Power of Agreement to Solve Wicked Problems

Systems thinking is a framework for seeing wholes and for seeing interrelationships rather than individual things. Systems thinking offers many philosophies, techniques, and practices for constructing sound, scalable systems. For more information on systems thinking see Peter Reier's article, Systems Thinking Skills and Insights to Solving Wicked Problems.

In his book, Data and Reality, it's author William Kent points out this duality. On the one hand, there is no one single objective reality. On the other hand, a group of people with a common, shared interest can share a common enough view of reality for most of our working purposes, so that reality does appear to be objective and stable.  But the chances of achieving such a shared view become less when we try to encompass broader purposes, and to involve more people.

George Box is credited with the statement, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."  Business people are practical people, they seek utility.  Otherwise they would have been artists, philosophers, or theologians.

In his book, Everything Is Miscellaneous,  David Weinberger points out two important things:

  • That every classification scheme ever devised inherently reflects the biases of those that constructed the classification system.
  • The role metadata plays in allowing you to create your own custom classification system so you can have the view of something that you want.
In his article, Description of reality: part I, Graham Berrisford makes a statement that is along similar lines which I provide in context below: (the key sentence is the one in bold)

"Confusing a token with a type leads to “semantic interoperability” issues. In different domains of knowledge, people use different tokens for the same type (synonyms). And worse, they use one token for different types (a homonym). This terminology torture is a big issue for enterprise architects wanting to integrate business systems. And for systems thinkers wanting to use different systems thinking approaches."

Our world has change from being a bunch of unconnected siloed world of individual peer-to-peer systems into a highly connected world of individual siloed peer-to-peer systems which we want to connect.  Yet, systems thinkers that are figuring out how to create these connections can use, and will use, different fundamental system thinking approaches.


And so, on the one hand we want to take advantage of technology and move some things from "real space" and put them in "cyberspace" (i.e. make things digital).  On the other hand computers are dumb beasts, business professionals use different terminologies, information technology professionals use different alternatives for doing exactly the same thing, we have inconsistent understandings of domains of knowledge, and we want to connect even more things together and create "the semantic web".
  1. The system needs to be as narrow as possible to maximize the potential for agreement but as broad as possible to maximize the utility of the system.
  2. The stakeholders of the system specify goals and objectives that the system needs to be able to perform (i.e. the aim of the system).
  3. The system stakeholders need to be able to use the system effectively.
  4. Standards should be used to the maximum extent possible.
  5. Some "conductor" of the orchestra needs to appear to get each of the "instruments" of the system working to maximize the benefit of the aim of the system desired by the system stakeholders.
  6. Upper or top level ontologies can be useful in making sure systems work well together.
Good test cases and rigorous testing proves all of the above.

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