A Wicked Good Year
Spending a year of my childhood outside of Boston, I was introduced to the regional phrase “wicked awesome.” A usage of wicked as an adjective that I quickly learned was meant to push the scales beyond just your plain old “awesome.” Years later I read Wicked by Gregory Maguire, a novel that turned Oz’s wicked witch of the west into a misunderstood heroine. Now, I’ve come across a Harvard Business Review article about Strategy as a Wicked Problem (http://hbr.org/2008/05/strategy-as-a-wicked-problem/ar/1) that states: “A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer, … environmental degradation, terrorism, and poverty—these are classic examples of wicked problems. They’re the opposite of hard but ordinary problems, which people can solve in a finite time period by applying standard techniques. Not only do conventional processes fail to tackle wicked problems, but they may exacerbate situations by generating undesirable consequences." I