most poems written at twenty, drawing as they must upon a narrow range of experiences, will be sloppy or superficial: Sloppy because the would-be poets have not taken the time to become acquainted with the structures and the traditions of the art they are trying to master, superficial because they will will have little to write about beyond their own personal angst. They have not lived through nor attempted to come to terms with the range of demanding experiences that life eventually forces upon all of us. They will not have grappled seriously with questions that have no answers or problems that cannot be solved. They are not yet aware of the extent to which their ignorance exceeds their knowledge. Paraphrasing the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, while life must be lived forward, it can only be understood backward. Beyond some amount of talent, a crucial requirement for writing poetry is to have lived long enough so that when one looks backward, something worth writing about is there.

Edward Hirsch at 20 and Beyond

The distinguished American poet Edward Hirsch, now president of the John Guggenheim Foundation, lived through the dilemma of trying to be a poet at 20 and failing. In an interview published in August, 2016, in The New Yorker, he said that in high school he played football and wrote poems, “although it’s generous to call it poetry. I had feelings I didn’t know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them,” he said. “I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. They liked the combination [of football and poetry].” During his first year of college, an English teacher who, in Hirsch’s words, “gave me the one thing that was more powerful than anything else,” told him “You could be a poet – you have the imagination, the intelligence, the passion – but what you’re writing is not poetry…you’re just writing out your feelings. You need to read poems,” his teacher continued, “and [then] you need to try and make something.”

Following her advice, he began to read widely. Almost by accident he stumbled upon the “terrible sonnets” that Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote during a spiritual crisis between 1885 and 1886. “Holy cow,” said Hirsch, “these are sonnets – he shaped them into something, he didn’t write them out the way I’m writing. I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to be a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.”

Talented and determined, and helped by a teacher who opened a door to the future, he learned over time to write good poems and eventually came to be recognized as one of America’s best poets. Author of nine books of poetry, six books of prose, and editor of five others, in 1987 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1997 he was honored with a McArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant.”

Meg Ryan’s Discovery

The challenge of “being a poet at 20” is not just the dilemma of a young person trying to write poetry, but one for all people everywhere. One’s version of what life is in late adolescence is mostly a fantasy – incomplete, unrealistic and distorted No one should be surprised. During our childhood and adolescence, many of us have not experienced life in the raw, especially as members of America’s privileged middle and upper classes. During those early years, parents, teachers, and often society itself, have conspired to cushion children and adolescents from the rude shocks and painful jolts of an unprotected life. Yet, as novelist Graham Greene once wrote, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” For some young people, that door opens when they join the military and see and hear things that previously only existed in comic books or video games. For others that door opens as they confront life away from parents and home on a college campus or real first job. For still others, the future begins to take on a darker cast when they experience their first important failures, rejections or betrayals.

Meg Ryan, one of the most successful actresses in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, gained an understanding of what happened to her when she was young and naive only after she reached middle age and, tying to make sense of it all, looked backward. “You’re at a disadvantage as a young, famous person,” she said in a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, “because you don’t know who’s telling you the truth…All of a sudden I was told I needed a publicist and a manager and a lawyer. People fly in because you’re inexperienced, and someone says: ‘Don’t worry. I fixed the problem…’ Then suddenly you’re grateful to someone about solving a problem that you didn’t know you could even define. You’re doing things that people tell you that you need to do, but you don’t.”

Facing problems that one can’t understand, or even define, is part of being 20. While it is often clear that things are not the way they should be and that changes need to be made, many 20-year-olds find it difficult to get beyond their feelings of anger, frustration, or depression. Coming up with a plan for constructive action is frequently beyond their capacity, impeded as they are by an inability to make sense of what is happening. Without this understanding, and lacking the ability to put it into words, it is next to impossible to take the next steps.

The Role of Significant Adults

Throughout history, children and adolescents have generally not been preparedto manage successfully the problems they face – a dilemma made more acute in recent times as the societies in which they live have become more complex, more complicated and more problematic. The responsibilities for helping young people learn what is required to be successful in moving forward is assigned to adults. Parents, teachers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, bosses, ministers, priests, and rabbis, among others, are expected to teach the young what to do and how to do it. Significant adults in all societies share these four responsibilities:

1. To keep the children safe.

2. To instill in them the beliefs, behaviors. attitudes, values and skills of their community and society.

3. To teach them “correct” behaviors, and identify the situations where these behaviors are appropriate and inappropriate.

4. To prepare them to cope successfully with the problems they will face throughout their lives.

Clearly, this list is important, but it is also vague, abstract and overly simplistic. It also contains a serious problem: Many of the adults who are supposed to teach and model these behaviors and values have not mastered them themselves. Not only do they mumble when they try to “talk the talk,” they are even less prepared to “walk the walk.” And compounding this problem, there are often serious disagreements over which values, attitudes and behaviors are the most important, how they should be taught, and who should teach them. As a result, what ends up being taught and modeled is often contradictory, confusing, and irrelevant to the problems with which the young are grappling. No wonder many children ignore much of the teaching from adults, often rejecting it outright, and then turning elsewhere for answers.

Problems at the Center

Perhaps the most important dilemma for those who are teaching, and therefore for those who are expected to learn, is found in preparing them to cope successfully with problems. Philosopher and economist E. F. Schumacher once wrote, “To live means to cope, to contend and keep levels with all sorts of circumstances, many of them difficult. Difficult circumstances present problems, and it might be said that living means, above all else, dealing with problems.” Many adults are ill prepared to understand the problems they face, let alone manage them successfully. For teachers to attempt to teach young people to cope with problems that they neither understand nor are unable to manage themselves is a travesty than a contribution. Not only are many adults unable to teach by example, they frequently base their teachings on false beliefs and assumptions. They err in believing that problems can be solved if only they work hard enough, if they can find the right technology to use, or identity the guru or expert to tell them how to do it. These beliefs can be helpful for tame problems but not for wicked ones. Since most of the crucial problems young people will face are wicked, adults who teach concepts that are appropriate only for tame ones are contributing to making the lives of young people even more difficult than they already are. When we have mistaken the nature of the problems we struggle with, the amount of hard work invested in the problem is irrelevant, searching for the right technology is fruitless, and enlisting an expert to provide answers a waste of time. Since most of the crucial problems young people face are wicked, adults who teach concepts that are appropriate only for tame problems are contributing to making their lives even more difficult than they are. What needs to happen then is to find and utilize better, more effective strategies and approaches for helping young people learn to grapple with wicked problems.

Helpful Adults for Wicked Problems

There are adults who can “open a door,” to the future who, understand the nature of the problems that young people are facing and have developed effective ways of teaching them. As a result, they offer young people a glimpse of the problems that are coming and present them with ideas, concepts and skills that will be helpful as they struggle to learn how to “cope, content and keep level,” with them. They have discovered how to get young people started on paths that can lead to higher levels of competence and mastery of the messy, wicked problems that are a part of growing into adulthood.

Here are three examples:

Dr. Jay Roberts: In February of 2019, Jay Roberts, Ph.D., professor of education at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana was invited to address students at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin, on the question, “Do our schools prepare students to solve ‘wicked problems?” His answer? “No!” The great mistake of our educational practices and policies, he said, is that we teach students about the problems they are facing in their lives, rather than allowing them to experience them directly. Roberts calls this approach of experiencing problems directly, “Conscious Experiential Learning,” a pedagogy that relies not upon answers and solutions, but upon questions that are based upon “uncertainty.” Approaching education that is founded upon uncertainly would be the equivalent of an “earthquake in higher education,” he said, and instead of encouraging passivity and acceptance by students, would lead to “direct experience and reflection.” If widely accepted, it would require education to be “purposeful, unscripted, student-centered, authentic and integrated.”

Dr. Katy Crossley-Frolick In the autumn of 2016, students from Denison University in Granville, Ohio traveled to Holland to join with students from the University of Tilberg in Rotterdam for a seminar examining “Wicked Problems.” Wicked problems is a phrase, said the seminar director, Dr. Katy Crossley-Frolick, that is “widely used in the social sciences to describe the stubborn, intractable, social problems that are constantly changing, defying simple solutions, and continuing to confront policy makers today.” During the seminar, the Denison students came to realize that” wicked problems – such as terrorism, immigration, and climate change…are connected across disciplines and across borders.” A major learning activity was a day-long U. N. Security Council simulation on the Syrian refugee crisis. After a two-hour briefing on the Syrian refugee situation, the students were split into groups representing 15 different countries. After a day-long struggle, however, “no one could come up with a solution for even one minute aspect of the Syrian refugee crisis because of the complex, social, economic, and governance factors involved in the problems. “And that’s the point,” (Italics added) said Dr. Crossley-Frolick. “The goal of the seminar was to understand that there are problems that are not solvable. Wicked problems are dynamic and constantly moving, and all we can hope for is to manage them on the margins. That’s a hard lesson for anybody to wrap their head around.”

“Wrapping heads” around the idea that most of the problems that really matter in our lives cannot never be solved is, for anyone, an important concept to lean. The Denison and Tillborg students were fortunate to learn it in the 20’s, and learn it in a low-risk, supportive environment with guidance from teachers who knew what they were talking about.

Professor Roger Pielke Jr: In 2016, Professor Roger Pielke Jr. published a book about “war.” It was not , however, about war between nations, but a “war for the soul of sport.” Professor Pielke’s argument was that a war is being waged by sport federations, nations, and the athletes themselves, against the rules of the games. “Sports depends for its very existence on rules: take the rules away,” he writes” and what you have left might be a fistfight or a workout, but it won’t be sport.”

The main battles of this war are being fought on five fronts: the fixing of games by referees and officials; amateurism; doping; new technologies; and sex testing. “Today,” Pielke writes, “the edge between what is acceptable in sport and what is not has become blurred, and this blurred edge threatens the soul of sport itself.”

The name that Pielke chooses to describe the issues with which sports is struggling is “wicked:” “…the controversies facing sports today are wicked problems…By definition,” he writes, “we can never really solve a wicked problem; we can only do better or worse at trying to manage it…Wicked problems can only be addressed by negotiation, and negotiation can’t solve the problem. [It] can only make the problem better or worse.”

Pielke is not content just to write about the wicked problems that organized sports are facing. He is also committed to teaching the young people in his classes at the University of Colorado that wicked problems are an important part of their lives as well, both in the present and in the future, and that learning to identify what they are and what can be done with them is a crucial part of education Here is how Pielke describes his strategy to make the lesson about the nature of wicked problems clear:

“As a professor, I sometimes play tricks on students in my graduate seminars on policy and decision making. One of these is to present them with a wicked problem and then ask them to solve it. The trick, as you know, is that wicked problems cannot be solved but only managed. After students inevitably struggle with “solving” wicked problems, they often admit defeat and then recommend that a committee of super smart experts be put together to solve the problem. I return all such recommendations, with a note that says ‘Incomplete, please try again.'”

Helpful Insights

Since “to be poet at twenty is to be twenty,” expecting twenty-year-olds to write real “poetry” is a stretch. Delacroix’s generalization also holds true for young people struggling with problems, especially wicked ones. Because of their youth, inexperience, and lack of information, they are out of their depth. Most of what they to do is either sloppy or superficial. And yet that does not exempt young people from struggling with problems. In fact, struggling with problems is how young people spend most of their time. And, because what they lack is an understanding and experience about the kinds of problems they face and the choices that are open in order to to deal with them, they are not very good at it.

The helpful adults described above were aware that their students were not prepared to deal effectively with problems. They stepped in and offered helpful insights about the nature of the problems they were facing and would face throughout their lives. Though the students may not have realized it at the time, learning about wicked problems would turn out to be especially helpful in their future relationships and careers.

These teachers informed them that these problems had a name – they were wicked. And they offered them opportunities to learn about wicked problems by struggling with them in safe and supportive environments.

Here are the important lessons they taught their students

Wicked problems exist, are important, and when struggling with them, require different way of thinking and acting.
Wicked problems are dynamic and constantly changing. Not only are there no solutions, it is a struggle even to define the problem.
Rather than a single correct solution, what exists are many possibilities.
Finding the “best” solution is the goal. That itself is also a wicked problem.
“Uncertainty” is a not a condition to be avoided when struggling with these problems, but since it can encourage essential skills and attitudes – especially innovation and creativity – it is one to be appreciated.
“Unscripted” need not be feared but opens doors for us to write our own scripts.
Wicked problems are connected across all disciplines and borders.
Wicked problems are complex and involve social, economic, philosophical, and governmental factors. One begins with complexity and then seeks to create sufficient simplicity in order to take action.
The substance of our problems lies in the obstacles that block our way from moving from an Undesirable Present to a more Desirable Future. Finding, naming, and then organizing to attack these obstacles is the way for individual and groups to move forward.
Handing off the problem to “experts” in the hope that they will find a solution, leads inevitably to a dead end. While the expertise of “experts,” is relevant for tame problems, it is generally not helpful when the problems are wicked.
When it comes to the wicked problems we face in our lives, we are our own “experts”

Young people who are fortunate to learn these principles and concepts when they are young, and especially when there are supportive and experienced adults and teachers to provide guidance and support, will leave school with invaluable gifts that will serve them well in the future.

Ignorance Abounds. Who Will Help?

Most of the problems that make a difference in our lives are wicked. But few young people are aware of this. They are aware that many of the problems they struggle with are troublesome and in some cases sometimes debilitating, but they are unclear what kinds of problems they are or the best way to go about working on them. Experienced, knowledgeable and helpful adults can be a young person’s most valuable resource. They can help 20-year-olds understand that there is no “get out of jail” card for wicked problems. Wicked problems are inevitable part of living. They are also the raw materials from which both progress and poetry are made.