Wicked Problems Quotes

“Engineering approaches to wicked problems can be realized only through multiple criteria. The friction among six concepts - efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience - can guide our solutions, resolutions, and dissolutions. Wicked problems are not two-sided issues; they are six-sided issues. An acceptable solution, resolution, or dissolution should go through all six filters.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“By missing a university education, I failed to learn my own limitations,” he once said. “It made it possible for me to do things that had never been done before.” His brilliance was in liberating himself from specialization that allowed him to transfer concepts from musical space to aerospace and then to hydrospace,”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“There’s an efficiency argument for maintenance, a resilience consideration in safety, and vulnerabilities lurking within vagueness. And similarly, maintenance and safety contribute to efficiency, just as their deficiency can affect vagueness, vulnerability, and resilience. Yet again, the tendency to excessively emphasize hardness—and related problem-solving—can fester into softness, messiness, and, ultimately, wickedness.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“It’s inevitable that when these six concepts are put into practice and refined, additional considerations will present themselves”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Combining efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“engineering projects could have benefits beyond infrastructure, namely providing access to better education, jobs, agriculture, and health.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Most of the intractability, as Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber wrote in their 1973 paper, “is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex causal networks the trouble really lies).”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“PowerPoint is strangely adept at disguising the fragile foundations of a proposal, the emptiness of a business plan;”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Even the word “efficiency” can become vague. Its context defines whether it’s pursued as the technique for a target or the target for a technique.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

“Deliberation without work is empty,” Levine notes, “but work without deliberation is blind.”
― Guru Madhavan, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World