Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning¶
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Leverage Points
- Meadows 2008 Thinking in Systems condensed this and emphasized that paradigm shifts are rare, hard, and stable once achieved
This sourceIntroduces "wicked problems" as a category distinct from well-structured search problems: vague initial states, contested goals, non-enumerable operators, and shifting success criteria; foundational for design thinking and policy analysis.
- Meadows 2008 Thinking in Systems condensed this and emphasized that paradigm shifts are rare, hard, and stable once achieved
- Problem Framing
- A situation admitting more than one defensible description → a selection of boundary, units, levers, causal assumptions, and success criterion → a bounded solution space with an evidence-relevance rule attached → an exclusion set that remains inspectable and revisable.
This sourceArgues that planning problems admit many defensible formulations and have no stopping rule, so where work stops is a property of the formulation rather than of the situation.
- A situation admitting more than one defensible description → a selection of boundary, units, levers, causal assumptions, and success criterion → a bounded solution space with an evidence-relevance rule attached → an exclusion set that remains inspectable and revisable.
- Problem Space
- Structural tension: Many real-world problems are ill-structured—initial state is vague or contested, goal is ambiguous or contested, operators are not fully enumerable, and success criteria are multivalent or shifting—a class Rittel and Webber (1973) named "wicked problems" to mark them as categorically distinct from the well-structured search problems classical formalisms assume.
This sourceIntroduces "wicked problems" as a category distinct from well-structured search problems: vague initial states, contested goals, non-enumerable operators, and shifting success criteria; foundational for design thinking and policy analysis.
- Structural tension: Many real-world problems are ill-structured—initial state is vague or contested, goal is ambiguous or contested, operators are not fully enumerable, and success criteria are multivalent or shifting—a class Rittel and Webber (1973) named "wicked problems" to mark them as categorically distinct from the well-structured search problems classical formalisms assume.
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