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.”