Some problems are fairly straight forward to answer. For example, 2 + 2 is always 4. There is a single, well defined answer to the problem. Other problems are very complex, with no single answer. Most political, design, and sociological problems fall into this category. We call these 'wicked problems'.
Everybody faces wicked problems in their lives. There is no formula for solving them. Instead, we need to use a problem solving approach which first lets us make sense of the problem, and then weigh up possible solutions. This is where Concept Mapping comes in.
Where the term comes from
The term was coined in 1973 by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, who were studying why social planning projects kept failing. They noticed that problems like housing policy or public transport weren't just harder versions of engineering problems - they were a different category entirely. 'Wicked' here doesn't mean evil, it means resistant to a tidy solution.
What makes a problem wicked
Wicked problems tend to share a few traits:
- There's no definitive statement of the problem. Different people will describe it differently, and how you frame it shapes what solutions look reasonable.
- There's no clear stopping point. You don't 'solve' a wicked problem so much as improve or worsen it. You just decide when to stop working on it, often because you've run out of time or budget.
- Solutions aren't right or wrong, only better or worse, and reasonable people can disagree on which is which.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique. Lessons from a similar past problem help, but rarely transfer cleanly.
- Every attempt at a solution changes the situation, so you can't simply undo it and try something else if it doesn't work.
A tame problem, by contrast, has an agreed definition, a known set of possible solutions, and a clear test for whether you've solved it. Fixing a bug with a reliable reproduction case is tame. Deciding how a city should grow over the next twenty years is wicked.
Everyday examples
You don't need to run a city to run into wicked problems. Deciding on a career path, restructuring a team, setting a product roadmap, or agreeing on house rules with a partner all have the same shape: multiple stakeholders, competing values, and no answer that everybody agrees is correct. What looks like a straightforward decision from a distance often turns out to be wicked once you start digging into the details and the people affected by it.
Why concept mapping helps
Because a wicked problem resists a single clean answer, the most useful thing you can do is get better at holding the whole picture in your head at once: the competing goals, the stakeholders, the constraints, and the trade-offs between them. That's exactly what a concept map is good for.
Instead of forcing the problem into a linear list, you can lay out each perspective, sub-question, and piece of evidence as its own node, and draw connections showing how they relate, conflict, or support each other. Because there's no fixed 'finish line', the map can keep evolving as your understanding changes, rather than being thrown away once a decision is made. And because it's visual, it's much easier to bring other stakeholders in and show them why you're leaning towards a particular trade-off, rather than just asserting a conclusion.
Wicked problems rarely get 'solved' in a satisfying way. But with the right tool, you can at least make sense of them, and make a well-reasoned choice about what to do next.