The late 20th century industrial age has left us with a lot to clean up, not least is how we solve complex or wicked problems.
Management practises, perspectives and theories that worked so well from the 1950s to Y2K are now proving to be woefully inadequate in our era of uncertainty, distrust and change.
Why? Because 20th-century management practices taught us to think small, but the 21st century demands we think big.
Take, for example, the horrible and ugly fight over trans students in schools, which can be traced to an organized far-right movement on the rise in Canada.
As I wrote in a February 2023 column, pushing back against these anti-democratic, authoritarian movements with their focused content campaigns and expertise in manipulating social media sentiment can feel like we are bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Where we seek fairness, they seek power – and they are successfully upending conventional thinking to do it.
The anti-trans movement gains traction because it broadens its audience by attaching itself to a far more extensive and less controversial problem: parents’ growing distrust of the public education system.
The messaging from these purveyors of misinformation doesn’t target unsupportive parents of trans kids, who would be a small minority of parents with a very specific problem. Both the audience and their problem are too small.
No, the anti-trans movement appeals to the concern of a much larger crowd: parents who fear their local school has become something they don’t recognize, understand or trust to educate their kids and prepare them for the real world.
Now that we’re on the other side of pandemic learning, with its Microsoft Teams video calls and lack of structured learning time, I know a lot of parents who are frustrated by what they witnessed and are unconvinced teachers, principals, and system administrators are prepared to solve lingering problems.
While they can’t quite put their finger on the root of the problem, they feel something isn’t working.
Many teachers, principals and system administrators think the same of parents.
Just as I know parents who complain about unresponsive and condescending educators, I know several teachers who complain about parents who are either overly demanding or blithely unresponsive.
The education department may trumpet that we are all partners in education, but the reality is a persistent level of mutual distrust bubbling beneath the surface.
It’s a classic wicked problem, ill-defined with no clear direction, bogged down by vested interests and institutional inertia.
The size of the problem and a persistent unwillingness to address these underlying issues of trust have created an opening for bad actors to mine that seam of doubt to harm a small minority of vulnerable children.
This means to protect the rights of trans kids – a relatively narrow problem we can clearly define – we need to address the larger ill-defined problem of distrust between parents and teachers.
Such advice goes against how most of us view problem-solving.
Traditional management practices have conditioned us to break down large challenges into narrowly defined problems to manage and control change more easily.
However, this structured problem-solving model comes up short when faced with the speed and fluidity of networked wicked problems, which by their nature are connected to other wicked problems.
Twentieth-century management theory tells us that’s a problem; I disagree.
The interconnectedness of wicked problems isn’t a bug; it’s a feature, and recognizing that is the first step towards developing sustainable, long-term solutions.
We are moving from hierarchical systems of control to networked systems of access, and that requires a different type of roadmap, one that embraces building solutions that rally diverse groups and concerns around a shared mission and priorities.
Hate groups do that by appealing to our collective fear of loss.
To fight back, we need to appeal to our collective desire for peace.
That means we need to start believing in each other and our capacity to develop solutions that bridge rather than exacerbate divides.
We need to go big; we solve nothing if we stay small.
