Module 3: Sustainability Thinking Tools and Models Description
History, Arts, and Linguistics
28th Jun 2025
2
We shift this week into 'thinking models' to help us understand sustainability work. You may have come across the idea of a wicked problem - and it is a serious allegation - it doesn't mean evil, or super cool or 'out there'. It refers to a fundamental recognition of complexity, messiness, and an undigested mixture of knowns and unknowns. For me, the under-pinning idea that should emerge from an understanding of a wicked problem is humility. WHY do you think?
Watch: WP and Modeling the World (1:00:21 min)
This video is a little longer than I planned. In my defense - it is such an interesting and important conceptual framework. I hope I help you to become more comfortable with this idea
The purpose of this module is to examine the social, cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions of “wicked problems.”
Wicked problems are problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.
▢ understand that many sustainability problems operating at local to global scales are “wicked problems.”
▢ apply wicked problem thinking to different scenarios
As you reflect on the lecture and complete the reading, make notes to answer the following questions:
What is a wicked problem?
How does it differ from other problems?
What are some examples of wicked problems?
How does Sun and Yang say social mess and fragmentation can help us to think about WP?
Why is climate change a wicked problem?
I encourage you to pull up a foot stool and grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy one of the most perplexing problems hopping around our Queensland countryside - cane toads! Here's the inside story from the ground up - and I suggest that you think through every decision point in the film and project how a wicked problem framing would have stopped this warty project before it even started.
UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) President Marie Chatardová asked participants at the 2017 Sustainable Development Transition Forum (SDTF) to “bear in mind the indivisible, integrated and interlinked nature of the SDGs and the three dimensions of sustainable development, including cross-cutting, new and emerging issues.” In this context, participants discussed the utility of systems thinking and mapping as useful tools for planners and policymakers, as well as computer simulation models for understanding important SDG interconnections, feedback mechanisms, and policy leverage points.