——— How I work
Reflective design for complex problems
I am not defined by a subject I have mastered, but by a class of problems I seek: problems that resist simplification, in which even the definition of the problem is contested. The harder the problem, the more it interests me.
Hard problems rarely arrive well posed. An institution arrives with a question about measurement or management, or with an indicator that won’t behave — and the real problem turns out to be a missing architecture: no shared criterion for ordering what already exists and no common language in which disconnected evidence traditions can be integrated.
A problem can be hard in three distinct ways
Complexity
Many actors and levels, each affected differently, each needing to act, each having to commit resources of every kind to understand and address the problem. No single vantage point holds the whole.
Uncertainty
Not only about the solution, but about the problem itself: what it is, what would count as evidence, and what would count as better.
Divergence
No agreement on what the problem even is. Rival framings that more information will not reconcile — reaching, at its deepest, a disagreement over whether the problem is worth allocating resources to address.
These are not degrees of a single thing. Most methods for hard problems answer the first of these and quietly assume the other two away: intersectoral coordination and social participation address complexity, but neither dissolves the uncertainty of a problem whose very definition is unsettled, nor the divergence in which some deny there is a problem to solve at all. I have seen this in national policy and within a single institution alike — and where the work is hardest, all three arrive at once, as a starting condition. Problems like these are not merely difficult; they are wicked: they shift as you engage them, and a push in one place resurfaces as pressure elsewhere.
When all three arrive together, more analysis does not converge — it multiplies. The way in is not to dig deeper into the problem as posed but to rise above it.
I find that criterion by rising to what the whole exists for.
A health system exists to provide high-quality care; a university exists for its purpose in society. That category is not merely a better description of the problem — it is the language in which evidence that had not spoken to one another can finally be put to work. The craft is to give a hard problem enough structure to function without flattening it: structure that emerges from the problem, not one imposed on it.
Grounded in reflective practice and frame reflection (Schön), and in the literature on wicked problems in public policy.