Welcome to the Wicked World
In which we make decisions with messy and incomplete data
Most of us are raised in kind learning environments, especially when we start going to school. Kind, in this context, doesn’t mean nice or anything like that. The (high) school environment is often unkind.
In psychology, a kind learning environment means one in which questions have undeniably correct answers. Whether it’s through rote memorization or by following a set of predetermined steps, most exam questions we face during our education have a correct answer. Makes sense; it would be hard to grade them otherwise. Even open-ended, essay-type questions tend to be graded by a checklist to tick off. Did the student mention these topics we saw in class? Did they string them together in a coherent argument? And so on.
Then, yay, we graduate and, like fledglings kicked out of a nest, we enter the world of adult life.
And there, the problems begin. The wicked problems, to be precise. Many of the challenges we face in adult life are part of a wicked learning environment. First articulated in these terms by psychologists/behavioral scientists Robin M. Hogarth, Tomás Lejarraga, and Emre Soyer in 2015, wicked learning environments are those in which there is a mismatch between the information that is acquired and the information needed to formulate a decision. This idea is based on earlier work on ‘wicked’ problems, as defined by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973. In 1,000 words:
Most games, even difficult ones like chess, are kind learning environments. There are rules, clear conditions of victory, and, often, direct feedback mechanisms. Things like startups, climate change, and inequality (or, you know, life in general) are wicked learning environments. It’s impossible to have all relevant information, everything is context-dependent, conditions of success are unclear and ever-changing, and a lot depends on how you define the question or challenge to begin with.
For example: How can I be happy? Or; how can I be successful? There are no rules, axioms, or algorithms that can answer these questions for us (no matter what the self-help industry tries to tell you). The questions themselves are too slippery to be kind. What is happiness? How do we define success? Our schooling cannot help us here, at least not in the way it’s currently structured.
(That’s just my experience with being taught in a traditional Western European type of education. I’d love to hear about other experiences.)
This is not a knock on the educational system. Not a big one, anyway. We need the tools and skills to tackle ‘kind’ problems, there are facts we’ll have to learn by heart, and there are ways of manipulating information that are useful (think of mathematical operations) and that we need to be taught. But we tend to be ill-prepared to face wicked problems.
Example two: in the last missive of Thinking Ahead, I requested your help in diagnosing the fluttering pulse of this newsletter. As the poll and thoughtful comments show, I wrongfully thought that this might be a kind problem. It isn’t; it’s a wicked problem. There is no singular answer to what makes a newsletter good. And good for whom anyway? Context, perspective, changing preferences, not to mention my own brain that makes weird jumps sometimes, all mess up the question.
So, there is no ‘right’ answer. This is daunting. And freeing. I get to make my own answer.
Stay tuned…
Related thoughts:
Hi Gunnar.
It seems to me that there are three fundamentally self-evident, intuitives:
1. Causation – the logical association of facts – science
2. Morality – a sense of obligation to others – duty
3. Gratitude – a sense of appreciation for being in the game.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator…”
Keep up the good work you are doing fine.
Geoff
Being an aging Boomer, I often think of this line in the opening of Paul Simon's Kodachrome:
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."