Wicked Problems

In writing about the district energy hubs in Guelph I've tried to emphasize the difficulty I've had in trying to understand what has happened with regard to them. In actual fact, I've come to the conclusion that this is the real story, not the economics of district energy, or, the politics that led to their creation and eventual "moth-balling". I think that the best value a reader can get from what I'm writing about them is to see the whole issue as an example of a "wicked problem". As such, I thought I'd devote an editorial to this general question in order to help explain exactly what I am trying to do with these two articles.

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C. West Churchman, image used
under "Fair Use" provision from
In Memory of C. West Churchman

The term itself was invented by a philosopher named C. West Churchman and first mentioned in a 1967 article in a management science journal. It's rather hard to define what a "wicked problem" is because the first characteristic that adheres to it is that there is no way to easily define or explain one. If you can't easily explain any particular example, you aren't going to be able to easily define the entire class.

Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1929
Public Domain image c/o
Wiki Commons. 

This doesn't mean that this something isn't real, however. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein got around this problem by describing what he called "family resemblance". This when you group a bunch of different things together not because they all have one thing in common, but rather because they each share several---but different---things in common. The name comes from the situation in families where you might say that so-and-so has his father's eyes, his mother's nose, his paternal grandfather's ears, etc.

What this means is that the concept of "wicked problem" is expressed by a list of items that people have noticed about some types of problems that extremely difficult to deal with (I hesitate to use the word "solve".) The following chart is one attempt to create such a list.

Used under the "Fair Use" provision of the Copyright Act,
Original Image from the "Stack Exchange" Website.

Looking at the above chart while thinking about the Guelph Community Energy Initiative and the District Energy program I can see some of the different elements expressed in it.

Let's start by looking at the statement "Every wicked problem is connected to others". This is true with district energy in that it flows from the issue of trying to make Guelph more energy efficient, which in turn, is really motivated by the question of "how can we get Guelph to take climate change seriously?" And, of course, all of these issues are directly linked to other, deeper problems of civic governance such as dependence on the automobile and wasteful suburban sprawl, which are linked to issues like parking, zoning, housing, etc.

All these issues straddle organizational and discipline boundaries---federal, provincial, and, municipal governance; plus zoning, planning, and, engineering.

And, of course, there are multiple stakeholders who have conflicting agendas. Business people want to make money---indeed because of the "fiduciary responsibility" it would be illegal if they didn't. Municipal employees want to keep their jobs, which means keeping their heads down and not "making waves" when the ideological winds blow from Council. Councillors want to get re-elected, which means pandering to what the small fraction of the citizenry who actually votes wants---whether it makes any sense or not. Sprinkled on top of this political doughnut is the vague idea most politicians have of wanting to do good. Unfortunately, this very often this gets polluted by the ideological "short-cuts" people take when they look at the world.

One thing that makes the conflicting agendas even more difficult to sort out is that the core motivating issue boils down to "Do you want to stop the human race from committing suicide through climate change?" No one is going to answer "No", but the tricky bit is how big a priority they are willing to make it. This ranges from "I'm against committing suicide---but only if it doesn't mean higher taxes" to the idea that the nation needs to be put on a "war footing". The problem is, no one is going to say in a speech "I want to stop climate change---but only if taxes don't go up". Instead, they will say "I want to stop climate change" and "I'm against new taxes"----and blithely ignore the fact that you probably can't do the former without the latter. And if one side is saying "we'll end climate change without raising taxes", it's kinda hard for the other side to win with the slogan of "we'll do the same thing that the other guy says---and raise your taxes too!"

The problem is that environmental issues---as "wicked problem"---aren't questions of "either/or", but rather "better/worse". How much environmental destruction are you willing to put up with in order to keep our taxes from going up? And during elections no one gets points for being specific about how much pain they are willing to inflict on voters. 

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Who's going to pay? Polish bagpiper,
photo by Jan Mehlich via Wiki Commons

I get just as tired of writing these pleas for people to subscribe to the "Back-Grounder" as you probably do reading them. But I keep doing it because as the news economy keeps changing it's important for there to be a direct connection between the people who read it and the people who write it. Instead, people have gotten used to large corporations doing all the work of organizing and paying for news as an advertising medium. Well, as we were taught as children "He who pays the piper gets to call the tune". If you pay directly for the news, you get to call the tune. If you don't, well then you get whatever the advertisers want you to hear. If you like what I write---and you can afford it---share the links and some coin, c/o Patreon or the Tip Jar. 

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Beyond the question of conflicting agendas, another problem with anything to do with the environment---including the Community Energy Initiative and District Energy---is that the problem you are solving is never done. It just goes on and on as your society plays "whack a mole". Smog, phosphates, DDT, the ozone hole, plastics, exotic species, climate change, etc, etc. It never ends. It takes a long time to get results. And things never seem to get back to being as good as they used to be, no matter what you do. This means that the everyone involved is vulnerable to something comparable to compassion fatigue. Eventually many voters, politicians, and, bureaucrats simply want a "holiday" from having to deal with something that just makes their job more difficult without adding any tangible, short-term benefit to their life. (Nobody ever got a pay raise or more votes because they prevented a tiny fraction of one degree rise in global temperatures 100 years in the future.)

And of all the solutions that you try to put forward, only a few are able to get past all the competing agendas. And most are exceptionally easy to sabotage. As I pointed out in my solid waste articles, business groups moved heaven and earth to sabotage the tire recycling fee, the eco-fee program, the product stewardship councils, and, even municipal recycling and composting programs. And, of course, Doug Ford simply decided to tear up the cap-and-trade system that the governments of Ontario, Quebec, and, California had negotiated to put a price on carbon. Doesn't it make perfect sense to call the problem that can never really be finally solved "wicked"?

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One really important thing I want readers to come away with is the idea that the problem is wicked, not the individuals who are involved in it. I've been paying attention to Guelph Council for a long time and I don't think that any of the individuals involved were "wicked" people. Instead, I see them as folks who have brought a specific way of looking at the world to their jobs. And I see some of these viewpoints as being relatively better or worse at understanding what is happening to our city and the world it inhabits. My personal understanding is that much of it is profoundly wrong-headed, but I don't think that this makes the people involved evil, just "wrong-headed". And the only way I can think about how to improve things is to try to enter the conversation and try to suggest a more clear and precise way of looking at things. This may result in some politicians or bureaucrats changing their minds. It might also result in some voters changing which people they support during elections.

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!