Structure of messy problem solving.

Design

Collaboration

for, and support collaboration with automated tools, we require a deeper understanding of how collaboration works.

declare
connect
learn
“we”
create

COLLABORATION IS NOT OUR FIRST CHOICE

When faced with a messy problem, most people do not automatically fall into a mode of collaboration. Our colleague, Nancy Roberts, has confirmed this from her work and uses it to teach a class on “coping with wicked problems” [ 9].

Roberts begins the class by posing a wicked problem and asking everyone to devise a solution to it. When they come together, the group judges no solution satisfactory. Their proposals typically involve getting an appropriately high authority to make and enforce key declarations. For example, a green infrastructure is best achieved by establishing a new cab-inet-level “infrastructure czar” who can set sustainability goals, create timetables for their completion, and inflict punishments on those who do not comply.

After this failure, Roberts asks the students to try again. Once again, when they come together, the group judges no proposed solution satisfactory. This time their proposals involve various forms of competition: the best prevails in some sort of contest. For example, the green and blue advocates both

present their cases to the public, who vote on referenda to adopt one scheme after a period of debates and campaigning.

Roberts sends the students back to try a third time. In their frustration over their recalcitrant instructor they start meeting as a group. They discover they can invent solutions that take care of multiple concerns. They find a solution to the wicked problem.

Roberts notes that the students eventually got to collaboration, but not before they had exhausted the alternatives of authoritarianism and competition. These two approaches do not work because they do not show each member of the group how individual concerns will be addressed. Roberts concludes, “People fail into collaboration.”

We are not saying that authoritarian solutions or competition solutions never work. Of course they do. They tend not to work for wicked problems. Our familiarity with them draws us to them first. Roberts is saying that when we encounter a wicked problem, our best bet is to look for a collaborative solution.

The situation in the U.S. after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005

followed this pattern.
The wicked problem
was to restore infrastruc-
ture in a region where
most of the residents
had permanently fled
after the storm knocked
out all power, communi-
cations, water, trans-
portation, food
distribution, sewage, and waste
removal. The President’s first pro-
posal (FEMA takeover) was
authoritarian. Local authorities
asserting regional rights rebuffed
that approach. Thereafter, the situ-
ation devolved into numerous
competitions (including disputes
and finger-pointing) between fed-
eral and local jurisdictions. Two
years after the disaster, the region
remained gridlocked by local rival-
ries, fewer than half the residents
had returned, disaster reimburse-
ments were held up by enormous
tangles of red tape, and very little
rebuilding had even started. Most
of the progress that was made
came from the grass-roots level,
such as businesses, churches, vol-
untary associations, and neighbors.

So the political system tried and failed at authoritarianism and competition and got stuck, while the grass roots fell into collaboration and made progress. The political system, in its desire to manage everything, did little to empower the grass roots.

Two aspects of our contemporary culture may be further disincentives for collaboration. One is a belief that we can win in every negotiation by standing our ground [ 4]. This belief leaves little

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