Rotman Management Spring 2012

THE WINTER 2009 ISSUE OF Rotman Magazine introduced a new term to many of our readers: ‘wicked problems’. Those who read the issue learned that wickedness doesn’t pertain to a degree of difficulty; rather, these problems are different because traditional problemsolving processes cannot resolve them. Unlike ‘tame’ problems – which can be irrefutably solved – wicked problems are messy and reactive, and there is no single solution. Indeed, defining the parameters of the problem itself is often half the challenge. When design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term in a seminal 1973 Policy Sciences article, they could not have known how poignant it would become for 21st century leaders. We have all faced wicked problems at some point: What will we do when oil resources run out? How…

IN THE MID-2000s, Walmart faced a particularly wicked problem. Its reputation with consumers was eroding, as activists effectively painted the company as an enemy to the environment. As the largest retailer in the world – and one with a massive global supply chain, Walmart did indeed have a significant carbon footprint: according to a 2007 Stanford Business School case on the company, it was “the biggest private user of electricity in the United States and emitted more than 19.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually – an amount equal to the pollution created by roughly 2.8 million households.” And that doesn’t even include the impact of its suppliers. So the activists had a point, and Walmart had a tough decision to make. While there were myriad approaches it could…

While at university, you attended a presentation by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that ‘changed you forever’. How so? I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan at the time, and I was extremely depressed. My father had died a few weeks before, and five days later my grandfather died. I went back to college and locked myself in my room, refusing to go out. Then I saw an article in the Michigan Daily that Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to our campus. This was 1962, so nobody really knew who he was yet; but for some reason, I decided to go. On the day of the presentation there was a major snowstorm – the sort of day when nobody in their right mind goes out; but I did. When…

Climate Change: The climate is changing in ways that jeopardize human security and well being. The global warming trend we are currently experiencing differs alarmingly from past changes in the Earth’s climate. This warming is largely driven by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture, and clearing of forests, which release heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide. The effects of rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are already being felt across the globe. We no longer have the luxury of treating this as a future problem: climate change is with us today and we need to tackle it from a risk management perspective. This will require aggressive actions to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases to avoid the risks of the most severe impacts, coupled with systems-based approaches…

What we mean by global threats Global threats have the potential to kill or debilitate very large numbers of people or cause significant economic or social dislocation or paralysis throughout the world. These threats cannot be solved by any one country; they require some sort of a collective response. Global threats are often non-linear, and are likely to become exponentially more difficult to manage if we don’t begin making serious strides in the right direction in the next 5-10 years. Cross-cutting focus We believe global threats share causes, challenges and potentially, cures. We primarily seek to identify and address complex challenges common to multiple global threats. Cross-cutting areas that we believe could help society manage these threats include: • Communication: Promote better understanding of uncertainty and risk at every level of discourse, public to…

LIKE MOST DESIGNERS, I am quite comfortable with the notion of designing simple things. I can pick up just about any object and tell you how it was made, and I could probably have a reasonable crack at designing an equivalent of it, even though I’m not a particularly technical person. That’s because it is possible to definitively know everything important about a simple object: we can know its form, the market for it, and the best method of manufacturing it. We might even know what to do with it when people are finished using it. The traditional design process entails figuring all of this out beforehand and ‘making it so’ in the world. Unfortunately, as the world’s problems have become more complex, the traditional design process has been challenged. Many…