I opened the talk with a discussion of wicked problems. Among many of my colleagues in the dialog and deliberation field, wicked problems are old hat and not very interesting. However, among more normal folks, the idea never fails to generate energy and very interesting “ah-ha!” moments as people ponder the implications.
That was what I saw yesterday, as people nodded their heads and their facial expressions betrayed discovery.
Ordinary Problems
A lot of problems in public life that communities face are technical in nature. How large should the dam be? How do we plow snow most efficiently? How should we invest the City’s retirement funds? These are the kinds of problems that it is best to ask experts to address. They can tell us what the best, right answer is and then our political leaders can drive the appropriate solutions.
Other problems are educational in nature. Some people don’t know that they shouldn’t park on certain streets in snowy weather and plow operations get fouled up. Other people are not aware of the services available to them as low-income residents, so they do without things they need. These kinds of problems can also be solved in straightforward ways by getting more information out to the right people (not to say they are easy to solve, just straightforward).
Still other problems are just political problems, or engineering problems, or scientific problems.
Wicked Problems
Then there are wicked problems — these are often problems that beset communities over and over. Persistent poverty is a wicked problem. So is persistent crime. What we do about health care as a community (or nation) is a wicked problem.
Wicked problems were first formally defined and described by a pair of planners, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973:
Now that . . . relatively easy problems [like shelter clean water, and roads] have been dealt with, we have been turning our attention to others that are much more stubborn. . . . A growing sensitivity to the waves of repercussions that ripple through . . . systemic networks and to the value consequences of those repercussions has generated the recent reexamination of received values and the recent search for national goals. There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in the professional’s support system lies at the juncture where goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet. . . .
As distinguished from problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable, the problems of governmental planning – and especially those of policy or social planning – are ill-defined; and they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution. (Not “solution.” Social problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved – over and over again.)
What Wicked Problems Look Like
Rittel and Webber identify ten characteristics of wicked problems. That’s a lot of characteristics to keep in mind, and many are in fact corollaries of one another, so I tend to simplify it a bit.
Here are the key factors I usually talk about:
There is no agreement on the cause of the problem, or the cause is not clear
There is no definitive solution to the problem
Every solution has trade offs
Any solution will take multiple actors (e.g. community groups, individuals, and government)
It boils down to this: Wicked problems are so intractable because they involve conflicts between values and every solution has a downside.
For instance, one contemporary wicked problem is what to do about the possibility of terrorism on U.S. soil. We don’t agree on the cause – is it radical Islam, is it porous borders, is it oppression of developed nations, or something else? There is no definitive solution – will jailing all potential terrorists do the trick, or deporting them, or how about educating people around the globe about the freedoms America represents? Every solution has trade offs — for example, if we drastically restrict air travel that may be effective but at the cost of curtailing our fundamental freedom of movement. And, any solution will take multiple actors — government can’t just do it themselves, not can individuals just be more watchful on their own.
Solving And Re-Solving Wicked Problems
We seem to be destined to solve and re-solve wicked problems, precisely because we have to re-strike a social covenant each time we face the problem. In the terrorism example, in 2001 we were willing to live with sudden dramatic travel restrictions in pursuit of security. Today, in 2010, our willingness to go along with that deal is not as wholehearted.
For communities (and nations) to face wicked problems, we simply must deliberate together and weigh the options. This is not an educational question, but a deal-making question. We must decide together what deals we will strike. Otherwise, we will be faced with imposed solutions from leaders that have tepid support at best.
It has been my honor to work in various ways on exactly these kinds of questions over my career, exploring and articulating the values trade-offs inherent in difficult public problems. It is rewarding, and sometimes difficult, work. But it is work that we in communities will need to keep plugging away at.
The problems we solve today will be back later – not because we did a bad job solving them, but because circumstances change.
Because they are wicked problems.
By the way, here is the presentation I used at my talk, in case you are curious:
As you may know, the Marine Corps Marathon is coming up in October — October 25, to be exact. I plan to run in it again this year. I am excited! Last year I came very close to my goal (I finished at 4:13:58). This year I hope at least to beat last year’s time, with a stretch goal of cracking four hours.
My friend, Annie Corr, has autism. Her parents, Nancy and Ed, have honored me by asking me to do very small things to support her once in a while. Little things like a drive to the caregiver’s, or staying over a few hours into the night when they need to be away. I have come to know Annie and she always makes me smile.
Donating to the Organization for Autism Research will help that organization make practical research available to the field, to improve the lives of all people with autism, like Annie.
There is no lower limit. Last year friends and family helped me raise $1,770. Let’s beat that!!
I do understand that there are many causes. My cause may not be your cause. I understand that! So, please, do not feel any pressure with this. Simply give if you feel so moved.
If you are the head of an organization and interested in gift matching in return for sponsorship (you know, like if I wore a logo t-shirt during the race or something like that), please get in touch with me.
I live near a crossroads of sorts in our town. It’s a large traffic circle at the intersection of two residential roads that serve as thoroughfares. It’s not a big Boston rotary, it’s more like a village square – only round. There’s a park in the middle that was recently named for a longtime resident, but I continue to think of it under its more prosaic name, Mannakee Circle.
Like a lot of communities, our neighborhood is not a walk-everywhere kind of place, but you are always assured of seeing a pedestrian or two wherever you go. There’s an elementary school a few blocks in one direction, a community college in the other direction, and a community pool nearby too. So people seem to collect informally on Mannakee Circle. Sometimes people walking will stop and talk to one another about whatever is going on. There’s nothing special here, a small garden, some shrubs, and a few benches. But it’s comfortable.
You’ll also see, if you wait long enough, just about all your neighbors drive by. Like I said, it’s a thoroughfare. It’s not a big, fast road, but the circle is at the heart of things.
People use Mannakee Circle for a lot of different purposes. In the early morning hours you can see and hear groups of people being put through their paces by a drill sergeant type as they do calisthenics in a “boot camp” style exercise program. There’s a teenager who seems to practice Tai Chi every afternoon around three. Midmorning brings a local grandmother who stops off and sits with her grandchild, watching the cars go around. Sometimes I sit on the circle and strum my guitar while knots of people walk by on their way to a local Italian ice store that is nearby.
While there are sometimes ceremonies that take place here, that’s not its main function. It’s not an official town center. It’s ad hoc.
I think of Mannakee Circle as one of my favorite public spaces. It embodies a number of characteristics:
It’s a meeting place. We don’t have enough places where you can just happen upon people these days. This is one of those places.
It’s informal. Mannakee Circle was not set aside for this or that civic purpose. It’s just a place. People go through it and meet up without having the feeling of entered some official realm.
People make of it what they want. People use Mannakee Circle for all sorts of things, from a simple way from here to there, to a conversation salon, and even an exercise studio. It does not require a certain kind of behavior, set-up, or special rules. Just ordinary common sense.
It knits together the community without being the focus. Mannakee Circle is by no means the main focus of town, but it is a presence and most people in the neighborhood have been there and know it. You can use it as a landmark, as a destination, as a Frisbee field, as a meeting place. Because it’s so gently in everyone’s consciousness, it connects us.
It’s all potential. The circle is really just a large expanse of grass with some benches and shrubs. The only limits are safety (it’s in the middle of roads, after all) and imagination. It’s not an official “meeting room” in a civic building, nor is it even a “recreation area” in a park. It just is there.
It can be more if desired. There is so much more that could be done. Why not have a block party there? How about an open air concert? Or maybe a community meeting? All these things are possible. No one has yet done them – but they could.
Today, almost every space in our lives has to be built have a purpose. Even a new park has months of planning behind it, as it gets laid out for maximum recreational impact and the proper playground equipment gets ordered in.
There are many groups that seek to build community, trying to recapture the magic that happens when people work out together, and for themselves, how they ought to approach a public issue. There’s even an office in the White House designed to do this. Many of these efforts seem formal, mechanized. It’s hard for ordinary people to grab a hold of them.
This is why I love this circle. It is unassuming and informal – just a space that people fill in their own ways, at their own pace, for their own purposes.
And out of this informality and possibility emerge meaning and community.
Yesterday, I described one way in which my local blog, Rockville Central, is different from our local newspaper, even though my blog contains “news.” The key lies in the purpose behind the blog, which is to improve community life in the town I call home.
In essence, with Rockville Central I am trying to open up a civic space for other people to step into.
Rockville Central masthead
Today I want to describe what it can look like when that really works. I want to tell you about my friend, Temperance.
I have never had a conversation with Temperance directly, except to perhaps say “hi.” She knows what I look like, I know what she looks like. We have interacted by email and in the comments section of Rockville Central. We are “friends” on Facebook. I count her as a real friend, not a fake online friend. She’s a neighbor.
There’s been a very divisive issue in town for many months now. Temperance has strong feelings about it, and is on the side opposite from a number of very vocal community members. As the issue unfolded, she seemed to find her voice in some of the comments that she wrote.
I did not know Temperance before starting the blog, so maybe she was just as eloquent in public statements all along. But as I watched it seemed to me I was watching someone come to achieve a degree of comfort and leadership that had been less visible before.
On this tough issue, Temperance advocated for her ideas very well.
Now there’s a new issue before the community, equally divisive. On a recent article, the comment trail has included a lot of complaining about “officials not listening” to ordinary citizens.
Temperance stepped in and crafted one of the most eloquent descriptions of the special role we ask public officials to play that I have ever read:
Many of the people who have a perception that they are being ignored or “not listened to” in political exchanges are often the ones who are operating from a highly-charged emotional state of anger or frustration, and feel that the anger itself should be sufficient to motivate their officials to react in a certain way. From the time of our Revolution, through the Civil War, to the scores of conflicts and issues of the 20th century and into our currently polarized blue state/red state millennium, Americans have always been politically exuberant. But it’s disturbing to realize how little we’ve evolved as citizens or human beings that we are still so easily inflamed into behavior that is often so polluted with emotional rage that the perspective of the actual issues at hand is obscured or distorted, if not sometimes completely forgotten. I admit to being susceptible to it myself.
It’s sad to see how many of the issues affecting Rockville frequently degenerate into forums for personal attacks and intimidation.
Do we really want our elected officials to make decisions based primarily on the level of emotion displayed at public hearings, rather than on what they may feel to be the best interests of the entire citizenry, and not just the subset who were motivated enough to show up and yell? I’m reminded of the [another issue, when at a meeting] opponents claimed that their overwhelming presence and volume at the hearing was “evidence” that [everyone] opposed [it]. In fact, many supporters . . . , such as myself, refrained from attending this meeting (and several others) out of sheer fear of the level of emotion. I have a lot of sympathy for the public officials who listen to this type of testimony and can remain calm enough to properly evaluate the situation. While political officials should most definitely listen to their constituents, they should not base their actions on what sometimes amounts to a mob mentality.
This could have been written by any number of my learned colleagues in the civic participation community. But it was written by Temperance, advising her fellow citizens to remember the roles that we all play in public life.
Often, my civic participation colleagues discuss democratic theory as if it takes an advanced degree and specialized training to delve into such weighty topics as whether we elect people as delegates or as representatives, or such as how citizens can begin to set aside self-interest as they consider what is best for their communities. I have heard people discuss “framing issues” as if this were a secret skill that takes years of practice to even become an apprentice.
But the reality is that a practical understanding of what it means to employ self-rule is something that we all share, to differing degrees. And you see this when you trust open civic spaces enough to let the true leaders emerge and help guide the conversation toward properly democratic ends.
Temperance is a true leader.
That’s what can happen when you simply invite people to enter public life and give them a space safe enough that they begin to feel comfortable.
The White House announced yesterday that the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation “would fan out to every region in the country” (according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy) to search for worthy recipients of the $50 million social innovation fund created by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The idea is to find and grow worthy programs and help them scale up.
I’ve been hearing that word “scale” a lot lately, I think because it sounds exciting and technological. Ten years ago everyone in the community benefit sector — nonprofits and foundations — talked about “replicating” programs. I think that word was popular because it sounded smart.
Either way, it amounts to a similar idea: If you think it through properly, and apply money properly, you can take what works in one context and make it work elsewhere.
"Purple Mushrooms" by Flickr user c.j.b
It’s a reasonable thought and in many cases it’s probably right. But there’s something missing.
To me, the “scale” and “replication” terminology is too mechanistic and doesn’t capture what is at play. It implies that with a big enough brain you can do just about anything.
But good programs grow — organically. Like mushrooms. Instead of going around and try to find them to give them more funding, we perhaps ought to look more at creating the right conditions for them to grow and spread from place to place. In some cases this might be funding, but in other cases (perhaps more cases) it might be leadership training, or some other catalytic intervention.
We’re in danger, in the policy world, of being too clever by half. Indeed, I am growing to fear that we’ll look back on this period as “that time when we were overoptimistic about the power of our plans and technologies.”
The turmoil in Iran and the efforts of the nation’s citizens to overcome government censorship provide a good argument for why it is important to build capacity in communities.
Iran protests for the 5th straight day #iranelection by Flickr user .faramarz
Since at least 2004, Iran has been censoring social networking sites. So, according to this New York Times article, people have had about five years to figure out how to get around such censorship. People haven’t been fomenting Internet revolution all this time, though: they’ve been blogging about everyday things like sports scores and sharing pictures of cute cats.
But this created a reservoir of capacity. Iran has relatively many people who can write, use the Internet, and communicate digitally. They’ve got lots of bloggers. Now that this capacity is urgently needed, it’s available.
(There’s another story in the article about the role rugby bloggers in Kenya played in that country’s recent history.)
Here in the U.S., funders and others who support civic projects might take notice. Not all projects have an immediate “outcome” — but many have an important capacity building component that is often not apparent. Research (by Rich Harwood and others) has shown that for many communities, it’s community capacity that can be the difference between responding to adversity well, or spiraling downward.
What does “community capacity” look like? I like to think about it very simply:
Community capacity is the habit of working together on public issues.
This can take many forms, including formal “projects” but also neighborhood block parties, informal afternoons talking about issues while children play, and (natch) local blogs. It’s not a very widespread phenomenon. Even though there may be a few glimmers of hope, for the last fifteen years and more Americans have been turning away from one another.
So, sure we need “outcomes” when we think about community projects.
But we also need to position our communities to respond to future issues we can’t now imagine. We need to keep building the capacity to work together on public issues.
Among people who work in, study, and manage online communities, there’s something called the “90-9-1 Principle.” The idea is that in most online communities, 90 percent of the users are audience members, passively reading posts and comments. Nine percent of the users are “editors” editing posts (in wiki-style communities) or adding comments (in blog-style or forum-style communities).
Just 1 percent are “creators” — people who start threads and articles from scratch.
A corollary of this idea is that, for online community managers, one of the leverage points is the Creators. More Creators will multiply into more action by Editors.
In consulting and in business management, there are lots of similar theories and ideas that hinge on a catchy duo or trio of numbers. I always wonder if these numbers are accurate, what they are based on, and if there is any way to test them.
But the 90-9-1 idea seems intuitively true. I wonder how it would hold up in real life communities.
In a physical, place-based community like a neighborhood, the roles might go by different names.
Remember, in the online community the 90-9-1 rule does not take into account the people who are unaware of the community or only have glanced at once or twice. Similarly, in many neighborhoods, there is a large segment of the public that isn’t engaged and is unaware of some of the community issues. They go to work and go about their business, but aren’t connected in in any significant way.
Outside of that group, the in-person 90-9-1 rule might look like this:
The majority of “audience” might be called the attentive public. They attend community meetings, and keep up on events and news.
The next group (“editors”) might be called the active public. They stand up and comment in meetings. They write letters to the editor, and take substantive part of
Finally, there are the leaders. These are the people who step forward and take focal-point roles. They run for office, lead neighborhood groups, chair committees, serve on commissions.
These “leaders” are not just the officials in office. It’s lots of different kinds of people. Someone who is a leader in one context might be active in another and simply attentive in a third. But the key leverage point for increasingly community vibrancy is on getting more leaders.
For a number of years, there has been a new theory of community leadership building. The idea is that people emerge as leaders from communities — they aren’t anointed, appointed, or made.
This simple notion has driven new kinds of community leadership programs, ones which don’t focus so much on creating a Chamber of Commerce-style network, or even a policy school-type of cohort of highly knowledgeable lay people (even though both of these are important and necessary). These new kinds of leadership programs focus on cultivating leadership skills among people who might not otherwise see themselves as community leaders . As more of these people step forward, into the public square, more active and attentive people follow suit.
Growing the ranks of leadership is one key leverage point (not the only) in fostering a vibrant community life.
My family and I traveled to see the wedding of a dear, dear friend recently. The bride is a wonderful person (as is the groom, but I do not know him as well). The ceremony just perfectly embodied who my friend Emily is: beautiful, humble, gracious.
It got me thinking about my own wedding, some sixteen years ago and more. We chose a decidedly nontraditional approach to our ceremony. It is a choice that has endured and I continue to be glad of it. My wife, Andrea Jarrell, and I met doing civic activities. These things were the center of our life at the time. We were (and are) both true believers that a good person leaves their community better than they found it, or tries to. We wanted our wedding to embody the civic ideals to which we aspired.
It’s a neat story.
How We Met
The day before primary election day in Los Angeles in June 1991, my not-yet-wife and I had both begun volunteering on behalf of an acquaintance, John Emerson, who was in the midst of a pitched battle for a seat in the California state Assembly. John was Deputy City Attorney for Los Angeles. Andrea and I didn’t know one another yet. We ended up phone-banking next to one another, and got to talking. The next night, at the victory party, we talked more.
John lost by a heartbreaking 31 votes, which entitled him to a recount but he decided against it, opting instead for party unity.
Over the next months, we got to know one another. We both had jobs that caused us to circulate in Los Angeles’ civic realm — I was a major gift fundraiser for my alma mater, and Andrea was an executive at the premier speaker’s forum in town. Our courtship is for another time, but suffice to say we hit it off, became friends, fell in love, and got engaged to be married — all very quickly. By October we’d made the decision.
Will You Marry Us?
We wanted John to marry us, which he could do as a City official. We met him at a downtown diner to ask him. We had no real idea how kind John was being to meet with us, two young kids. He had a very, very big job. But I think he was flattered, or his heart was touched. He said yes. Continue reading Our Civic Wedding
One of my entrepreneur and social web heroes, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur, is among the most open and accessible members of the digerati. He is constantly sharing and praising others. He recently was at a conference where Internet star Chris Pirillo was speaking and the subject turned toward community and community building. Chris had some interesting things to say, and Loic responded in equally interesting ways.
Note that these folks were talking about online communities — my question for readers is to what extent, and how, do these observations apply to real-world, neighborhood community building?
I don’t want to be part of anything viral about any community ever, that’s just me a blog is just a tool. If you think a blog is a community then you too are a tool. [Y]ou can’t build a community it is either there or it’s not. You know you have a community if it takes care of itself.
YOU are the asset of a community and not the other way around. [T]he best community leaders come out of the community rather than being hired or thrown in.
If you cultivate your community like a plant it will grow. If you empower and guide your community, you will lead it. if you have something to say, if you have a voice, use it, exercise it. Make those connections. You will be a leader before U know it.
[C]ommunity is the antithesis of ego. It is inside you but it is not about you.
Interesting ideas there. A few points:
The idea that YOU are the asset of a community, and not the other way around. So many of my friends in the community-building world look at the networks they are trying to build within the communities as “assets” to be used (either by the community members or by the parent organization).
We are quick to call something a “community” that just isn’t. Chris is withering when he tells bloggers who view their commenters as a “community” that “you are a tool.” How many nonprofit orgs see communities where there are just groups of people? (A related question, for another time, might be: what turns an accidental group into a community?)
Loic’s Response
Loic, in inimmitable fashion (follow him a while and you will come to recognize it) has a few things to say. One thing he takes issue with is the idea that you can’t “build” community — in Loic’s view, you can:
I think you can “build” it though, it is just a question of words. Chris says “cultivate” by sharing regularly amongst other things. I think you can build with passion.
He goes into more detail in this brief video, and if you listen to his points from the standpoint of a nonprofit organization seeking to build community, there is a lot to be learned:
My good friend Cindy Cotte Griffiths is a prodigious volunteer and always has been. She’s the leader of a Cub Scout pack, chair of a city commission, active in her church, and in her childrens’ schools. She’s also my partner in the hyperlocal news site, Rockville Central.
Me in Second Life (Bradrourke Dynamo)
The other day Cindy wrote about the pull online commitments can exert, in the face of offline, real world interactions. We seem constantly pulled away from reality to tend to online business. For many, this can be vexing. For volunteers intent on helping those around them, it can be even more of a dilemma.
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