Wicked problems, wicked solutions
I'd like to draw your attention to Ugo Bardi's latest essay Wicked problems and wicked solutions: the case of the world's food supply that has also been re-published on Resilience.org.
Ugo uses the world food supply as a starting point to explore some fundamental complex system issues that are consistently missed by the "solutionistas" in all domains. In the process he distills out some essential ideas:
- Wicked problems generate wicked solutions (i.e. trying to solve a wicked problem usually makes it worse)
- "Population" is not the same thing as "the number of people"
- "Calories" are not the same thing as "food"
- Domain experts are universally unable to comprehend the full scope of the complex system their domain is a part of.
And my personal favourites:
- "In a complex system, there are neither problems nor solutions. There is only change and adaptation."
- "You can't solve a change."
Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is member of the scientific committee of ASPO (Association for the study of peak oil) as well as a member of the Club of Rome. His most recent book in English is
Extracted: How the Quest for Global Mining Wealth is Plundering the Planet . He is also the author of
The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer 2011).
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