the wicked problem within myself
Posted on October 24, 2021
My younger self looking at her hometown from the top of the mountain.
I didn’t think much when I made the decision to move from Colombia to Canada with my partner. He just had gotten a job in a small unknown town in the province of Nova Scotia as a software developer, and it looked like a good idea to explore new skies. I felt lucky to be able to experience what normality was for other people in a very distinct place on the planet, so I felt no doubt. It was an easy decision.
“Wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973) is shared by systems and design theory, as a complex situation that cannot be reduced and analyzed with the techniques of classical problem solving and decision making. Wicked problems include the most persistent social and environmental issues, such as the continuous global problems that have evolved over time.”
Peter H. Jones · 2014
I had lived abroad the first year of my twenties, so I had an idea of how it was going to be. I remembered how good it felt to be independent, traveling alone, taking care of myself entirely for the first time. I remember the feeling of my mind expanding, and the many times I lied to my mom when she asked me if I missed home or if I wanted to go back. Things flowed easily then and I was naive enough to believe that the Canada experience was going to be the same; of course, it wasn’t.
Quickly, I understood that years make you more comfortable, more resistant to change, more attached to your relationships, more used to the role you play in your tribe and the language spoken on the streets. Your body accustoms to the daily routines to the point that you don’t need to think when you go out to buy the good flowers.
When I moved to Canada, I was 28 years old, I hadn’t spoken English in 8 years, and yes, the winter… I also felt extremely alone, and this time I did miss my people, their warmer personalities, and the parties without an hour of ending. Loneliness gives you plenty of time to endlessly ruminate in your mind and unresolved stuff, that has been piling up for as long as you have lived, starts to come up to the surface.
“We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth.”
D Haraway · 1988
After the first winter depression, when I was feeling chaos inside of me, I decided to get my life together from the bottom up. Which in my case meant to start unpacking one by one the layers of my past, to listen closely to my body signals, to trace where my feelings were coming from, to learn how to ask the right questions, to discern, to try to make sense of all of it, to pay attention to my embodied experience. All this in the context of therapy: painful confessions, awkward self hugs, gratefulness, plenty of tears, long walks until my feet hurt and my nose froze, and of course, a lot of dance.
“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures.”
D Haraway · 1988“We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.”
Donnatella Meadows · 2015
Talk therapy is extremely important to define a common reality for yourself and a sense of community, but language is not enough. Movement therapy (yoga, dancing, singing, making music together) is also essential to rewire the physiological system and re-sync with the people around us. Accordingly, besides my conversations with the psychologist where I answer questions about my mom, I imagined better scenarios of things that happen in my childhood, I learned yoga connected through Zoom with my friends in Colombia, I danced like a maniac with the marvelous videos on the youtube channel Kukuwa Fitness, I practiced the eradication of the ego with Kundalini exercises.
With meditation, I learned how to identify thoughts, and instead of compulsively obsessing with the past or the future, try to let them flow, see them pass, stay with the trouble. I also learned how to map my mental constructs and their connections, take responsibility for my actions, and celebrate complexity within me instead of only being overwhelmed and paralyzed by it.
Properties of wicked problems:
- They do not have a definitive formulation.
- They do not have a “stopping rule.” In other words, these problems lack an inherent logic that signals when they are solved.
- There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem.
Rittel and Webber · 1973
That kid I used to be
These processes have brought clarity, but no definitive solutions. To find the solution to a wicked problem means to find the problem, and there is not such a thing as a clear frame to the root causes of how you became who you are. A single human individual is a complex being surrounded by many other complex living critters that impact each other’s lives leaving forever dents to stumble upon. Our interconnectedness is profound, and realizing it during the past two years, has been as if I’ve been given a gift.
Above all, I have come to understand that this will never be a finished task, that there is no stopping rule for the wicked problem within me, that I need to stay humble, I need to stay a learner of myself forever.
By gamz.
References:
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press, 2016.
Horst W. J. Rittel, and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, Springer, 1973, pp. 155–69, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4531523.
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.
Klein, Ezra. “This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma.” New York Times, August 24th, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-van-der-kolk.html?showTranscript=1.