To obtain the degree awarded by ESADE in

Master in Business Administration (MBA)

Research Project / Class of 2016 Research Project Format: Master Thesis Business Creation Project In-Company Business Project Increasing M&A Success Rate with Design Thinking March 11, 2016 Student Ramon Serrallonga Director or Personal Faculty Advisor Santiago Simón del Burgo ESADE Full Professor

(The field in this table should be filled in by the student / participant)

Barcelona, Friday, March 11, 2016

2 Abstract The M&A practice has a puzzle. The share of operations that are not able to deliver the value increase for the acquirers is more than half. And as time goes by the success rate is not improving. It is stable if not worsening. This thesis proposes that the puzzle lies in M&A’s decision making process design, explores an alternative framework and presents the good fit of Design Thinking as a vehicle to run such alternative framework.

Keywords Design Thinking; post-acquisition integration; Wicked Problems.

Acknowledgements Santiago Simón del Burgo – ESADE Business School

Lotta Hassi – ESADE Business School

Jeanne Liedtka – Darden School of Business

Michael Ho – Darden School of Business

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Table of Contents 1. Motivation of this thesis ......................................................................................... 4 2. The conventional wisdom ...................................................................................... 5 3. A new paradigm .................................................................................................. 14 4. A spectre is haunting management ..................................................................... 20 5. Conclusions......................................................................................................... 30 6. Discussion ........................................................................................................... 31 7. References .......................................................................................................... 33

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1. Motivation of this thesis Design Thinking is in vogue. The ink is still wet on the Harvard Business Review of last September with Tim brown & Roger Martin (2015) and Jon Kolko (2015) articles. The interest in this methodology applied to management has increased since the article of Tim Brown on Harvard Business Review in June 2008. On the other hand, the author decided to base his MBA Final Project on M&A looking for the cause of its high rate of failure in generating value for the buyers. So the author glimpsed an intersection between a methodology that is thought to be applied in a high uncertain context, and a post-acquisition integration process that empirical evidence shows to have a high risk of failure. The aim of this thesis is to open a new crevasse to spur further investigation in the application of Design Thinking in management.

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2. The conventional wisdom The positive approach The practice of M&A along years has stablished a conventional wisdom about how to run the post-acquisition integration to realize the envisioned synergies. The pursued

Economies of scale

Economies of scope

Tax and financial synergies

Market power

Diversification

Trade of undervalued companies

may never realize if the integration fails. Companies devote a lot of resources in the pre-acquisition phase and, maybe, all the glamour of a M&A operation resides in this phase with expensive investment bankers and lawyers. But the sophisticated M&A practitioners know that as important as closing the right deal is then making it true.

The integration process guidelines could be summarized as follows:

1. Define the new strategy and create an integration plan:

a. Clearly defining roles and decision-making lines.

2. Managers should be visible:

a. Paying attention to communication.

b. Understanding the rational, emotional and political problems.

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3. Integration Manager:

a. Supervising the integration process.

4. Carry out integration rapidly:

a. Capitalizing on the momentum for change.

5. Prioritize integration actions:

a. Involving employees from the acquired company.

b. Building integrating capacity into our company.

Failure could come from strategic reasons, also called hard ones, or from a mismanagement of human resources after the acquisition, also called soft ones.

The hard problems could be classified as:

Unclear strategic decision or lack of strategic compatibility

Unsolved problems in the due diligence phase

One-off savings

Overvalued synergies

Excessive price

Lack of a well-defined integration plan

The business culture is a set of rules, convictions, beliefs and viewpoints operating at the unconscious level shared by those within the organization. Its relevance for an integration process is deemed as

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High for horizontal integrations (with a company from the same or complementary activity sectors)

Medium for vertical integrations (with a customer or a supplier)

Low for diversifications (with a company from a different activity sector)

The soft problems could be classified as:

Cultural problems

o Anger (taking on a new culture)

o Cultural distance

o Fear (dismissal, changes, ...)

o Breach of psychological contract

o Feeling of loss (security, stability, ...)

o Loss of identity

o Feelings of winners and losers

Problems with the management teams

o Agency problem

o Problem of corporate arrogance (hubris problem)

o Over-commitment of acquiring team

o Loss of decision-making capacity

o Incompatibility of management teams

o Falling commitment

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Lack of adequate communication

The sophisticated M&A practitioners devote the required resources to tackle these known issues that may arise. When a deal is closed the buyers have taken enough care to ensure that it will be a success. Otherwise the purchase would have not taken place. However and as studied by Simón del Burgo (2003), several publications from both academia and the private sector coincide in that the M&A failure rate has been steadily above 50% over time.

M&A results according to scholars

Publication date Author % Failures

1985 Pritchett 50

1987 Clarke 50

1990 Hunt 50

1990 Hitt 66

1992 Marks 66-75

1993 Cartwright 50-60

1993 Kransdorff 50

1997 Marks 50

1997 Angwin 50

1998 Davenport 50

1999 Eccles 59

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1999 Rappaport 66

1999 Marks 75

Source: Simón del Burgo (2003)

M&A results according to consultants

Publication date Author % Failures

1998 Mercer 57

1998 Andersen Consulting 61

1999 Andersen Consulting 57

1999 A.T. Kearney 58

1999 KPMG 83

Source: Simón del Burgo (2003)

And a recent follow up of these results (not published yet) shows that they have not changed in the last 15 years. And other more recent studies state that

A Deloitte & Touche study (2001) found that only 1/3 of their total sample of 540 companies surveyed about mergers and acquisitions, could say that they thought that their merger was successful.

Synergies projected for M&A are not achieved in 70-80 % of cases (Coffey et al 2003)

65% of strategic acquisitions and mergers result in negative shareholder value (Marcum 2003)

10 So the puzzle for the sophisticated M&A practitioners is that the past experience is not increasing the success rate of M&A.

The M&A puzzle From a positive approach, the focus is in stablishing a set of stylized facts on what to do and what not to do based on the experience. Success and failure cases serve as examples of how the known management vices were manifested, or new approaches on how the good practices were applied.

In the previous section the stylized facts have been broadly introduced. A good example of success cases is the article from Moss Kanter (2009) Mergers That Stick. In the article one can see three successful M&A stories. The idea in brief from the article is

Solution examples

Failed cases

Stylized facts

Successful cases

Body of Knowledge

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“…successful mergers will be those that have focused on integrating and motivating new talent—not those involving a bargain-basement approach to acquisitions.”

“The winners do not act like conquerors sending out occupying armies. Instead, they act like welcoming hosts and eager learners. Behaving as fixers rather than destroyers, they turn skeptics into fans.”

Many would agree that the idea in brief sounds like a good waybill. But if one reads every case he would see that a successful M&A can take many forms. In the first case there is a paternalistic approach by the acquirer. In the second one there is a merger between equals approach by the acquirer. And in the third one there is a reverse takeover approach by the acquirer. One could be tempted to focus in the concrete solutions of each case to add them in the M&A body of knowledge. And the articles does indeed. But how much value does it add when they are ad hoc solutions? They are just one of the possible set of solutions that would have made that M&A operation succeed. What lacks, and what would be really interesting, is how did the acquirers identify the problems underlying their operations that triggered those solutions. Understanding the scenario is a sine qua non condition to analyze the solution applied. So how does the positive approach tackle the problem of incomplete and asymmetric information by the acquirer?

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The M&A process stages are planning and implementation. During the planning stage M&A practitioners perform a wide range of due diligences

Financial

Tax

Legal

Commercial

Technical

Environmental

Cultural

to gather as much information as possible to design an integration plan that ensures success. But notice the linearity of the process. This process relies on having all the information ex-ante, designing the optimal solution and implementing it. But what if it

13 is impossible to gather all the information ex-ante? The process lacks from the flexibility to redefine itself to adapt to new information arising during the implementation. Because all the decisions where taken at an earlier stage. It is obvious that the managers will solve problems as they arise. That M&A due diligence begins before the deal process, through the deal process and after the deal is completed. That they can hire the services of HR consultants to try to smooth the process with best practices. That the implementation plan can be polished with constant feedback loop mechanism. But the process is not designed to evolve its core on the way. Like a person that is shaped by experience but his character remains the same.

So the speculation from this master thesis is:

The cause of M&A high failure rate is its decision making process design

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3. A new paradigm A normative approach Mitleton-Kelly (2005) in Complexity as a Sensemaking Framework proposes a new approach. Based on Complexity Theory (concept that falls out of the scope of this thesis and will not be discussed) the paper tackles the linearity problem of the M&A process stated in the previous chapter.

“An ideal post-merger integration, according to complexity, would resemble the creation of a child. It has some characteristics inherited from both parents but it has its own unique personality and identity.”

“Organisations often assume that it is possible to ‘design’ an organisation in the same way that engineers can design a new product, but this is an erroneous assumption and the repeated failure of organisational restructuring and of M&As to create a successful new integrated organisation, provide significant evidence that a different approach is required.”

“The business model as well as the culture of the new organisation should be allowed to emerge, not through a detailed design but through the creation of an enabling environment that facilitates the co-creation of a new organisation through co-evolution not imposition. There is also no one

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correct or optimal model. What may appear as optimal in one set of circumstances will no longer be optimal when those circumstances change, but if the organisation is able to co-evolve with a changing environment then the business model stands a better chance of being appropriate in any current conditions.”

According to its bibliographic resources, the main reason for the high rate of M&A failures is due to soft problems and the next explanation follows

“Critchlow (2003) states three converging trends, which can help explain why cultural issues have become so important:

First, service companies increasingly dominate the largest global economies. That means the chief assets are not factories and equipment, but people - executives who develop client relationships and leverage a certain expertise. Consequently, mergers involve assets that can leave when things become uncomfortable. This was supported by Coffey et al (2003) who found that 47% of executives leave the company within the first year, and 75% leave within the first three years.

Second, the sharp increase in cross border deals between global firms with operations in many different countries means that different national cultures become an additional challenge.

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Finally, deal rationales have become more complex. Many companies engage in mergers and acquisitions not just to squeeze out value or increase their size, but also to transform their business or industry. Whereas only one of the top ten global deals (by purchase price) in 1988 aimed to change the basis of competition, eight of the top ten deals announced in 2000 did so.”

The paper introduces two cases of M&A to illustrate a successful and a dysfunctional application of post-merger integration, seen from a complexity theory perspective. They joined a research project of the London School of Economics Complexity Group. The first one explains the case of an operation that seemed to be, a priori, an easy one due to the acquirer track record in acquisitions and the fit of the two companies. But two years after the operation the company was suffering from severe dysfunctional relationships. The acquirer demonstrated awkwardness to correctly identify and remedy the situation. The second one explains the case of an operation that seemed difficult a priori and turned out to be a posteriori. But the clear awareness of an integration problem early on by the management, and the decision of opening up to changes even in strategy turned the operation in a success. The high collaboration from the company made cropping out the main problems in just 2 days of workshop. Some key findings were identified.

“Following is a summary of the key findings both from the merger and the acquisition, as both addressed the challenge of post-M&A integration:

Clear and well communicated vision and direction

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Strong sense of identity (not uniformity but an overall sense of coherence that accommodates diversity)

A leader who ‘holds the space’, articulates the vision and direction, identifies emergent new patterns quickly and develops partnerships/networks/ alliances

Distributed leadership and distributed power

Local autonomy

Effective and timely communication of the process; the reasoning behind it and the benefits and successes to be gained

Regular updates on progress

Key successes: “recognising what we are doing that’s good”

Gain involvement: open to everybody, so they feel part of the change process

Time for reflection not just constantly fire-fighting

Creating an enabling environment that facilitates co-evolutionary integration

An evolving business model – there is no single ‘right’ model”

Takeaways The paper states that current M&A practitioners do not put enough emphasis in post-acquisition relationships and that this is one of the main factors causing the high

18 failure rate. The study of this phenomenon is not new and many of the key findings from the cases are shared with the integration guidelines stated in the previous chapter. So it does not seem to be substance enough to state the lack of emphasis of M&A practitioners for the implementation stage.

Regarding the importance of soft problems the paper coincides with the exposed in the previous chapter. Checking if its weight has become more important in current years, due to the reasons exposed by Critchlow (2003), or if its weight has been equally important since the beginning falls outside of the scope of this thesis. But management turnover rate is a phenomenon already studied (Simón del Burgo (2003)) and it depends on several factors. Such as the stake taken in the acquired company and the institutional nature of the acquirer. The impact of tertiarization of the economy could be easily tested if the failure rate varies significantly between economic sectors. And one of the findings of the second case was that the problems associated with national culture differences were more apparent than real. It also can be noticed that the solutions applied and claimed are strategic. So the independence between hard and soft problems does not seem as clear in this paper as they were in the previous chapter. Specifically regarding strategy and integration plan.

For the purpose of this thesis, the main takeaways will be the spirit and the dynamic M&A process that emanates from the paper. Its humanism accommodates the complexities underlying an M&A operation stated in the previous chapter. Hence the integration plan should be designed as an enabler that lets the new company define its own personality. With this refocusing the integration plan switches from solution-centric (in the positive approach) to problem-centric.

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“If an organisation adopts a complexity perspective then it would (a) actively facilitate, rather than inadvertently inhibit, the emergence of new ways of working, new relationships and power structures, (b) through enabling infrastructures that facilitate emergence, self-organisation and the exploration of the space of possibilities. It would therefore (c) encourage the self-organisation of local teams and (d) the exploration of alternative ways of working or ideas for new products, or simply a different way of doing things. This of course carries a great deal of responsibility, as the well being of the organisation cannot be jeopardised. (e) The structure of such an organisation would be neither too organised nor too random (e.g. a kind of fuzzy matrix); and (f) the power structure would favour distributed power and local autonomy (g) acknowledging the value of distributed intelligence and knowledge throughout the organisation. In addition such an organisation would (h) value variability and the consequent large repertoire of responses through diversity in people, cultures, products, markets, etc.; (i) it would understand connectivity and interdependence and that generative relationships foster a collaborative culture that (j) is likely to co-evolve and co-create a new responsive organisation that would enable it to cope in unpredictable environments and to achieve co-evolutionary integration.”

Now the question that follows is: how this new approach can be implemented? How to turn this idea into a reality?

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4. A spectre is haunting management The spectre of Design Thinking In the book Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works, Liedtka et al. (2013) introduce the case of a successful merger between two insurance companies, Suncorp and Promina, to form the second largest insurance company in Australia. Integration between competitors is the hardest one according to M&A practice because the relevance of cultural differences is the highest. They used the design tools of visualization, metaphor and storytelling to facilitate a strategic conversation in order to build alignment on strategy and vision. But what is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a human-centered methodology that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.

It is a dialectical, iterative and experimental process with the following stages:

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Design Thinking applies the tools and processes from the design disciplines to solve open ended problems. Some of the tools used are the following:

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In Liedtka et al. (2013) some explanations are given of the tools used:

“Visualization: Visualization lies at the very core of design thinking. But that doesn’t mean you need to be an artist to use it. Visualization is the transformation of information into images that you see, either literally with your eyes or figuratively with your mind’s eye. We can do that in many ways-using drawings, photographs, stories, and even PowerPoint (but not lists of bullet points). The white boards used […] become a canvas on which participants paint a new future together.”

“Posters: In a world where everyone has too many meetings to attend and not enough time to read the materials carefully prepared in advance, posters are invaluable. For about $2 at a copy store, you can turn a slide into a big

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wall poster that people can browse as part of your meeting (when you’ve got them in your power), rather than relying on them preparing the material in advance (which they often don’t). Posters like the one […] to guide the Suncorp team allow you to bring a group quickly to a shared understanding of a problem or a data set. They allow you as the conversation leader to set boundaries by determining what goes on a poster, but they give your attendees the freedom to choose what they think is important in it. They don’t have quite the stature of Post-it Notes in the innovation world, but we think they deserve similar reverence!”

“Metaphor: Metaphor is a commonly used design thinking tool. Taken from the Latin word meaning “to transfer,” it involves drawing an analogy between two objects, such as referring to business as war or an organization as a family. Using metaphor unlocks the creative side of our brains and surfaces unarticulated perspectives, feelings, and assumptions. It helps us to escape our mental models, and it encourages candor by reducing the risk of talking about difficult issues.”

“Boundary-Crossing Teams: Again and again we see the prominence of boundary-crossing teams in the innovation space. The reason is simple: We may be able to get out of our own box only by climbing into someone else’s. There is simply no better way to help managers develop the broad systems perspective that is a foundation for design thinking than by exposing them to people who think differently than they do. Take whatever silos your

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organization puts people in and mix them up. Diverse teams tend to generate better hypotheses.”

But if one compares the process with the classic Project Management approach one would not find a big difference in the process stages. The classic PM approach has some standards such as Project Management Body Of Knowledge, issued by the Project Management Institute, or the ISO 21500, and it could be defined as a connected sequence of unique and complex activities, with a single goal or purpose that should be completed in a specific time and with a given budget, according to a specification. So where the difference resides? The difference resides in the degree of uncertainty, in how open-ended the problem is.

As argued by Buchanan (1992) in his paper Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, the natural problems that Design Thinking tackles is the Wicked Problem framework defined by Rittel & Webber (1973).

25 Wicked problems have also taken the attention of management scholars. Camillus (2008) in his paper Strategy as a Wicked Problem defends that strategic decisions taken by companies have become wicked problems due to the increase of complexity. Even more, he describes how companies use design tools to tame them. However, he does not use the concept Design Thinking.

If one could demonstrate that a post-acquisition integration process is a wicked problem one could state, following Buchanan (1992), that Design Thinking methodology is a proper framework to address post-acquisition integration processes. And that is a framework to vehicle the ideal integration process proposed by Mitleton-Kelly (2005).

Proposition Rittel & Webber (1973) set ten Wicked Problems distinguishing properties. Camillus (2008) short definitions of them are added for an easier understanding.

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem. It’s not possible to write a well-defined statement of the problem, as can be done with an ordinary problem.

The interpretation of the integration problems done by the managers will also lead the additional questions to better understand the problems. Certainly, problem understanding and problem resolution are concomitant to each other.

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2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. You can tell when you’ve reached a solution with an ordinary problem. With a wicked problem, the search for solutions never stops.

Based on implementing solutions one can observe if the solutions work or not. And the fitness of a solution is manifested as time goes by.

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad. Ordinary problems have solutions that can be objectively evaluated as right or wrong. Choosing a solution to a wicked problem is largely a matter of judgment.

One can only observe one of the possible realizations of an M&A operation, and the outcome could be as good as expected, worse than expected or better than expected. So by construction there is not an absolute conclusion but a relative one.

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem. It’s possible to determine right away if a solution to an ordinary problem is working. But solutions to wicked problems generate unexpected consequences over time, making it difficult to measure their effectiveness.

27 An M&A operation is alive until the target company is sold again to the market. Then it is straight forward (and naive) to assess if the selling price is higher than the purchase price. But while waiting for the fatal day, if ever comes, waves of consequences will be generated. So there is no immediate test and even having an ultimate test one does not know if it will ever happen.

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly. Solutions to ordinary problems can be easily tried and abandoned. With wicked problems, every implemented solution has consequences that cannot be undone.

Every implemented solution has consequences that cannot be undone. But implementation phases are sometimes available to reduce the risk of irreversible prejudice.

6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan. Ordinary problems come with a limited set of potential solutions, by contrast.

28 The set of solutions for a post-acquisition integration is only bounded by the creativity of the managers and the limited company resources devoted to it.

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique. An ordinary problem belongs to a class of similar problems that are all solved in the same way. A wicked problem is substantially without precedent; experience does not help you address it.

Despite long lists of similarities between a current acquirer and acquired company and previous ones, there always might be an additional distinguishing property that is of overriding importance. Because M&A is dealing with people and unique companies, and every situation is likely to be one-of-a-kind. One can never be certain that the particulars of a problem do not override its commonalities with other problems already dealt with.

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem. While an ordinary problem is self-contained, a wicked problem is entwined with other problems. However, those problems don’t have one root cause.

What is the cause of an integration problem could be clear after some analysis. But other ones are more complex and even you could end up in a loop.

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9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution. A wicked problem involves many stakeholders, who all will have different ideas about what the problem really is and what its causes are.

By definition, a post-acquisition integration has two parts: the acquirer and the acquired. So at least there will be the duality acquirer/acquired problem interpretation.

10. The planner has no right to be wrong. Problem solvers dealing with a wicked issue are held liable for the consequences of any actions they take, because those actions will have such a large impact and are hard to justify.

An M&A is undertaken only because value creation is foreseen. During the pre-acquisition negotiations is when the managers are supposed to check if initial flirting can lead to a stable marriage. So managers do not have the right to be wrong because they are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate.

So the proposition from this master thesis is:

A post-acquisition integration process is a Wicked Problem

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5. Conclusions This thesis has presented the state of the art of the M&A practice and has proposed that the problem of its bad performance is its decision making process design. Then it has exposed an alternative co-evolutionary framework. And finally it has analyzed the fit of Design Thinking methodology as a vehicle to materialize such alternative framework.

A speculation and a proposition have been stated in this thesis:

Speculation: The cause of M&A high failure rate is its decision making process design.

Proposition: A post-acquisition integration process is a Wicked Problem.

The descriptive approach of this thesis has not allowed to turn the speculation and proposition into hypothesis in order to test them. Just for the proposition, due to its nature, there has been option of arguing in favor of it as it has been done.

So assuming that the speculation and the proposition hold, the application of Design Thinking in the M&A practice would represent an improvement of the procedure and an improvement in the success rate should be expected.

The previous statement is written in conditional because the literature of Design Thinking applied to M&A is scarce. There are neither enough cases studied to test its suitability nor to test its performance. Further investigation in this topic request from a broader set of cases.

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6. Discussion It worth to say that some M&A operations would already be applying part of the Design Thinking resources. So indeed, this thesis may not be discovering anything new. But could be fostering the institutionalization of the post-acquisition stage in M&A practice. Fixing the glamour unbalance between the pre and post-acquisition stages. Putting at the same level the investment bank from the pre-acquisition and the Design Thinking consulting from the post-acquisition. It may seem redundant but maybe only by institutionalizing the importance that people have in a M&A operation the industry will move to the next level.

Introducing Design Thinking in M&A practice implies increasing the complexity of the process and it raises two issues.

First, if it worth for any particular case. The complexity of an operation depends in several factors such as if it is a horizontal, vertical or diversification operation. It may happen that the risk of failure of a concrete operation is deemed so low that does not pay off to devote the resources required to introduce a more sophisticated process. The same way that the resources devoted in the pre-acquisition stage may vary with the size of the operation.

Second, how does it affect the price of the operation? The introduction of Design Thinking would bear dealing with more uncertainty at the time the price of the operation is set. Because several elements would be postponed to be defined at a later stage. Hence pricing schemes would have to be more flexible with conditional schemes. Current earn-out scheme test the trustworthiness of the seller regarding his

32 insider information and his confidence in the future of the business. Even if once the transaction is closed, the buyer is now in control of the operations and the post-acquisition integration. But with the introduction of Design Thinking the burden would also lie in the buyer side since it is also leaving uncertainty at that stage. And future outcome depends on his expertise in the integration process. It does not seem likely that the seller would like to bear the cost of the risk introduced by the buyer.

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7. References Tim Brown & Roger Martin (September 2015) Design for Action Harvard Business Review

Jon Kolko (September 2015) Design Thinking Comes of Age Harvard Business Review

Tim Brown (June 2008) Design Thinking Harvard Business Review

Santiago Simón del Burgo (March 2003) Causas de los fracasos en los procesos de Fusión y Adquisición ESADE

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (October 2009) Mergers That Stick Harvard Business Review

Coffey, J., Garrow, V. & Holbeche L. (2003) Reaping the Benefits of Mergers and Acquisitions Butterworth & Heinmann, Oxford

Mika Aaltonen with Theodor Barth, John L. Casti, Eve Mitleton-Kelly & T. Irene Sanders (April 2005) Complexity as a Sensemaking Framework Finland Futures Research Center

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Critchlow J. (2003) Post Merger Integration: Seize the Day Acquisition Monthly, Vol 9, Thompson Press

Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King & Kevin Bennett (September 2013) Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works Columbia Business School Publishing

Richard Buchanan (1992) Wicked Problems in Design Thinking The MIT Press

Horst W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber (1973) Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning Policy Sciences

John C. Camillus (May 2008) Strategy as a Wicked Problem Harvard Business Review