Is tangled the new wicked?

Englishman Sir Paul Smith’s catwalk shows are renown the world over for their style, brashness and audience as well as for their terrific clothes. He somehow manages to take, each and every year, a step away from the current fashion to define the next season. Fashion started way back in 1858 when another Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth, opened his high fashion shop in Paris. Today, the importance of the professional designer in a changing fashion world has increased to the point when almost all clothes in almost any high street shop, from bijoux boutique to colossal chain, is inspired by their work. Every season, the ‘Fashion Problem’ – that of coming up with tomorrow’s fashions today – reinvents itself; the fashion dynamic is cyclic, recurring, revisited. As new fashion becomes the norm, last season’s fashion problem is reborn to be solved anew; the Fashion Problem begets each new season’s fashion problem. What changes from season to season? Simply that the context into which the new fashion must fit is changed by last season’s fashion. The new fashion problem, while conceived of the old and tangled with it, has a new solution that sustains the next. It’s wicked. 1973 saw Rittel and Webber coin the term ‘wicked’ to describe problems that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise.” Wicked problems have always fascinated me. There’s a lot of mystique – fear even – around them: to me their characterisation as insolvable makes their status as problems dubious, and traditional explanations of their insolubility – such as “requirements are volatile” – while having some truth don’t seem to explain everything: some people can handle problems with volatile requirements and some can’t, but Rittel and Webber’s definition never told me why. Jeff Conklin characterises wicked problems in another way: their stake-holders understand the problems differently and the things constraining the solution and the resources needed to solve the problem change over time. He adds, somewhat paradoxically, that they are not understood until after formulation of a solution yet are never solved. Our Fashion Problem’s seasonal instances tangle together, last season’s solution becomes part of this season’s constraints; this season’s problem can’t be understood until last season’s problem is solved, but the Fashion Problem per se is never solved. According to Conklin’s criteria, our Fashion Problem is truly wicked. It’s a bit like a Paul Smith scarf, tangling back on itself. Not even the Paul Smiths of this world can solve the Fashion Problem. No matter, because each season’s instance of the fashion problem can be solved – if you’re Paul Smith, at least. Perhaps the recognition of the tangling of instances of a wicked problem1 holds some hope for a new approach to their treatment?