Tame, Crisis, and Wicked Problems: The Kandahar Experience

In my last blog I outlined a number of questions that all came up at a recent breakfast seminar I led where all the participants discussed the complexities of solving tame, crisis and wicked problems and the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) approach for general conditions and solutions. In this blog I examine tame, crisis and wicked problems.

Before I approach the subject of wicked problems – which Brexit certainly is – and its impact on a sector like insurance, it important to understand the context of VUCA and how the seminar’s key note speaker Steve Harpum’s Afghanistan experience applies. Steve spent most of 2008 at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan where he was the Deputy Commander responsible for all support functions on this base. He had full responsibility for personnel, logistics and supply chain, communications and infrastructure to worry about. His role was to co-ordinate 5 partner nations, 22 contributor nations and at any given time there were typically 10,000 plus people moving in and out of Kandahar.

The main focus of the operation was to maintain 300 aircraft movements a day, relying on 21 support contracts. His mission was first and foremost;
‘Keep the world’s busiest single runway airfield open to provide air support for the troops on the ground confronting the Taliban’

Secondly and always going on in the background is that he was sustaining a small town, serving 23,000 meals a day across various dietary requirements, providing water for those people for drinking and showering, supplying 300 tonnes of fuel a month and the challenge of transporting it regularly from Pakistan.

TAME PROBLEMS

So as Steve explained you have to manage the challenges based on time and complexity using this process there is a category of problem we can refer to as tame. It doesn’t mean they are not complicated challenges but we have systems and processes that help to manage them. Air re-fuelling, for example, is a very complicated, dangerous process, you have the tankers and fighters all up in the air at the same time but we have an organised process and we know how to do it. Therefore it is a tame problem.

Steve says: “In my case the supply chain was a tame problem. It was a bit unorthodox and fragile but I know how to run a supply chain. My whole professional career had taught me that. These are the things that tend to be short in duration and tend to be quite uncomplicated.”

This is where a clear ‘Vision’ is required, a real understanding of what the end result is and having organised processes in place to ensure the repeatable tasks are known, tested, communicated and assigned to responsible owners resulting in a high performing team.

CRISIS PROBLEMS

When a Taliban rocket landed on a fuel pipeline this was not the time to convene the five partner nations to discuss the options, this was a ‘crisis’ problem that had to be dealt with quickly. Steve had systems in place that he could activate rather than invent, in this case the crisis solution was the Canadian support contractor that provided the fire brigade.

This ‘crisis’ example demonstrates that having a clear ‘Understanding’ of the potential risks and issues will enable you to have the right level of support available should you be faced with a ‘crisis’ getting access to the experts and quickly is key to recovery.

WICKED PROBLEMS

Then there are wicked problems. This is where you are in a changing culturally complex world, there are no rules, everything impacts on something else, for example, you are trying to grow the air field all the time while all the different parties on the ground have different agendas. There are no known solutions. It all sounds rather familiar to most people that have been following the Brexit news recently! So the symptoms are all intertwined. We have no linear causality any more. This is where leadership rather than management skills need to come into play. Klaus Fitz who is a Russian soldier who described “the fog of war” and this is what you get with wicked problems.

The problem you have if you adopt “tried and tested” or off the shelf techniques to try and manage wicked situations or the techniques that many modern leadership solutions use to manage these unknown problems is that you can start to run into errors because your solutions are not matching the problems.

Leadership is key, building collaborative teams where they participate and accept responsibility is a must however there are times when consensus is just not possible, there will be times when the issue is ambiguous, no one has a solution, so you have to be able to react to the unplanned activity and take decisions that will take you a step closer to deliver the vision. The decision may not be the right one longer term but a decision should be taken to mobilise towards the desired outcome, try the solution, test it and refine it, but you must always take the decision, it should not be avoided, this is when leadership is the most critical. Be confident in your decision taking, be dependable!

In my next blog I explain the concept of VUCA and how it might be applied to the insurance sector.