(2011-08-02) Schroeder Wicked Problems

Karl Schroeder thinks there's hope for Wicked problems. Scaling Structured Dialogic Design sessions to groups larger than 50 to 70 people at a time has proven difficult--but the fact that it and similar methods exist at all should give us hope... Here's my take on things: our biggest challenges are no longer technological. They are issues of communication, coordination, and cooperation. These are, for the most part, well-studied problems that are not wicked. The methodologies that solve them need to be scaled up from the small-group settings where they currently work well, and injected into the DNA of our society--or, at least, built into our default modes of using the internet. They then can be used to tackle the wicked problems... What we need, in other words, is a Facebook for Collaborative Decision Making: an app built to compensate for the most egregious cognitive biases and behaviours that derail us when we get together to think in groups. Decision-support, Stakeholder analysis, bias filtering, collaborative scratch-pads and, most importantly, mechanisms to extract Commitment-s to action from those that use these tools... no large-scale collaborative system is going to work, however, unless everybody using it shares a common language (Shared Language).

A commenter points at Dynamically Distributed Democracy. See also Disputation Arena.

See related his story Schroeder Degrees Of Freedom.