#cognexus

The SustainLab Winter Term Project is phase 1 of the FLSI@Oberlin program (ForesightLSI.org), soon accepting highly-motivated HS leaders who are concerned about sustainability for our summer session.

One criticism of the notion of wicked problems is that you can't do a diagnostic that defines a problem as 'definitively wicked.' There are degrees of wickedness. What is clear is that the notion of business-as-usual that we inherited from the industrial era is a manufacturing-based, linear-process oriented approach, and if you are locked into that view, you will miss out on all the deeper problems. That's what a lot of attention to innovation is really about: it's about being able to get outside of the limited framework of business-as-usual and sense and reflect on the bigger situation. Any time you do that in today's environment, you're looking at a wicked problem, because you're confronting fundamental problems of identity: who is our company? What is our direction? What is our market? Who is our customer? These fundamental issues are always present, but it's very easy to avoid them by focusing on immediate problems that are more tractable.