Blog #1 – Why ‘Wicked’ Issues?

Blog post by Dr Julian Crockford (Sheffield Hallam University)

If you’ve read any of the blogs on the Evaluation Collective website, attended any of our events or read our (forthcoming!) Wicked Evaluation Issue zines, you’ll have noticed that we often talk about wicked problems or issues, whether these occur in the broader areas of our work, which for many of us often centres on developing transformative social justice in higher education¹ or are specific to our evaluation activities².  

We’ll talk more about problem wickidity in the next blog, but we first we wanted to explain how our focus on the wicked character of problems serves several purposes.  

1. By focusing on underlying problems or issues, we can short-circuit the temptation to dive straight into activity-driven solutions without pausing to consider how these solutions respond to the specific contexts we’re working in or to acknowledge the wider structural or political issues that play a part in creating these problems in the first place. 
2. Looking at a problem from a variety of perspectives helps us sidestep what we call in our Manifesto the ‘performative, task-focused, tick box evaluation machine’ that drives us to see evaluation as an end in itself. We also view evaluation as a thinking process that can actively support and improve transformative educational interventions.  
3. Considering how problems may not be straightforward encourages us to recognise the complex nature of our role as evaluators, and of evaluation as an activity. By engaging with wicked evaluation issues, we have to acknowledge that evaluation itself takes place in a complex, often contested space, in which desired outcomes can vary according to stakeholder’s perspectives and / or be appropriated by a range of different interests.³  
4. By acknowledging just how complex some of the underlying issues are, we recognise the need for an inclusive, diverse and self-reflexive space.⁴ This enables us to approach complex issues from a wide variety of perspectives and positions and to be aware of the often-unacknowledged assumptions we bring as evaluators.⁵   

 By starting at the beginning, with a thorough consideration of the problems we’re dealing with, we power-up our ability understand, and hopefully, solve them.   

  You want a celebrity endorsement of this approach? No problem.  

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and 1 minute solving it.    – Einstein (Probably)

At first glance, this totally sounds like recipe for stress. (Especially if you’re a desperate bystander watching a genius sat staring into space, while the planet-killing meteor in the sky gets bigger and bigger…)  

Now, whether Einstein actually said this or not, it’s a salutary point for us to consider before we go wading in to start wrangling wicked problems. It’s often hard to resist diving straight into the exciting and messy middle of a problem, without doing the necessary spade work. However, the more time we spend analysing and understanding the nature of the problem we’re dealing with, the bigger the pay-off when finding and implementing solutions. This is even more the case when we’re dealing with problems that lie towards the evil end of the wickedness scale.  

What is a problem?  

  Well. That just depends on who you ask doesn’t it? As usual, there are a myriad of different answers to this question.   

  Throwing the Cambridge English dictionary at it reveals that a ‘problem’ is ‘a situation, person, or thing that need attention and needs to be dealt with or solved’. So far so good.   

  Unsurprisingly for a psychologist, Karl Dunker⁶ (1945) prefers to think about problems or issues in terms of the individual, suggesting that a problem occurs when a person has a specific aim, but doesn’t know how to achieve it.  

 Newell and Simon⁷ (1972), coming at it from a political science, economics and computer science angle, talk about a ‘problem space’ (more of a problem process, really). The problem space includes the initial state (how it started), the processes or actions that transform it, and a goal state (how it ended). They used the Tower of Hanoi problem as an example, a game where you have to move a series of disks from one spindle (initial state) to another spindle (goal state) in order. However, you can only move one disk at a time and can’t place a larger disk onto a smaller disk.⁸ 

 From these perspectives, a problem lies in the gap between the way things are and the way we want them to be. For some problems, however, we may not, yet, have a clear idea of where we want to wind up or what the end state looks like.   

 Moreover, problems (and solutions!) are often in the eye of the beholder. The ability to define something as a problem is a powerful one. It is also worth considering whether there might be vested interests in how an issue is defined as a problem, who defines it as such, any interests they might have and the kinds of solutions they prize. 

 For example, in the first issue of our wicked evaluation issues zine, we heard from ‘Chris’ who was concerned that his student’s intangible learning, growth and development wasn’t being captured and evidenced. We also heard from ‘Andi’ who was struggling to evaluate a programme with just five participants. In both cases, our correspondents were worried that they were falling short against normative expectations about what are appropriate evaluation measures and or effective sample sizes. In turn, this begs the question of who gets to define what evaluation should be, how it should work, and what counts as evidence. As soon as we recognise this, we create room for alternative views and perspectives, and the possibility of other forms of evaluation. In short, some of these evaluation ‘wicked issues’ turn out to only be problems when viewed from particular positions or perspectives. 

In the next blog, we’ll start looking at the concept of a problem through a lens of wickedness. 

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¹ Manifesto principle 1 – ‘Evaluation should be a collective and transformative action’. https://evaluationcollective.wordpress.com/evaluation-manifesto/

² Or both! Manifesto principle 2 – ‘Evaluation advocacy can be an empowering tool for social justice’.

³ Manifesto principle 8 – ‘Hierarchical assumptions about evaluation methods should be disrupted’.

⁴ Manifesto principle 3 – ‘Evaluation will evolve in visible, inclusive, and supportive spaces’. [1] ⁵ Manifesto principle 6 – ‘Evaluations should be transparently grounded in criticality and context’.

⁶ Duncker, K. (1945). On problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 58 – https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-16110-001

⁷ Newell, A., & Simon, H. A., (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

⁸ If you fancy a go, head over to https://www.mathsisfun.com/games/towerofhanoi.html