Great whitepaper from Touchstone on solving wicked problems--those problems which are difficult to define, large, complex, changing and which do not respond to a traditional linear problem-solving approach (in the beginning of the paper, they mention that most of us don't actually solve problems with a linear model, but we think we do, which, it turns out, is significant):

Solving a wicked problem is a fundamentally social process.

Most wicked problems involve lots of stakeholders. In a corporate project, stakeholders could include:

• All the members of the project team
• Upper management
• People in other parts of the organization working on related projects
• People in other departments, like Finance or Purchasing, who have some general oversight function
• External stakeholders, such as customers, investors, partner companies, regulators, watchdog organizations, and organizations in other countries.

What makes wicked-problem solving so challenging is that none of these stakeholders can be safely ignored. Many are involved in defining the problem, and many also add constraints to the solution. Other teams working on related projects have a particularly large stake, because one team's solution is the next team's problem.

No project leader is brilliant or experienced enough to go off and solve a wicked problem alone. It is not even possible to assemble a team of brilliant people to go off and solve the problem, because the moment they go off, they leave behind stakeholders whose input is essential.

....

Faced with the frustration of wicked-problem solving, some people get fixated on some aspect of the problem or solution. They recognize that that aspect is vital to the project's success, and that it will get mishandled or forgotten unless they make sure that it is not. These people will make the same point, meeting after meeting. Henry, in the example above, will hold onto his idea for using the pemory widget-for weeks, if necessary-until it is time to incorporate it. Without a system to document or capture the full range of thinking and creativity that occurs in wicked-problem solving, people have to remember to keep in existence any idea that comes up out of sequence. Since repetition is one key to memory, project meetings are a ritual of repetition so that nobody forgets an important idea.

Without a system to document or capture the full range of thinking and creativity that occurs in wicked-problem solving, people have to remember to keep in existence any idea that comes up out of sequence. Faced with wicked problems, few people today are able to have meetings be effective. We often hear that there are "too many meetings" and that they don't go well. People identify with a point of view and defend it. Topics are continually rehashed, with little progress and virtually no learning taking place. Side issues seem to consume valuable meeting time.

Most complex problems these days are also wicked problems and learning how to recognize them and solve them is critical to organizations.

...via elearningpost