Overview

Most academic disciplines and professional groups coalesce very directly around significant problems—Engineering seeks to improve the built environment with hands- on design/build experiences; Natural Sciences monitor and sustain vital ecosystems threatened by human activity; Cybersecurity confronts the shifting balance between privacy and security; Business responds constantly to all the factors that influence the bottom-line. The Social Sciences and the Humanities often focus directly on the toll social and cultural inequalities take on the human spirit and voice.

Workplace problems require research which often include “troubleshooting, “close- ended problems that indicate a “gap from standard,” and open-ended problems that call for new and innovative strategies. But perhaps most importantly (and interestingly), there are “wicked problems”: A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer because they’re the opposite of hard but ordinary problems, which people can solve in a finite time by applying standard techniques. Wicked problems often crop up when organizations must face constant change or unprecedented challenges. They occur in a social context; the greater the disagreement among stakeholders, the more wicked the problem. In fact, it’s the social complexity of wicked problems as much as their technical difficulties that make them tough to manage …[C]onfusion, discord, and lack of progress are telltale signs that an issue might be wicked” (Camillus 100). Rhetorical Theory attempts to address wicked problems in several ways, starting with classical rhetoric.