Sense Making in Dealing with Problems

From our daily experiences it seems that most of the tame problems tend to
change to wicked due to the complexity business environment imposes to
organizations. The globalization, internet and technology accelerate the
demand for more and quick results, especially for income, and this leads
strategists to search, beyond imagination, for and mostly unprecedented
ways to achieve that. That in itself could be good but much of the
innovation brought into companies’ structures create numerous
uncertainties, confusions, insecurity and rivalries and that results in a lot of
problems, and some of them very wicked. Because of this, as Camillus
defends, a wicked problem has innumerable causes, tough to describe and
doesn’t have the right answer (2008, 100), meaning they can’t be solved
but can be tamed” Camillus, J.C. (2008).

That’s a very interesting issue that I’ve learned because many times I found
myself frustrated and almost killing myself for being a failure. It gets very
clear to me now, as I relate to situations that I’ve faced several times in
organizations I have already been that, whenever there are more than one
stakeholder, who will probably not think in the same way, based on their
social realities, thoughts will always converge and in some cases these
problems get so complicated and without a solution. Sometimes you may
not even be able to perceive where problems come from, and their solution
generate unpredicted consequences. The question is, Camillus strongly
argues that a wicked problem do not have solutions and quotes Occam’s
razor when he suggest that simplest techniques are the best, so, when such
a complex problem is tamed do they not turn into ordinary problems? And
can’t these ordinary, no matter how many they become, be tackled out?
Should one persist in searching for answers, overtime, until there’s no trace
of a wicked problem anymore?

Well, from Pye’s example we can understand how deep and profound the
effects of a wicked problem can deepen and this is a great lesson. One
needs to go beyond personal values and aspirations, it’s also a matter of
acknowledging that we should not attempt to lead global change (Pye,
2005), we should create links, infuse objectives with other stakeholders
(35, 36).
The most important lesson we learn as leaders is that we should always see
a solution beyond the obstacles. The secret is in how we react towards
unexpected situations. Problems are not an end in themselves and Margolis,
J.D. & Stoltz, P.G. (2010) recommend that a leader should be ready to
respond quickly and constructively crises in a way that a negative situation
is turned to a productive one. This use to be a day by day issue that I use to
confront at my work place where I work now for four years. People are
resistant to changes and the first thing they do when they are appointed to
solve a problem is to present a list of obstacles in a tendency to withdraw
from the task. Week 7 will sharpen our approaches to situations like this,
because it gives us insight on how to influent our executive managers to
help us create changes, perhaps by giving authority to shifting people so
that they start seeing things from different perspective.

References

Camillus, J.C. (2008) ‘Strategy as a wicked problem’, Harvard Business

Review, 86 (5), pp.98-106, [Online].

Pye, A. (2005) ‘Leadership and organizing: sensemaking in action’,

Leadership, 1 (1),
pp.31-49, [Online].

Margolis, J.D. & Stoltz, P.G. (2010) ‘How to bounce back from adversity’,
Harvard Business Review, 88 (1/2), pp.86-92, [Online].

Jackson, B. & Parry, K. (2011) A very short, fairly interesting and

reasonably cheap book about studying leadership. London: Sage.