The Wikipedia article on Wicked Problems lists a number of techniques, but makes no reference to Design Thinking - obviously a lapse of content. But the point is that Design Thinking is not the sole approach used to grapple with such problems.

In the analogy equating a wicked problem to a hopelessly tangled ball of wool, one could argue that the best approach to addressing the mess is to make sure the tangle never happens in the first place. For instance, in a social context, if there is no function concerned with helping the various agents involved develop a sense of overarching coherence between their respective strategies, a tangle will unavoidably result.

Similarly, the absence of a function dedicated to the non-directive resolution of agent to agent conflicts will inevitably lead to instabilities that obscure underlying causes and motivations. Finally, if there is no mechanism to search out opportunities for synergy between agents, the overall loss of effectiveness of the whole will be compensated by individual agents doing their own thing, compounding the issues of coherence and stability. Tangles will result.

The point is that a focus on untangling the ball of wool will yield some degree of result, but the real and relatively simple structural issues underlying the tangle will be very hard to identify and resolve if one only looks at the tangle.

I propose then that a transversal approach such as the Viable System Model (VSM) can be used to uncover the structural causes that manifest some or all the components leading to the wicked problem. The VSM was developed by the cyberneticist Stafford Beer as an expression of the invariable characteristics of viable organisms and organizations that confer to such systems their viability.

The VSM systematically resolves problems of lack of coherence, instability and synergy by assessing the structure of the organization or domain under consideration, and proposing measures to resolve such lacks. The VSM is useful to validate the viability of any entity expected to persist in time. It helps makes sure that tangles-in-formation get noticed and resolved early, before they get wicked. We are talking here about departments in an organization, the organization itself, a community, a city, a region, etc. The VSM scales and is recursive.

With regard to the practical problem of solving an actual wicked problem, the inherent difficulty is that the various vectors of the problem need to be understood and resolved in parallel as these vectors are interdependent and interactive. When we gather together the stakeholders impacted by a wicked problem, conversations tend to run down linear paths, making parallel vector exploration very difficult, if not impossible.

e-Deliberation™ is the only technique that I know about that was designed for large groups (several dozen) to collaboratively deliberate and work through multiple vectors in parallel, ensuring ongoing coherence, stability and synergy between the solution sets being explored across these vectors.

The VSM and e-Deliberation™ are both complementary and extremely effective at preventing messes, and at resolving them as the case may be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

https://www.e-deliberation.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model