Wicked Problems: The Actual Paper
Rittel and Webber listed ten properties in 1973. Most citations use six, and the term was in print six years earlier than the paper everyone cites. The ten as actually written.
Date
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Writer
The paper is fifteen pages long and it opens by conceding defeat. "The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail," write Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber on the first page of Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, published in Policy Sciences volume 4 in 1973, pages 155 to 169. Under their names the journal prints their posts at Berkeley. Rittel is Professor of the Science of Design. Webber is Professor of City Planning. The man holding a chair named for a science of design begins by telling you that the science you are hoping for cannot be had.
I have quoted this paper in client rooms for years. When I finally sat down with the actual text rather than the summaries, I found that most of what I thought I was quoting was not in it, and that the parts I had never heard anyone mention are the parts that do the real work.
Who actually coined the term
The design internet says Rittel coined "wicked problem" in the 1973 paper. The Interaction Design Foundation's topic page is typical: it attributes the term's origin to Rittel and dates the ten characteristics to 1973.
The term was in print six years earlier. In Management Science volume 14, number 4, December 1967, pages B141 to B142, C. West Churchman published a guest editorial titled simply "Wicked Problems". He attributes the idea to Rittel and gives a definition he credits to him: "that class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing."
Churchman's editorial makes a moral argument the later paper does not make in those terms: "whoever attempts to tame a part of a wicked problem, but not the whole, is morally wrong." It is aimed squarely at the habit of carving off the tractable piece and declaring victory. Buchanan, writing in 1992, dates Rittel's ten properties to 1972 rather than 1973.
So the correct sentence is: Rittel formulated the idea, Churchman put it into print in 1967, and Rittel and Webber published the ten-property version in 1973. Most design writing collapses this into one date and one author.
The ten properties, as they are actually headed
Rittel and Webber introduce the list flatly: "There are at least ten distinguishing properties of planning-type problems, i.e. wicked ones". The phrase "at least" is doing work. The list is not presented as complete or as a definition. It is a set of symptoms.
They are also explicit that the word is not a moral judgement. "we are calling them 'wicked' not because these properties are themselves ethically deplorable. We use the term 'wicked' in a meaning akin to that of 'malignant' (in contrast to 'benign') or 'vicious' (like a circle) or 'tricky' (like a leprechaun) or 'aggressive' (like a lion, in contrast to the docility of a lamb)". Their contrast class is the "tame" problem, and the examples they give are specific: "a problem of mathematics, such as solving an equation, or the task of an organic chemist in analyzing the structure of some unknown compound, or that of the chess player attempting to accomplish checkmate in five moves". A tame problem is not an easy problem. Checkmate in five is not easy. It is a problem whose statement is stable and whose solution can be checked.
Property as headed in the paper | What the property actually claims | What design usage usually does with it |
|---|---|---|
1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem. | "The information needed to understand the problem depends upon one's idea for solving it", so that "To find the problem is thus the same thing as finding the solution". | Reduced to "the brief will change", which is a project-management observation rather than an epistemic one. |
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. | Work ends for reasons outside the problem: the planner "stops for considerations that are external". | Usually kept intact, and usually the only property people can recite. |
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad. | Judgement of a plan is made by parties with standing and differing interests, not by a test. | Read as licence for subjective taste, which inverts the point: many judges, each with grounds. |
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem. | Consequences propagate over unbounded time, so no result closes the account. | Mostly dropped, because it makes design measurement look worse than anyone wants. |
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly. | Interventions in social systems are irreversible and leave traces. | Flatly contradicted by the prototyping literature, which is usually presented as the answer to wicked problems. |
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions. | Nor is there "a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan". | Read as "there are many possible solutions", which is much weaker than "the set cannot be enumerated". |
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique. | "there always might be an additional distinguishing property that is of overriding importance", so precedent cannot be relied upon. | Frequently cited, then contradicted two slides later by a reusable process diagram. |
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem. | The level at which you fix the problem is a choice, and fixing at too low a level is a known failure mode. | Becomes "systems thinking" as a slogan, without the warning attached. |
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. | "The analyst's 'world view' is the strongest determining factor in explaining a discrepancy and, therefore, in resolving a wicked problem." | Almost never quoted, although it is the most useful sentence in the paper for a working designer. |
10. The planner has no right to be wrong. | Scientists may float hypotheses for refutation; planners may not, because "Planners are liable for the consequences of the actions which they generate". | Dropped entirely. It is a liability claim, and it does not fit a workshop. |
The three sentences nobody quotes
Property 10 is the one that changes the paper's meaning. Rittel and Webber invoke Popper directly: "As Karl Popper argues in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, it is a principle of science that solutions to problems are only hypotheses offered for refutation". Their point is that the planner cannot claim that privilege, because the experiment is performed on people. The property is not epistemological at all. It is about accountability. Design writing that reproduces properties 1 through 9 and quietly omits 10 has removed the paper's spine.
Property 9 is the second. If the analyst's world view is the strongest determining factor in explaining a discrepancy, then the framing you bring to a brief is not neutral preparation, it is already most of the answer. That is a claim any designer can test on a Monday morning, and it is far more actionable than "the problem will keep changing".
The third is the paper's diagnosis of why professionals were being attacked in 1973: "The lay customers are complaining because planners and other professionals have not succeeded in solving the problems they claimed they could solve." Rittel and Webber are not defending planners. They are explaining that the profession over-promised, and that the over-promise followed from importing a model of problem solving that does not apply.
"there are no 'solutions' in the sense of definitive and objective answers"
What Buchanan added in 1992
Richard Buchanan's Wicked Problems in Design Thinking appeared in Design Issues volume 8, number 2, Spring 1992, pages 5 to 21. It is the hinge by which Rittel's planning argument entered design education, and it is worth reading because Buchanan does not simply relay the ten properties. He reinterprets why design problems behave that way.
Rittel and Webber locate wickedness in the social system: open systems, plural clients, contested values. Buchanan relocates it in the discipline. "Design problems are 'indeterminate' and 'wicked' because design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be." And: "The reason for this is simple: design is fundamentally concerned with the particular, and there is no science of the particular."
That is a different claim. Under Rittel, a wicked problem is a kind of problem, and plenty of problems are not wicked. Under Buchanan, indeterminacy is a property of design as such. Everything a designer touches becomes indeterminate by virtue of being designed. This is the move that lets "wicked problem" expand to cover a packaging refresh.
Buchanan's own contribution, the part that deserves to survive, is the doctrine of placements. "Categories have fixed meanings that are accepted within the framework of a theory or a philosophy", he writes, while "Placements have boundaries to shape and constrain meaning, but are not rigidly fixed and determinate." A placement is a deliberately loose frame you apply to an undetermined subject in order to generate a reading of it. It is a practical technique for property 9: if the world view determines the explanation, then swapping world views on purpose is a method.
He also proposes the four orders of design: symbolic and visual communication, material objects, activities and organised services, and complex systems and environments. Anyone who has sat through a service design induction has met this taxonomy without being told where it came from. And he frames design as "a new liberal art of technological culture", which is the sentence that gets quoted most and defended least.
How the term travels now
Most designers do not encounter Rittel's ten properties. They encounter Jeff Conklin's six. Conklin's Wicked Problems and Social Complexity, the opening chapter of his dialogue mapping work published through the CogNexus Institute in the early 2000s, gives this list: you do not understand the problem until you have developed a solution; wicked problems have no stopping rule; solutions are not right or wrong; every wicked problem is essentially unique and novel; every solution is a one-shot operation; wicked problems have no given alternative solutions. Conklin is honest about the edit. A footnote says "Rittel had a more exhaustive list of criteria for wicked problems", and that he has tried to simplify without losing the essence.
Look at what the simplification removes. Properties 4, 8, 9 and 10 are gone: no test of a solution, every problem a symptom of another, world view as the determining factor, and the planner's liability. Four of the ten, including both of the ones that carry ethical weight. The six-property version is the one that circulates.
There is now quantitative evidence for the drift. Jennie Lönngren and Katrien van Poeck's mapping review, published in the International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology volume 28, issue 6, 2021, pages 481 to 502, screened 201 abstracts and read 55 full papers. They record Rittel and Webber's paper as the single most cited publication on wicked problems, with more than 5,000 Scopus citations as of February 2020. Of the 55 papers they coded for how visibly the theory was used, 32 (58 per cent) applied it consistently, 13 (24 per cent) applied it partially and then abandoned it, 7 (13 per cent) merely implied it, and in 3 (5 per cent) the concept was "not introduced or described as a theoretical concept" at all. They note that several authors argue the term functions rhetorically rather than analytically.
In policy studies the concept has held up better. Kate Crowley and Brian Head's reassessment in Policy Sciences volume 50, number 4, 2017, pages 539 to 547, finds "great resonance in the paper with contemporary problem solving preoccupations, not least that the political context is crucial, that argumentation must be transparent and robust, and that policy interventions may have consequences that cannot be easily controlled in open and highly pluralised social systems." Note which properties that sentence is drawing on. The political ones.
Four specific divergences
Wicked has come to mean hard
Rittel and Webber's contrast is not difficulty. Checkmate in five is difficult and tame. The distinguishing feature is that a tame problem has a stable formulation and a checkable solution. A redesign with a contested brief and several stakeholders is genuinely closer to wicked than to tame. A redesign that is merely large is not.
Property 5 is quietly reversed
"Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one-shot operation'; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly." Design thinking answers wicked problems with iterative prototyping, which is trial and error. Both positions can be defended, but they are not the same position, and presenting prototyping as the natural response to the ten properties papers over a direct contradiction with one of them. The honest version is that prototyping is how you avoid making the one-shot move before you have to, and that the moment of release is still one-shot.
The subject matter changed
The 1973 paper is about public planning: housing, transport, crime, schooling. Its unit of analysis is a population that did not commission the work and cannot opt out. Almost all design use of the term concerns products with users who can leave. Property 10, the liability claim, is what made the original stakes what they were, and it is the first thing dropped when the term moves into commercial design.
Ten became a definition
"At least ten distinguishing properties" is not a test. It became one. The ixdf page lists ten characteristics and then a list of examples: climate change, healthcare, poverty, urban planning, terrorism, water scarcity. Those examples are good ones by the paper's own standards. But the format, ten boxes to tick, turns a description of a predicament into a diagnostic instrument that Rittel and Webber did not offer and did not claim to have.
What I got wrong, and what I still cannot check
For several years I used "wicked problem" as a way of telling a client that their brief was harder than they thought. That is a misuse. The paper is not about difficulty, and using it that way flatters the designer: it implies the work is heroic rather than that the framing is contested. Property 9 says the opposite. If my world view is the strongest determinant of how I explain the discrepancy, then calling a problem wicked is often a way of not examining my own framing.
Two things I could not establish. First, I have not been able to read Rittel's 1972 paper "On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the First and Second Generations", published in the Norwegian journal Bedriftsøkonomen, in full; the copy I located could not be retrieved. Buchanan dates the ten properties to that 1972 text, and I am relying on his dating rather than on the source. Second, Rittel and Webber never say why the list stops at ten. The paper as I read it offers no eleventh property and no argument for the number, which is worth knowing before anyone treats ten as a closed set.
Sources
Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning", Policy Sciences, volume 4, number 2, 1973, pages 155 to 169. doi 10.1007/BF01405730. urbanpolicy.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Rittel-Webber_1973_DilemmasInAGeneralTheoryOfPlanning.pdf
Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning", scanned copy used to verify properties 6, 7 and 9 and the "malignant" passage. theisrm.org/documents/Rittel & Webber (1973) Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.pdf
Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning", OCR copy used to verify the opening sentence, the tame-problem examples and the Popper passage. andreasaltelli.eu/file/repository/Rittel_OCR.pdf
C. West Churchman, "Guest Editorial: Wicked Problems", Management Science, volume 14, number 4, December 1967, pages B141 to B142. punkrockor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/wicked-problems-churchman-1967.pdf
Richard Buchanan, "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking", Design Issues, volume 8, number 2, Spring 1992, pages 5 to 21. MIT Press. doi 10.2307/1511637. web.mit.edu/jrankin/www/engin_as_lib_art/Design_thinking.pdf
Jeff Conklin, "Wicked Problems and Social Complexity", chapter 1 of Dialogue Mapping, CogNexus Institute, 2001 to 2003. qi.elft.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/cn-wickedproblems.pdf
Jennie Lönngren and Katrien van Poeck, "Wicked problems: a mapping review of the literature", International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, volume 28, issue 6, 2021, pages 481 to 502. uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1598781/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Kate Crowley and Brian W. Head, "The enduring challenge of 'wicked problems': revisiting Rittel and Webber", Policy Sciences, volume 50, number 4, 2017, pages 539 to 547. doi 10.1007/s11077-017-9302-4. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11077-017-9302-4
Interaction Design Foundation, "Wicked Problems" topic page, consulted as an example of current design usage. ixdf.org/literature/topics/wicked-problems
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