Some problems have no definitive formulation, no stopping rule, and no test of the solution, so every attempt is consequential and unrepeatable.
Rittel and Webber's 1973 paper. Their list is the useful part: no stopping rule, no test of the solution, every attempt consequential, and no opportunity to learn by trial and error.
In practice
- A team asked to fix declining trust cannot say what finished looks like, and every intervention changes the thing it was measuring.
- A homelessness strategy cannot be piloted, reversed or scored, which is why importing project management from engineering fails on it.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Design & Systems
- Essay
- Why systems behave against intuition