Wiki Collaboration for Wicked Problem Solving

Nick Fera asks who is better for "Wicked" problem solving, Groups or Individuals? after reading a December 5, 2007 article in ScienceDaily about a Sandia National Laboratories study.

The study's definition of a wicked problem:

those problems that by their very definition are so tangled that there is no agreement about their definitions, much less their solutions.

Their conclusion: Individuals!

That the quality of ideas from the people responding as individuals was significantly better across all three quality ratings.

The researchers comment that an added benefit from an organizational perspective is that individuals working alone use less time and resources to solve a problem than a group.

Is this the only answer? As I outline in When (and How) to Ask a Crowd it depends on the kind of problem you are trying to solve. When there is no definite answer and, so, you can't summarize opinion, then, as the Wisdom of Crowds book tells us, its better to ask an expert. Its also useful to consider what kind of group to assemble and what pitfalls to avoid. A study I discuss on Diverse Teams published in MIT Sloan Management Review outlines the problems diverse teams face and ways to overcome them.

Could Technology Help? As Nick argues, Yes. The researchers offer their caveat:

It still seems reasonable that there may be modes of [as yet, untested] web-based interactions and strategies that would allow the larger group to have superior performance... better software, including threaded discussions with moderators to focus the work and prediction markets to evaluate quality, will become tools that large organizations will use to solve wicked problems.

What role for software? Whether you organize as individuals or groups, information plays a crucial role in making judgements or simply brainstorming. The ability to monitor information over time and search it on demand is sure to assist any problem solving process which may rely on information and judgemental expertise (vs. pure mathematical expertise, for example), whether or not the problem du jour is solved by an individual or a team.

In this context, the role for software goes well beyond the facilities of discussion groups - moderated or not - as a means to support a team as they try to conquer a problem. This is where Wicked problems benefit from Wiki and blog based collaboration over time. The active collaboration in one or a series of workspaces educates and informs people such that they can gain and organize expertise over time, and access information resources for decision support when required. Furthermore, the threaded discussion can then happen in context of and build upon a larger information resource.