A wicked problem isn't just a hard one. It's a problem that changes shape the moment you start solving it.
The term comes from Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973, who were trying to describe why the planning problems of the 1960s kept defeating the people who studied them. A tame problem, they said, is one you can define clearly, break into parts, solve, and verify. A wicked problem is the opposite. There's no clean definition. There's no stopping rule. There's no objectively right answer. Every attempt to solve it changes the problem itself.
For a long time, most of business operated as if wicked problems were edge cases. You designed around them. You outsourced them to consultants who'd reframe them as tame ones and sell you a framework. You waited for the PhDs to figure it out.
That era is over.
Why wicked problems are everywhere now
Three things have shifted, and they're compounding.
First, the speed of change outpaces planning cycles. A five-year strategy that made sense at the start of the period is obsolete by year two. By the time you've aligned the organization, the ground under it has moved. The frameworks we inherited assume a slower clock.
Second, every problem cuts across disciplines. An AI adoption problem is a technology problem, yes. But it's also a people problem, an operating model problem, a governance problem, a pricing problem, a talent problem, and often a legal one. There is no single function that owns it. The old consulting model of sending in a domain expert does not fit problems that don't respect domain lines.
Third, solutions change the problem. You deploy a new capability, and the organization responds. People adapt. Workflows shift. New edge cases emerge. By the time you've shipped, the problem you set out to solve is a different problem. The engineering instinct, which is to specify the solution and build it, breaks down. What works instead is iteration close to the ground, with senior judgment making real-time calls.
The hardest part of a wicked problem is usually not the analysis. It's the humans.
Why the old playbooks fail
The dominant consulting model was built for tame problems. A big firm sends a team. They interview people. They produce a deck with a current state, a future state, and a gap analysis. They hand it over. They leave.
For a supply chain optimization or a cost reduction program, this works well enough. The problem holds still while you solve it. The solution, once implemented, stays solved.
Apply the same model to a wicked problem and three things happen.
The analysis is outdated before the final deck is delivered. The future state was designed for yesterday's version of the problem. The implementation gets stuck in the middle layer of the organization, where the people who actually have to change how they work are holding two incompatible mandates at once and have no room to move.
The deck is not the deliverable. The change is. And change is a wicked thing.
What actually works
A few patterns show up again and again in the work that moves wicked problems forward.
- Senior people close to the work, not junior people running frameworks from a distance
- Short iteration loops that match the rate at which the problem changes
- Honest diagnosis of where the actual resistance lives, which is almost never where the org chart says it is
- Direct conversation with the middle layer of the organization, not just the executives who commissioned the work
- Willingness to change course when the problem reveals itself to be something other than what it looked like
- A bias toward relationships and trust over process and deliverables
None of this is novel. It's just rare, because the incentives in most of the consulting industry point in the other direction.
The quiet claim
Rexicon is built on a quiet claim about where the real leverage is in this kind of work. It's not in the methodology. It's not in the framework. It's not in the deck.
It's in the caliber of the person in the room, the directness of the conversation, and the willingness to tell the truth about what's actually hard.
That's the work we want to do. And it's the work we're organizing around.