Tangled Webs, Wicked Ways

Tangles are a wonderful metaphor because wherever there is a line, there is a tangle that must be sorted out. I experience this primordial frustration every time I do yard work, as I struggle with the hoses and the 100-foot extension cord. Years ago in my youth, I worked on a sailboat - a guy in port told me of his time working as a cook on a long-line fishing boat and shared a key lesson: "Never serve spaghetti to a crew on a longliner."

Fishermen spent much time untangling and mending their lines and nets. There is even a myth involving tangled line from Greek times to describe an intractable problem - The Gordian Knot, - a legend associated with Alexander the Great, often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke ("cutting the Gordian knot").

Today in America, we face a tangled web when we consider what to do about broadband. It may be a Gordian Knot, but there appears to be no bold stroke waiting for us as a solution to our problem.

Not only do we have
- this legacy of what to do with the large and powerful corporations created out of the regulated industries;
- the complex political maneuvering and conflicting stories in public and in the backrooms to confuse the issues;
- high stakes in the outcome;
- billions of dollars at issue;
- industry changes of historic proportion;
- political careers at stake;
- entrenched stakeholders with long histories of betrayal; and
- a pervading lack of trust;

But also, we have
- new technologies like Wi Fi Mesh (802.11a,b,g,n); WiMAX, FTTH, PON that bring with them alternate ways to "skin the cat;"
- new technologies that disrupt the way we access the Internet;
- new technologies that challenge the meaning of "voice" and "video;"
- new user behaviors as the Internet matures;
- new derivative benefits from telecommunications that disrupt old ways of doing things;
- new business models that open up the industry to new players; and
- a seemingly inescapable need to invest large amounts of capital to build the infrastructure that will both meet our evolving needs and bring all these benefits.

I've borrowed a term from organizational and social theory, called the Wicked Problem, to better understand what we face as we look at broadband. I would recommend you look at my previous post from one month ago today Broadband in America: a "Wicked Game We Play".

Here's a short excerpt.

The concept of "wicked problems" was originally proposed by Horst Rittel (a pioneering theorist of design and planning, and late professor at the University of California, Berkeley) and M. Webber in a seminal treatise for social planning. Rittel expounded on the nature of ill-defined design and planning problems which he termed "wicked" (ie. messy, circular, aggressive) to contrast against the relatively "tame" problems of mathematics, chess, or puzzle solving. Wicked problem - Wikipedia

Key Aspects of The Wicked Problem
1. You don't understand the problem until you have developed a solution.
2. Wicked Problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to Wicked Problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every Wicked Problem is essentially unique and novel.
5. Every solution to a Wicked Problem is a "one-shot operation."
6. Wicked Problems have no given alternative solutions.

In plain English, there are some problems whose nature is so complex and changing that the only way to solve them is through cooperation and dialogue, first to reach a shared understanding of what the problem is - how to define it - and second, to devise a series of trials that will test out potential solutions and bring back more information that can be used to develop a more refined solution. And in the end, the Wicked Problem has no conclusive solution, only one that is acceptable to the group as "good enough for now."

That's where we are with Broadband in America. We face an issue at once so critical, complex, and so dynamic that a sustainable solution for the benefit of all stakeholders in society will only be obtained if we first come together to work jointly to define the problem to our mutual satisfaction, then build on the trust we have generated to craft together a series of partial solutions that will reveal the optimal path over time.

We've been looking at broadband in much the same way that we've looked at traditional telecommunications: through different lenses that lead us to see different problems to be solved. Each stakeholder group, from communities to consumers to network operators to content providers, has vested, competing interests and different, competing priorities. We each have different levels of sophistication when it comes to being able to discuss and work on these issues, and often the issues seem even too complex to manage, so we lay them off on others to solve, or we put things off until later, and the issues don't get resolved. They only fester and grow more complicated with more time.

The time has come to face these facts and begin work on a sustainable solution. The time has come to set aside past differences and sit down together to come up with a plan that will work for all stakeholders. There will be some who will not wish to support such a joint effort at this time. There will be others who will deny the need to attack this issue in such comprehensive fashion. But that will not make the issues any simpler, nor will it make us need broadband infrastructure any less.

I'm reminded of a book we used to read to our kids, a game they used to play in PreSchool: "We're Going on a Bear Hunt." See this great video on YouTube.

We're going on a bear hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Hoooo woooo!
Hoooo woooo!
Hoooo woooo!

Bear Hunt Song

Only, unlike when we were kids, we can't run away at the end when we find the bear - there's no warm bed to hide under the covers waiting for us. We have to solve this problem on our own, together. It's a sobering task, being an adult.

We can run away, we can delay it, we can place blame - but then, we've been doing all these things and it hasn't gotten any better.

Or, we can decide to face our problem and deal with it head on.

When it comes to broadband, we've got to go through it, folks.