De cerca, nadie es normal

Wicked Problems and General Morphological Analysis (GMA)

Posted: November 1st, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: General Morphological Analysis | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comentarios »

You may like it more or less but what is certain is that life is mainly about solving problems and they are sometimes elusive, confusing, ill-defined… the so-called wicked problems.

As I mentioned in my previous post The Design of Business, wicked problems are ambiguous, evolving, linked to moral, social and political issues and without a clearly defined solution. The classical linear mathematical approach -understand the problem, gather and sum up information, and develop solutions- is not valid for them. As Dr. Tom Ritchey mentioned in one his writings, Rittel and Webber -the ones who coined the term wicked problems in his article “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” in 1973- deemed this kind of problems entailed the following features amongst others:

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The Design of Business by Roger Martin

Posted: September 25th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Book Summaries, Business Design | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comentarios »

How long the summer can be and how many issues you have to cope with when you move with your family to another country! At last I have 15 minutes to write a brief review of The Design of Business by Roger Martin.

In his book Martin aims to reconcile the innovation -exploration of new knowledge- with efficiency -the exploitation of current knowledge. From his point of view the main objective of design-thinking is to help knowledge go through the stages of mystery -an unsolved problem-, heuristic -a rule of thumb leading to a solution-, and algorithm -a repicable success formula. The design-thinking firms focus on the first stage, dealing always with new challenges and exploring new ways. The mainly analytical thinking companies are built to operate as they always have; they are built to maintain the status quo.

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