The method

The Wicked Problem Solving Method

Wicked Problem Solving is a visual system for planning and doing work together. Developed from decades of collaboration with teams tackling an enormous range of challenges: designing cars, buildings, and consumer products; finding breakthroughs in machine learning; reshaping organizations and company strategy. The teams faced different problems, but had the same underlying need: to think clearly together

How the method works The research behind it

Where the term comes from

What makes a problem wicked

A wicked problem is one that resists a clean solution, because the problem itself keeps changing as you work on it. The term was coined in 1973 by Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, two planning theorists at Berkeley, in a paper called Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.

Their insight was that a whole class of problems cannot be handled by linear logic or engineering methods alone. There is no tidy point at which you have gathered enough information, no single correct answer waiting to be found, and no way to test a solution without changing the situation you were trying to fix.

More than fifty years on, the label fits an enormous amount of ordinary work. The world's largest challenges have wicked qualities, from climate change to misinformation to the effects of AI. So do a great many of the challenges already sitting on your desk: a strategy that shifts every quarter, a product decision with real costs on either side, a reorganization where every option takes something away from someone.

Qualities that make a problem hard to manage

  • Complexity
  • Complication
  • Fluidity
  • Emotional charge
  • Bias
  • Dilemmas and trade-offs
  • Ambiguity
  • Uncertainty
"Wicked problems avoid easy resolution. To tame them, we must apply many types of thinking to build shared understanding, create a vision of success, generate creative and viable options, and align on bold steps."
Tom Wujec, founder

WPS FOUNDATIONS

Thirty years in the making

WPS emerged from decades of applying design thinking, visual thinking, agile development, systems mapping, and behavioral economics to real problems under real pressure. The system gives individuals and teams a reliable way to work through tangled situations toward outcomes that hold up. It builds two kinds of skill at once: the cognitive skill to do the problem-solving, and the hands-on facilitation skill to guide a team through it.

01

Design thinking

Start with the people affected, and treat the problem as something to be framed carefully before anyone tries to solve it.

02

Visual thinking

Move ideas out of individual heads and onto a shared surface, where a group can look at them, argue with them, and rearrange them.

03

Agile development

Work in short, bounded cycles so progress stays visible and changing course stays cheap.

04

Systems mapping

See how the parts of a situation connect, so effort goes toward causes rather than symptoms.

05

Behavioral economics

Account for the bias, emotion, and incentive that shape how people actually make decisions.

The building blocks

How the method works

Wicked Problem Solving replaces open discussion with structured activity. The unit of that activity is the Play: a bounded, purposeful task that resolves one question or completes one piece of work. Every Play is constructed from the same three foundational elements.

Fig. 01 The anatomy of a Play

Play

A unit of work

01

Questions

Establishes the direction, scope, and intent of the Play. A well framed question does more work than any amount of agenda.

02

Visual structures

Make ideas tangible. A simple sketch on a whiteboard turns an abstract notion into something the group can see, point at, and rearrange.

03

Tasks

Turn passive participants into active contributors. When everyone has something to do, engagement climbs and the quieter people in the room get heard.

Plays are the foundation of the WPS method. Instead of asking people to talk about a problem, a Play gives them something concrete to do together.

01

All three, every time

Each Play combines a focused question that directs attention, a visual structure that makes ideas tangible, and a task that turns passive participants into active contributors.

02

Plays combine into sequences

A Play can run on its own or be strung together with others. When you put the right Plays in the right order, you design a session that moves step by step toward a clear outcome.

03

Design replaces improvisation

Once you can see a working session as a sequence of Plays, you can plan it before it starts, adjust it while it is running, and repeat what worked the next time a similar problem lands on your desk.

A worked example

Two Plays in action

The clearest way to see how a Play works is to watch two of them run back to back. Post Up and Cluster are foundational Plays, and they are almost always used as a pair. The first gets ideas out of people's heads and onto a shared surface. The second helps the group make sense of what is now in front of them.

01 Play

Post Up

The question it answers

What do we all know?

Everyone writes their ideas down, one idea per note, and posts them to a shared surface. There is no discussion while it happens, and no one waits for a turn to speak.

That constraint is doing quiet work. In an open conversation, the first confident voice sets the frame and the rest of the room adjusts to it. In a Post Up, every person answers the question independently before anyone sees what anyone else wrote, so the quiet expert and the senior sponsor arrive on the wall with equal weight.

What you get in a few minutes is a complete picture of what the group actually knows, including the parts that would never have surfaced in conversation.

The three elements
  • Question A single open prompt that everyone answers at the same time.
  • Visual structure A shared wall or canvas where every note sits in plain view.
  • Task Write one idea per note and post it. Everyone contributes at once.
02 Play

Cluster

The question it answers

What belongs together?

With the ideas now posted, participants silently move notes into natural groupings based on affinity. No debate is required at first, because the work happens through movement and pattern recognition.

The shift is immediate. What looked like a wall of disconnected inputs starts to organize itself. Themes emerge, gaps become obvious, and duplicates surface without anyone having to point them out.

Instead of reacting to a long list, the group begins to see patterns it can genuinely work with. Scattered input has become structured insight, and the structure was built by the whole room rather than handed to it.

The three elements
  • Question A sorting prompt that directs attention toward relationships.
  • Visual structure The same shared surface, now open to being rearranged.
  • Task Move notes into groups, working silently and in parallel.

Two Plays, one sequence

Run on its own, Post Up gives you a full picture of what the group knows. Run on its own, Cluster organizes whatever is already on the wall. Run in sequence, they take a room from scattered opinion to structured insight in about twenty minutes, and every person in the room can see how it happened.

That is the whole logic of the method at small scale. Choose the Plays that match the job in front of you, put them in an order that builds, and the session does the work rather than the loudest person in it.

The cognitive case

Why visuals matter

Visuals are instruments for thinking. Their effectiveness is cognitive rather than aesthetic.

The situation

A product team has been asked to work out why new customers keep leaving in their first ninety days. Rather than opening the floor for discussion, the facilitator runs a Post Up. Everyone in the room writes down what they know, one idea per note, and posts it to the wall. Twelve notes go up in four minutes.

Why are we losing customers in their first ninety days?

The same twelve notes, two ways

Okay so the handoff to support keeps slipping, and honestly onboarding takes about three weeks longer than we tell customers it will, plus nobody owns the renewal conversation, and I think the pricing page is confusing people before they even talk to us, oh and the trial is too short for enterprise, the demo environment breaks constantly, we lose people between signup and first login, sales is promising features that aren't built, support tickets spike in week two every single time, the docs are out of date, and the invoice flow has been broken since March.

Before they buy
  • Pricing page confuses people
  • Trial is too short for enterprise
  • Demo environment breaks
  • Sales promises unbuilt features
Getting started
  • Onboarding runs three weeks long
  • Drop-off between signup and login
  • Docs are out of date
  • Tickets spike in week two
Nobody owns it
  • Handoff to support keeps slipping
  • No owner for renewals
  • Invoice flow broken since March

Nothing was added and nothing was taken away. The second version is the same twelve notes arranged into a structure, and the pattern in them becomes visible immediately. That is a Cluster, and it takes about ten minutes.

Cognitive load theory establishes that working memory holds a severely limited number of elements at once, and that maintaining those elements consumes capacity otherwise available for reasoning. Externalising information into visual form releases that capacity for analysis and synthesis. Groups working from shared, visible material reach better decisions than groups working from conversation alone.

The architecture supports this. Approximately one third of the cerebral cortex is devoted to visual processing, substantially more than is allocated to hearing, and the visual system operates in parallel rather than in sequence. Within WPS, visual does not denote artistic rendering. It denotes recording ideas, positioning them, and arranging them into a structure that itself carries meaning.

Scattered input becoming structured insight

You don't solve hard problems by talking more. You solve them by making ideas visible.
Tom Wujec, founder

Grounded in science

Five core learning principles

Five principles from learning science, psychology, and design research form the instructional foundation of Wicked Problem Solving. Each governs a different condition of skill acquisition: how capability is built, how it is reinforced socially, how cognitive capacity is preserved, when transfer occurs, and how complexity is sequenced. Applied together, they produce a methodology that practitioners adopt readily and sustain in practice

Learning principle

Learn by doing

What the research shows

Adults retain and transfer skills far more effectively through active application than through explanation. Kolb showed that learning completes only when experience is followed by reflection, and Ericsson's work on deliberate practice established that expertise comes from repeated, focused effort with feedback rather than from time served.

How it shows up in WPS

Every concept is paired with a Play, a Map, or a live facilitation move you run yourself. Nothing is explained without something attached to it that you can go and do, and short reflections are built in after each one.

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.

Learning principle

Social learning

What the research shows

Bandura demonstrated that people acquire behaviour by observing and modelling others, and that watching a peer succeed at something raises your own belief that you can do it. Meaning also deepens when learning is discussed rather than absorbed alone.

How it shows up in WPS

The work is visible by design. Shared artifacts, group reflection, and Plays that put everyone's thinking on the same surface mean you are learning alongside other people rather than in parallel with them.

Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Learning principle

Cognitive offloading

What the research shows

Sweller's cognitive load theory shows that working memory is severely limited, and that holding information in place consumes capacity that could otherwise go toward reasoning. Externalising information into visual form frees that capacity and measurably improves decision quality.

How it shows up in WPS

Visual structures, one idea per note, and a shared surface for every session. The method is built so the group is never asked to hold in memory what it could be looking at instead.

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.

Learning principle

Immediate application

What the research shows

Adult learning research consistently finds that new material sticks when it solves a problem the learner already has. Training aimed at a hypothetical future situation is forgotten well before that situation arrives.

How it shows up in WPS

Every tool maps to work you are already doing. The Plays are designed for the meetings on your calendar this week, which means the first application happens within days rather than after the course ends.

Knowles, M. S. (1984). Andragogy in Action.

Learning principle

Scaffolded complexity

What the research shows

Mastery develops by progressing from simple contexts toward complex ones at a deliberate pace, with each new skill resting on one already secure. Bloom's taxonomy formalised this progression, and it underpins professional development design at institutions worldwide.

How it shows up in WPS

The sequence moves from familiar, lower-stakes situations toward the hardest ones, so confidence keeps pace with capability instead of lagging behind it.

Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Where to start

Try it, learn it, or bring it in

Reading about a method only gets you so far. There are three ways into Wicked Problem Solving, and they suit different amounts of time and commitment.

01 Free, thirty minutes

Run Draw Toast

The fastest way to feel how this works is to run it. Draw Toast is a short exercise you can lead with any group, and it demonstrates the whole method in about half an hour. Everything you need is on the page, including the guide and the instructions.

Get the exercise →
02 The flagship course

Meeting Mastery

The professional certificate course that teaches the method through the place most people need it first. Twelve modules, forty-six video lessons, and the playbook, maps, and cards that come with it.

See the course

Enroll Now

03 For teams

Bring WPS to your organization

Keynotes, custom workshops, licensed training, and playbooks built around your people and the problems in front of them. We have run this with Nike, NASA, and Fortune 500 teams across more than four hundred engagements.

Explore organizations →