7 ms·

Lean Meets Wicked Problems

52 points by sblank 3y ago

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
I'm reminded of a recent thread: "The design thinking movement is absurd" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893635
roenxi 3y ago
> Solving Disinformation/Information Pollution for the BBC This isn't really a complex problem; it is an intractable problem. It is very easy to solve disinformation - have a good editor who notes the quality of the evidence clearly. The problem comes in to play because once there is a reliable brand, partisans/corporate suits/do-gooders/hacks see value and set around corrupting the brand to extract value from it. It doesn't matter how good the solution is, eventually someone will decide that reality is pulling in a direction they don't like and bam! disinformation and censorship. The BBC is not in the business of neutrality. They are a reputable front for British propaganda. Seems likely that one of the reasons the quality is so high is someone is purposefully keeping the channel clear so they can nudge the debate more effectively. Especially after we discovered what the US agencies were doing in social media with the so-called Twitter Files - professional government disinformationists embedding in media outlets is obviously the done thing.
- j45 3y ago
  Editing every topic manually in the face of automated generation of misinformation may not be a solution that scales
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Narrator voice: it's not actually very easy to solve disinformation.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > It is very easy to solve disinformation - have a good editor who notes the quality of the evidence clearly. - how do you identify candidates? - how do you know that the candidate that is selected is actually what the judges think they are? - how do you know that the candidate is not at least partially compromised, on an ongoing basis? - for any given editorial issue, how do you know that the candidate is performing perfectly (or, when you said "solve", were you perhaps joking)? - is that air you're breathing right now?
- cma 3y ago
  It turned out that was Taibbi's own invention, changing an acronym so that it pointed to a government agency when it really didn't: > Taibbi claimed “the EIP was partnered with the government Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency—CISA—to censor Twitter,” but the reporter mixed up the government agency with the nonprofit firm Center for Internet Security. https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-host-mehdi-hasan-makes-matt-taibbi-squirm-over-his-twitter-files-errors https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-host-mehdi-hasan-makes-m...
- psunavy03 3y ago
  > It is very easy to solve disinformation I don't know about that, but it is very easy to make statements like this which make your credibility go "poof."
  - roenxi 3y ago
    You havn't managed to provide an argument our counterexample, so it is obviously at least something of a challenge to find unsolvable disinformation. Most of the easy examples are intensely political and it is obvious that motivated reasoning or clashing values is the root cause and no issues to do with facts. > make your credibility go "poof." I suspect you are using credibility to assess claims rather than arguments. If that is so, you're never going to escape disinformation because credible people routinely discover they can sell their credibility and do so. And credibility has never been a measure of truth, lots of credible people are also key spreaders of disinformation (like the BBC, for example). That would make the problem intractable. It is pretty normal for people to optimise for credibility, which means the disinformation is generally pushed specifically by people who are legitimately credible.
bena 3y ago
This is hilarious, because it misses one of the core issues with wicked problems. Wicked problems are wicked because they are nearly impossible to theorize about. You cannot know if a solution is viable unless you actually implement the solution. So you won't know if you're right or wrong until it is too late. You can collect all the data, interview all the people, see all the things, and still do the wrong thing. And you won't know it until you've tried. Sometimes you won't know if you've failed or not for years afterwards. There are no good ways to approach wicked problems in general, because each has its own complications. So while it may feel good to feel like you've done something here, I question whether anything was actually done. Because there is no way to know if any of these proposed solutions are actually viable or effective.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  > I question whether anything was actually done It sold services. There's a big market for that.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > You cannot know if a solution is viable unless you actually implement the solution. So you won't know if you're right or wrong until it is too late. It is certainly possible to sometimes know when a given idea cannot work. > There are no good ways to approach wicked problems in general, because each has its own complications. You are guessing, necessarily. That people are generally speaking not able to stop guessing, and realizing that they are guessing, is a lot bigger of a headwind imho.
- mrkeen 3y ago
  Did you read the article? It didn't miss any of that. That was the point of the article. >> Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking. >> Our goal was to see if we could get students to stop admiring problems and work rapidly on solving them.
  - 3y ago
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
> The team working on the Mapuche conflict in the Araucania region of Chile, flew to Chile from London, interviewed multiple stakeholders and were back in time for next week’s class. Jesus, for a class? Who are these people? I question the lesson, here. A wicked problem isn't one you can solve by flying into a country for a week, developing some incredibly superficial understanding, and then start proposing solutions. Step one, here, should be approaching these issues with deep humility, and this would seem to be the opposite of that.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  > Who are these people? Future management consultants.
  - newprint 3y ago
    My exact thought.
- mrkeen 3y ago
  > Jesus, for a class? Who are these people? The people taking the class. Which they flew out for. > A wicked problem isn't one you can solve by flying into a country for a week A wicked problem is one whose solution can't be seen until you've started working on it. > flying into a country for a week Meeting the stakeholders. > then start proposing solutions That's sprint one. The alternative to meeting the stakeholders before working the problem, is working the problem before meeting the stakeholders.
- vessenes 3y ago
  This is pointless armchair quarterbacking, and it's counterproductive to spread this sort of thinking. If you read the presentation from the Mapuche conflict team, you might come away appreciating the effort and recommendations. You'll note plenty of humility and humbling in the takeaway notes from the project. And, you'll also note there were Mapuche labeled as 'willing to talk' right in the deck. Especially here at HackerNews, I propose we generally stay positive on the idea of leaning in to solving difficult problems, and getting working on them rapidly. I believe it's better for the world.
psunavy03 3y ago
One could argue, according to Cynefin, that "wicked problems" are where Lean and Agile diverge. When you're operating in a generally-known environment where what's unknown are things like product/market fit or codebase behavior, it makes sense to operate in short iterations or kanbans with rapid customer feedback, while still trying to use Lean to drive efficiencies along the way. But if you really have no idea what's going on, there's no way to know what is "efficient," and so you have to fall back on more pure Agile, i.e. Cynefin's recommendations for the unordered "chaotic" or "complex" domains: do something small, analyze how that affected your environment, learn from that, and respond/repeat.
- kitotik 3y ago
  > do something small, > analyze how that affected your environment > learn from that, and > respond/repeat. I could be missing your point, but this is precisely a core tenet of Lean - Plan, Do, Check, Act Agile speaks nothing of these sorts of processes(aside from the cargo cult enterprise scrum nonsense of course)
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    You seem to have missed the point of Agile. But then, that's normal.
    - kitotik 3y ago
      Did I? Where does the manifesto talk about a process of any sort? It’s a set of values. It doesn’t mention anything about iterations, breaking things down, etc
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        PDCA, in more humanities than engineering terms, is basically the final Agile Principle “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
tgv 3y ago
The superficiality of the presentations reeks of consultancy. I wouldn't be surprised if all students ended up in KPMG-Deloite-Young. Even the smallest problem, something design ships something, only showed that the students had actually spoken to people, but not listened or understood, and it was smothered with a bad case of AI, the very thing called out at the start as an example of "not wicked."
contingencies 3y ago
Steve I have read your blog posts sporadically for years and am running a startup working on a wicked problem area (fully autonomous food preparation, retail and logistics) and would be happy to provide a case study in practical approaches we have used. Incidentally I will be in CA in the next few months and we are raising. Frankly our best strategies to date have been common ones: business-level modeling as a means to ensure strategic validity, in-depth study of predecessors and competitors, commitment to rapid iteration, brainstorming, first principles thinking, breaking down the problem, broad and dynamic base of contributors (different professional skillsets and mentalities), extensive documentation, looking at the whole problem, investing in developing required specialist skills, etc. After seven years of hard work according to public sources we are now the world leader in our space by multiple objective metrics, from which I would suggest we have been successful technically as well as financially. IMHO there's no secret sauce. It takes a lot of time and money and concerted effort. A lean / startup approach just allows more efficient execution.
yencabulator 3y ago
Apparently they're also solving Ukraine's need to provide medical care to people wounded in the war, and their primary contribution is to suggest using RFID bracelets. Even if you fully accept that patient tracking is crucial, jumping to RFID seems wholly unnecessary. Wartime is exactly when you do NOT mess around with fancy tech and hard-to-source materials; there is not even a hint here of why barcodes wouldn't be the solution, just weird fetishizing of RFID tech. https://drive.google.com/file/d/12a2aLdG25YaPUzFwpVlIeO346DUrfH2m/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/12a2aLdG25YaPUzFwpVlIeO346DU...
- cinntaile 3y ago
  I quickly skimmed through the presentation and you seem to be misrepresenting it.
tuatoru 3y ago
Dude wants a wicked problem, he should figure out how to change the name of the institution he works at. "Imperial" College? In this day and age?

52 points by sblank 3y ago

I'm reminded of a recent thread: "The design thinking movement is absurd" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893635

roenxi 3y ago

> Solving Disinformation/Information Pollution for the BBC This isn't really a complex problem; it is an intractable problem. It is very easy to solve disinformation - have a good editor who notes the quality of the evidence clearly. The problem comes in to play because once there is a reliable brand, partisans/corporate suits/do-gooders/hacks see value and set around corrupting the brand to extract value from it. It doesn't matter how good the solution is, eventually someone will decide that reality is pulling in a direction they don't like and bam! disinformation and censorship. The BBC is not in the business of neutrality. They are a reputable front for British propaganda. Seems likely that one of the reasons the quality is so high is someone is purposefully keeping the channel clear so they can nudge the debate more effectively. Especially after we discovered what the US agencies were doing in social media with the so-called Twitter Files - professional government disinformationists embedding in media outlets is obviously the done thing.

j45 3y ago
Editing every topic manually in the face of automated generation of misinformation may not be a solution that scales
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Narrator voice: it's not actually very easy to solve disinformation.
mistermann 3y ago
> It is very easy to solve disinformation - have a good editor who notes the quality of the evidence clearly. - how do you identify candidates? - how do you know that the candidate that is selected is actually what the judges think they are? - how do you know that the candidate is not at least partially compromised, on an ongoing basis? - for any given editorial issue, how do you know that the candidate is performing perfectly (or, when you said "solve", were you perhaps joking)? - is that air you're breathing right now?
cma 3y ago
It turned out that was Taibbi's own invention, changing an acronym so that it pointed to a government agency when it really didn't: > Taibbi claimed “the EIP was partnered with the government Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency—CISA—to censor Twitter,” but the reporter mixed up the government agency with the nonprofit firm Center for Internet Security. https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-host-mehdi-hasan-makes-matt-taibbi-squirm-over-his-twitter-files-errors https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbc-host-mehdi-hasan-makes-m...
psunavy03 3y ago
> It is very easy to solve disinformation I don't know about that, but it is very easy to make statements like this which make your credibility go "poof."
- roenxi 3y ago
  You havn't managed to provide an argument our counterexample, so it is obviously at least something of a challenge to find unsolvable disinformation. Most of the easy examples are intensely political and it is obvious that motivated reasoning or clashing values is the root cause and no issues to do with facts. > make your credibility go "poof." I suspect you are using credibility to assess claims rather than arguments. If that is so, you're never going to escape disinformation because credible people routinely discover they can sell their credibility and do so. And credibility has never been a measure of truth, lots of credible people are also key spreaders of disinformation (like the BBC, for example). That would make the problem intractable. It is pretty normal for people to optimise for credibility, which means the disinformation is generally pushed specifically by people who are legitimately credible.

bena 3y ago

This is hilarious, because it misses one of the core issues with wicked problems. Wicked problems are wicked because they are nearly impossible to theorize about. You cannot know if a solution is viable unless you actually implement the solution. So you won't know if you're right or wrong until it is too late. You can collect all the data, interview all the people, see all the things, and still do the wrong thing. And you won't know it until you've tried. Sometimes you won't know if you've failed or not for years afterwards. There are no good ways to approach wicked problems in general, because each has its own complications. So while it may feel good to feel like you've done something here, I question whether anything was actually done. Because there is no way to know if any of these proposed solutions are actually viable or effective.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
> I question whether anything was actually done It sold services. There's a big market for that.
mistermann 3y ago
> You cannot know if a solution is viable unless you actually implement the solution. So you won't know if you're right or wrong until it is too late. It is certainly possible to sometimes know when a given idea cannot work. > There are no good ways to approach wicked problems in general, because each has its own complications. You are guessing, necessarily. That people are generally speaking not able to stop guessing, and realizing that they are guessing, is a lot bigger of a headwind imho.
mrkeen 3y ago
Did you read the article? It didn't miss any of that. That was the point of the article. >> Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking. >> Our goal was to see if we could get students to stop admiring problems and work rapidly on solving them.
- 3y ago

BaseballPhysics 3y ago

> The team working on the Mapuche conflict in the Araucania region of Chile, flew to Chile from London, interviewed multiple stakeholders and were back in time for next week’s class. Jesus, for a class? Who are these people? I question the lesson, here. A wicked problem isn't one you can solve by flying into a country for a week, developing some incredibly superficial understanding, and then start proposing solutions. Step one, here, should be approaching these issues with deep humility, and this would seem to be the opposite of that.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
> Who are these people? Future management consultants.
- newprint 3y ago
  My exact thought.
mrkeen 3y ago
> Jesus, for a class? Who are these people? The people taking the class. Which they flew out for. > A wicked problem isn't one you can solve by flying into a country for a week A wicked problem is one whose solution can't be seen until you've started working on it. > flying into a country for a week Meeting the stakeholders. > then start proposing solutions That's sprint one. The alternative to meeting the stakeholders before working the problem, is working the problem before meeting the stakeholders.
vessenes 3y ago
This is pointless armchair quarterbacking, and it's counterproductive to spread this sort of thinking. If you read the presentation from the Mapuche conflict team, you might come away appreciating the effort and recommendations. You'll note plenty of humility and humbling in the takeaway notes from the project. And, you'll also note there were Mapuche labeled as 'willing to talk' right in the deck. Especially here at HackerNews, I propose we generally stay positive on the idea of leaning in to solving difficult problems, and getting working on them rapidly. I believe it's better for the world.

psunavy03 3y ago

One could argue, according to Cynefin, that "wicked problems" are where Lean and Agile diverge. When you're operating in a generally-known environment where what's unknown are things like product/market fit or codebase behavior, it makes sense to operate in short iterations or kanbans with rapid customer feedback, while still trying to use Lean to drive efficiencies along the way. But if you really have no idea what's going on, there's no way to know what is "efficient," and so you have to fall back on more pure Agile, i.e. Cynefin's recommendations for the unordered "chaotic" or "complex" domains: do something small, analyze how that affected your environment, learn from that, and respond/repeat.

kitotik 3y ago
> do something small, > analyze how that affected your environment > learn from that, and > respond/repeat. I could be missing your point, but this is precisely a core tenet of Lean - Plan, Do, Check, Act Agile speaks nothing of these sorts of processes(aside from the cargo cult enterprise scrum nonsense of course)
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  You seem to have missed the point of Agile. But then, that's normal.
  - kitotik 3y ago
    Did I? Where does the manifesto talk about a process of any sort? It’s a set of values. It doesn’t mention anything about iterations, breaking things down, etc
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      PDCA, in more humanities than engineering terms, is basically the final Agile Principle “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

tgv 3y ago

The superficiality of the presentations reeks of consultancy. I wouldn't be surprised if all students ended up in KPMG-Deloite-Young. Even the smallest problem, something design ships something, only showed that the students had actually spoken to people, but not listened or understood, and it was smothered with a bad case of AI, the very thing called out at the start as an example of "not wicked."

contingencies 3y ago

Steve I have read your blog posts sporadically for years and am running a startup working on a wicked problem area (fully autonomous food preparation, retail and logistics) and would be happy to provide a case study in practical approaches we have used. Incidentally I will be in CA in the next few months and we are raising. Frankly our best strategies to date have been common ones: business-level modeling as a means to ensure strategic validity, in-depth study of predecessors and competitors, commitment to rapid iteration, brainstorming, first principles thinking, breaking down the problem, broad and dynamic base of contributors (different professional skillsets and mentalities), extensive documentation, looking at the whole problem, investing in developing required specialist skills, etc. After seven years of hard work according to public sources we are now the world leader in our space by multiple objective metrics, from which I would suggest we have been successful technically as well as financially. IMHO there's no secret sauce. It takes a lot of time and money and concerted effort. A lean / startup approach just allows more efficient execution.

yencabulator 3y ago

Apparently they're also solving Ukraine's need to provide medical care to people wounded in the war, and their primary contribution is to suggest using RFID bracelets. Even if you fully accept that patient tracking is crucial, jumping to RFID seems wholly unnecessary. Wartime is exactly when you do NOT mess around with fancy tech and hard-to-source materials; there is not even a hint here of why barcodes wouldn't be the solution, just weird fetishizing of RFID tech. https://drive.google.com/file/d/12a2aLdG25YaPUzFwpVlIeO346DUrfH2m/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/12a2aLdG25YaPUzFwpVlIeO346DU...

cinntaile 3y ago
I quickly skimmed through the presentation and you seem to be misrepresenting it.

tuatoru 3y ago

Dude wants a wicked problem, he should figure out how to change the name of the institution he works at. "Imperial" College? In this day and age?