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RTI: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Wicked Problems

Ingrid Oxaal & Debra Price-Ellingstad

Office of Special Education Programs

June 21, 2006

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What is Fragmentation?

• People see themselves as more separate than united• Information and knowledge may be chaotic or

scattered• Fragmented pieces are perspectives, understandings

and intentions of the collaborators• Hidden fragmentation – when stakeholders don’t

realize there are incompatible assumptions

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Social Complexity

• The number and diversity of stakeholders (players with a stake in the outcome)

• Kinds of stakeholder diversity:• Individual differences in character and learning

style• Professional differences in expertise and

language use• Different organizations and departments

represented (“stove pipes”)• Differences in role and authority

• Each additional stakeholder adds to density and complexity of information flow

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How We Approach ProblemsThe Waterfall

Problem

Time Soluti

on

Gather data

Analyze data

Formulate solution

Implement solution

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• Problem solving is Opportunity-Driven

• Early attempts at solutions• Experiments• Prototypes• Hunches

• Late efforts to understand the real problem

How We Approach Novel ProblemsThe Earthquake

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Tame Problems• Simple or Complex• Relatively well defined• Lend themselves to traditional linear analysis• Have stopping points• Belong to a class of similar problems which

can be solved in a similar manner• Have agreed upon solutions which can be

tired, evaluated and judged right or wrong• Have solutions that can be easily tried and

abandoned.• Have a limited set of alternative solutions

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Wicked Problems

• Dynamic sets of complex and interacting issues• Often ill defined and ambiguous• Cause can be explained in numerous ways• Understood only in social contexts• Symptom of another wicked problem• Both problem and solution are stakeholder dependent • Associated with strong moral, political and professional

issues• No stopping rules• Solutions are not true-or-false, but better or worse• You don’t understand the problem fully without trying

solutions • One-shot operations

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Taming Wicked Problems

• Lay out alternative understandings of:• The problem

• Competing interests

• Priorities

• Constraints

• Operate through group interaction and iteration

• Generate ownership through transparency

• Shared understanding leads to shared commitment to possible solutions