Makers of the Environment : Building Resilience Into Our World, One Model at a Time.

I OF THE STORM WEBLINKS

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USE CASE FOR THIS BOOK

If people can’t figure out what enough is, where the end lies, they may decide it’s not worth starting. Sad but true. —Seth Godin

Executive Summary

Go to http://www.gettag.mobi/ to get your free mobile app or read more.

Dear Reader,

My goal is to advance new tools and processes into the mainstream, making complex ideas about the future of the built environment clear to the reader. I have long advocated for simplicity and clarity. The goal is to give readers a perspective that allows them to assess where we are today and where we can be tomorrow, in terms that everyone can understand.

The award winning BIG BIM little bim focused on implementing new technology and practices in architects’ design offices. This book focuses on possibilities and design futures for where technology can lead culture and how each of us can prepare ourselves for tomorrow. We need to know where the power of an interconnected world will take society.

When I started this book, I intended to release a third addition of BIG BIM little bim, describing the new and exciting things that have happened since the release of the second edition in 2008. The goal was to help readers understand where these rapidly evolving technologies and processes are heading. As I began the research and planning, it soon became apparent that adding case studies and tweaking the original book to include the latest happenings could not accurately represent the change.

The ability to interact with everything in the built environment is the most compelling aspect of the information that surrounds us. Easily using the distributed, multidimensional tools and processes that connect data from multiple sources is not a dream… People are doing it today. Collaborative processes, rich data repositories and advanced graphics are the seeds of this information revolution. Properly applied, the tools that make this transformation possible are straightforward and accessible. Anyone can apply them to their benefit.

The information that connects the world is not linear nor is it simple. This complex information affects us all, every day in everything we do. It comes from anywhere and everywhere. It defies linear description, and the complexity can overwhelm. Few are actively working to address the complexity for those most affected.

Many talented people have been working to address this complexity for the professionals that design and build today. Building information modeling is the tool that they use to represent and connect to this complexity. This book is designed to help the rest of us understand and use the information.

Accurately representing this multidimensional tangle of information in a real book seems to be difficult or impossible. How does one write a book that accurately represents this complexity? This was the challenge.

The solution was to make this book an information model itself…a book that connects to external information that connects to the built environment. Writing a book that is itself an information model involves several structures.

Where additional data, or the wisdom of others might improve understanding, the book links to external information via your web-enabled device, using tags. Tags allow the reader to jump to more detailed and technical discussions about topics included in the book. Those reading the book on a web-enabled reader, such as an iPad, find links taking them to the same places.

I have chosen to use the Microsoft Tag format. The tags offer several benefits:

They establish direct links to more information and let one embed information into a printed book. Think of them as a glossary on steroids.

They allow the reader to examine the broad ideas and possibilities, or to use the book as a technical text for students or others learning the subject in more depth. Think of the book as a 3-D symbolic model with links to underlying data.

They allow updating of connected information as things change, and offer the possibility of direct communication with the reader. They allow one to add data in real-time after publication of the physical book. Think of them as a database connection that over time can access an ever-richer representation of information.

The second structure is a narrative table of contents. The table of contents allows the reader to move through the book’s content in any order. Professionals approach their information modeling process from different viewpoints; the reader can experience this book the same way. I have organized the book in one logical order. Some readers will prefer to approach the order differently.

The Narrative Table of Contents creates the opportunity to map out your personal path through the book. Different people use information models differently. They approach them from differing viewpoints. They have different needs. A community leader evaluating new sidewalks needs different views of her information model than would a builder trying to schedule when to bring in the concrete finishers. Use the Narrative Table of Contents to read the book in the sequence that seems right. Feel free to explore elements that appeal, circling back to the story line as it suits your exploration.

Finally, I designed the book around a series of interconnected near-future usage scenarios. I built the scenarios around technology and processes that exist today or that can credibly be projected from today’s tools and environment. They are fictional projections, not case studies. Think of these design futures as individual an information model much like the Revit or ArchiCAD models that architects and contractors build.

The central design future that flows through this book describes technology that allows people to manage these issues in the built environment. This scenario shows how an organization in a small, depressed rural county can pull together to take advantage of short development cycles to become a world leader in the management of information to support the built environment. With systems and processes such as this design future describes, we for the first time in history can have a secure, verifiable, and accessible archive for the digital assets that help us to define and manage real-world assets. The central design future forms the backbone for the three scenarios that use the information to improve the world.

The design futures include rich information, show how to take advantage of existing tools, and allow just-in-time decision making, but they are not yet fully realized. The individuals in these scenarios are archetypes of the people that manage similar issues today.

I mention few real people in the book. Where real people are included, I believe them to be the originator of the idea or critical to the reader’s understanding of the issue under discussion. The locations that serve as the stages for these scenarios are, for the most part, physical places that can be found on any map. I have modified them to communicate within the time lines and needs of this book. Woven within the scenarios are commentary, opinion, and facts from the world today. These historical and present day passages are shaded for clarity. Chapters that begin with dates and places are design fiction.

— Finith E. Jernigan

Timeline

POWER OF INFORMATION

Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.—Frank Lloyd Wright

This book is an information model. Some might call it a building information model, but book information model is probably more accurate. The goal is to represent the complexity and power of information modeling technologies and processes within what has up to now been a linear media.

Information models have structure and represent one’s vision and data about the world. They connect bits of data to create frameworks for managing the complexity so that we can make better decisions with facts. They make information accessible; they create order, from what is often chaos.

Your home has context in the real world. It is part of a nation, a state, a city, a neighborhood, and a street. It has a foundation, walls, floors, ceilings, heating, lighting, a roof, and many other parts. So do information models in the virtual world. These models create connections to the world. They connect with data about the things in the model and about the things that influence the model.

Your model knows that you have (or plan to have) bamboo flooring in your family room. It also knows how strong the flooring is, how long it will last, how to care for it, where it came from, who installed it, and how much it cost. That is just the start. Your model also knows where they grew the bamboo, who cut it, and how it impacts on your country’s foreign trade balance and gives three-dimensional views of any of this information.

Your model brings all of this information any time a decision about your flooring is needed. It lets you look at the data, massage it, and use it to make better decisions. What type of rug would be best? Where can I buy the right rug? How can I fix the scratches that Buster made? Who can do this work? How much will it cost? Consult your model and get the facts that you need to decide.

This book does much the same thing. This book has a structure that puts information into context and builds a framework to represent a future vision of where information modeling is heading.

Today, information modeling is taking hold in the built environment, the man-made part of the world. The built environment provides the setting for human activity; ranging from buildings to neighborhoods to cities, and including infrastructure, such as transportation, water and energy networks, and other things that relate to humans over time.

Many specializations built around information are rapidly folding together as experts realize the power and possibilities that information modeling brings to the built environment. This is happening in a context that increases public access and makes data more democratic and useful. As in the best of today’s building information models, this book approaches the data from many viewpoints, with different media and many levels of detail, all intended to amuse and educate about the power of information to improve the world.

GRACE’S GREEN THUMB

DEVOL, OKLAHOMA

JULY 17, 1999

The very process of the restoring the land to health is the process through which we become attuned to Nature and, through Nature, with ourselves.—Chris Maser, Forest Primeval

Grace had a green thumb and could grow anything, even in the dry and desolate environment of southern Oklahoma. To her, gardening was essential to the family’s survival. Her garden was the centerpiece of her pink and white prairie bungalow, and a showplace in Cotton County, Oklahoma. She grew vegetables, fruit, and the prettiest flowers in the county. Her neighbors suspected that Grace’s windbreak had a lot to do with the strawberries that she grew every spring.

That farming is a struggle to balance the things that affect success or failure was never more true than in Oklahoma’s hot and dry conditions. Floyd and Grace farmed wheat and barley and raised four daughters in the times of recovery after the Dust Bowl. In those days, it was a constant struggle to survive. Soil conservation and water management were not luxuries. They were necessities of life. One of President Roosevelt’s windbreaks, forty feet deep, protected Floyd and Grace’s house and garden.

The Eastern Red Cedar windbreak protected the north and west exposures. To Floyd and Grace, the windbreak was not a bunch of trees; it was a vital part of their life. The windbreak was part of the Great Plains Shelterbelt program, one of the first green mandates designed to reduce wind velocity and slow evaporation of moisture. By the 1990s, their trees were thirty feet tall and formed an almost impenetrable barrier. Damaging the windbreak was taboo.

Young kids are natural explorers. They explore their environment guided by their natural curiosity. Their imagination can lead them to entertaining and sometimes unexpected consequences. Sandy was like that. She poked her nose into everything. She built tree houses and snow forts. When bored, even a blanket over a couple of chairs made for a magical place. Who knew what mysteries the impenetrable interior of the windbreak held?

It was a sunny, hot, and still Oklahoma Saturday. The adults were doing adult things, leaving the kids to keep themselves occupied… A perfect opportunity to explore the dark and impenetrable depths of the windbreak. After a trip to the barn, with clippers and limb loppers in hand, Sandy and her brother headed for the windbreak. Snip…lop…snip…snip…. Branches fell. Soon they found themselves in the shady interior of the windbreak. It was perfect and dry, with a blanket of soft needles. It was the best fort that they could imagine. For a couple of hours, they let their imagination roam.

As usually happened after an absence of a couple of hours and when they had fun, they heard their mom calling. When she found them and discovered their work on the windbreak, things stopped being fun…fast. They had trouble sitting down for a couple of days. They learned the true value of conservation, in an intensely personal way.

People have remarkably short memories when it comes to environmental disaster. To Sandy, the Dust Bowl was a superb example of the problems we bring on ourselves and how hard it is to recover. Growing up in north Texas and Oklahoma, conservation programs were part of life. Her experience in her grandmother’s windbreak directly affected how she related to the land. Even as a young child, she was a fast learner, especially with the proper reinforcement.

The Dust Bowl spawned severe drought. Intense farming with little regard for erosion control and indiscriminate cutting of trees and prairie grasses combined to form enormous dust storms that wiped out farms, forced over 2.5 million people from their homes, and scoured earth from millions of acres of land. Only when the dust storms reached the eastern seaboard in the mid-1930s did the catastrophe begin to be taken seriously by the rest of the country. The area started to heal as mandated soil conservation took hold. The programs encouraged farmers to restore and improve soil fertility, to minimize wind and water erosion, to preserve resources and wildlife.

Grace and the Devol, OK Gardening Club among her garden backed by her Red Cedar windbreak, circa 1960. 34° 11’ 26 N 98° 35’ 6" W

Recovery and stabilization required cooperation and active participation from many people over decades.

Environmental practices have changed since the days of windbreaks. Scientific research has given us a better understanding of the natural forces that drive the environment. We have learned more about what works and what does not work. Today we consider the Eastern Red Cedars, which Floyd and Grace planted to survive, to be invasive plants. As a monoculture, Red Cedars cause a loss of biodiversity, contribute to loss of endangered species, degrade air quality, and are a threat to water resources. New data and better science gave us a new view of a plant once valued for its rapid growth and dense vegetation.

The lessons that Sandy took away from the Dust Bowl and the Red Cedars is that we must find ways to fix those problems that affect us today, all the while keeping in mind that we may have to be flexible and change when more accurate information and new facts become available. The process can take decades.

THE SUNSET THREW LONG SHADOWS

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

SEPTEMBER 3, 2022

The sunset threw long shadows from the woods. Pete Jarvi looked out the kitchen’s sliding glass door of his Virginia Beach house. The deer were back! A doe and four almost grown fawns. Two deer hopped a few feet at the sound of the door opening. He walked out on the deck. Then they stopped and looked at him. Friend or foe? He did not like deer, at least, not in his back yard. He had put deer repellent around just a month ago. It was incongruous, his feelings about deer. He was sympathetic to the environment, and while not a tree-hugger, he did not like the idea of offshore oil drilling in Florida or more drilling in Alaskan wilderness. He liked spotted owls more than big lumber companies. He liked wildlife. He taught his kids to respect nature. They were Friends of the National Zoo—just no deer in his backyard!

He worried about the kids, Thomas and Cindy, getting Lyme disease or something worse. He was thinking about picking up more tick repellant, when the phone rang. It was probably one of Cindy’s friends calling about soccer. She would pick it up.

Dad, it’s Mr. Boyle.

Pete, I need you to get in here as fast as you can. It was Gary Boyle, his boss at CGSysOPs.

Can you tell me anything?

No. Just hurry!

Jarvi poured the remainder of his bourbon and water down the sink. He yelled down the basement steps, Mel, I’ve gotta go to the office. I don’t know whether I’ll be back tonight. I’ll call you later, if I can.

Melanie, Pete’s wife and mother of their kids, was in the basement supervising—make that refereeing—air hockey, and booting up the computer for Thomas to play games. The thing had been buggy lately.

Call me when you can. Your overnight bag’s in the hall closet, she called up the steps. Paul’s supposed to come up tomorrow and stay over. Call me if you aren’t going to be back in time.

Jarvi cranked the Toyota Camry and WNIS was broadcasting the news of an explosion in Portsmouth, a probable air attack. He figured that was why Gary called. The details were sketchy. It was probably serious, because Fred Boyd was on call for the weekend. If they called them both in, it was probably a disaster. Worse, they were probably expecting multiple attacks, like 9/11.

Pete Jarvi’s house backs up on woods and a creek in Virginia Beach, VA. 36° 51’ 25 N 76° 02’ 02 W. Google Earth Imagery copyright Google 2011

THUMP… THUMP… THUMP...

CRISFIELD, MARYLAND

APRIL 17, 2026

Every time the pile driver hammer dropped, the whole hospital jumped. Barring further problems, they would finish the piles today.

Yesterday, a hydraulic blowout shut down the operation. For a while, it looked like everything would stop for the rest of the week. Elle was beside herself; they certainly could not afford downtime this early on the new surgical wing, but Joe’s team jumped on the problem and they only lost three hours, just like they said, everyone working like a team this time.

In her head, she knew that they could do it, but in her heart she still had a hard time believing in this new integrated project technology. This information modeling stuff was just too much like magic. If the contractor at her last hospital had the same problem, he would take a day to figure out what was wrong. Then he would take four days to get the part, even if it were in stock right down the street. Joe’s crew did it in three hours! She truly did need to let her team handle things like this, and stop micromanaging.

Thump…thump…thump…. Elle’s immaculate desk jumped. Already focused on the reimbursement spreadsheet on her laptop, she did not notice.

Dr. Elaina Bagayoko-Smith (Elle to everyone that knew her) led Cork Point with the finesse of a symphony maestro—or, some would say, with the fire of a drill instructor. Her friends said that she was not a Type A personality; she was an A++. Elle had mastered the chess game played by all health-care CEOs, always looking five steps ahead to find strategies with significant payoffs. She was obsessive about managing risk.

Most healthcare CEOs just did not have time to focus on facilities. Their priorities were on keeping the medical staff happy, getting paid, and raising money. Elle was different. Her architects said that she was the best of clients, one who thought that design was essential. She truly got into the process… Some would say too much. It was not that she did not handle those other priorities. It was just that she saw things a lot more holistically. She had bet her career on the fact that she could create a people-centered, sustainable life care system by integrating everything.

Cork Point could no longer exist by focusing only on sick care. The system had to change. Elle knew that she needed to heal people when they were sick, but that could no longer be the only focus. Cork Point must become a real health-care system. The system must focus on personal health through prevention and education. Her priorities must become community integration and collaboration.

Cork Point must become an integrated enterprise. Otherwise, they would be living in a world where they would be the last holdout. Every day Elle saw and used products created by others who had already gone down this path. Her grocery store was integrated. Her local car care shop was integrated. Her bank was integrated. Integrated processes affected everything she did, every day. Cork Point must become the same.

She knew that the first task was to move away from command and control; the culture must adjust to allow collaboration, if they were to prosper.

Traditional shanties and blue crab shedding floats near Cedar Island Marsh, Somerset County, MD. 37° 57’ 52 N 75° 50’ 51 W

1 : WICKED PROBLEMS IN OUR WORLD

The Chesapeake Bay is in crisis. The Network for Sustainable Decisions is creating systems that let everyone actively participate in the revival, while managing the interests of all. Sandy Kim, a virtual enterprise manager, manages environmental recovery using live data, collaborative systems, and rule-based controls.

The United States Coast Guard has a mission of keeping us safe and secure. Information enables them to fulfill this mission in a world of ever-increasing complexity and threat. Meet Pete Jarvi, a BIM manager. He is your guide to using information to get certainty of outcomes.

A forward-thinking healthcare enterprise faces all of today’s issues. They are using technology and new ways of working to capitalize on peoples’ passions. They let people use their art to create a better world. Dr. Elle Smith, hospital administrator, shows how a health-care organization can use information to grow and support the community in a world of fiscal and regulatory constraints.

In each case, Somerset County’s BIMSynergy Corporation, led by your narrator George Thomas, the county development manager, provides the backbone to maintain the consistent, shared and authoritative data to get the job done. The corporation is just one of the public utility businesses that fulfill this need across the world.

SOMERSET COUNTY, MARYLAND

JUNE 1, 2030

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.—Albert Einstein

Since 1666, the county has seen a lot of ups and downs. We are pretty good at working through them…even if it takes a while. My name is George Thomas. I am the county development manager. The county has always had a farm- and seafood-based economy. My job has been to help the area become a player in the new world of information.

The changes required us to look deep inside of the way things operate around here. We had to be willing to make adjustments to just about anything and everything. We started out with a couple of dead-serious questions: Can a small group bring the resources to bear to support certainty for all? Can we handle information to make the world better for the future?

The seafood industry is dying. MSX has decimated the oysters. This year the crab population is okay. Last year crabs were scarce. Rockfish have rebounded, but rockfish do not keep the fishing fleet alive. It costs more to haul your boat and paint the bottom than a waterman can earn in a good season, these days. It is even hard to keep a few skipjacks sailing for the annual races on Labor Day. This year only four skipjacks filed their oyster-dredging certificates. We are a hardheaded bunch, known for patience, perseverance, and, most importantly, the ability to change when we must. Commerce and competition had changed from the day where a poor county was beholden to the urban areas.

A couple of years ago, the leadership in Princess Anne got together with the county and the university and decided that they would do whatever it took to turn the county into a haven for new technology. The members of the Somerset Intelligence Initiative figured that we could make this small, rural area into the showplace for the flat world described by Tom Friedman. The county took advantage of a level playing field, where perception and will opened up opportunities across the world. The Somerset Intelligence Initiative’s first big step in that direction was to install fiber-optic cabling and WiMAX everywhere, accessible to everyone. Photovoltaics, sustainability, net zero, smart grid, building information modeling, and model servers are the new names in the game, just as Friedman hinted.

The people who live and work in Somerset County and local leaders rebuilt the tax system from the bottom up. Local people did such a good job of making changes to the systems that people from all over the world asked us to help them with their change initiatives. We became the go-to for enlightened political change in rural communities and for integrating data to manage government better. New people are moving here to fill the new jobs. Not twenty years ago, there were only 5,444 families in the county. Last year the commissioners calculated that there were 12,000 families, a 120 percent increase! They think that it will double again in the next five years. We are busting at the seams. We are building new schools, new sewerage plants, and just about everything else that it takes to handle the growth.

The hospital down in Crisfield is one of the county’s greatest successes. They were among the first that embraced the integration idea. Their programs took off. It has become something that most have never seen—a place where young, old, and everyone in between can live, work, and play.

The hospital has a rich history. The leadership down there capitalized on tradition. They are keeping the hospital connected with the community. They did extensive research and marketing studies to make sure that the changes they proposed would work to better the community. The hospital even changed the name back to the original Cork Point to emphasize the long-standing connection to Crisfield and Somerset County.

Edward McCready, a Crisfield native, ran his family’s cork business from Chicago. On September 13, 1919, Edward, his daughter, and the young girl’s nurse embarked on the long drive home after visiting relatives in his native Crisfield. That fateful Saturday morning, they collided with a train near Westover. Both adults died at the scene. Rescuers rushed the girl to the hospital in downtown Crisfield, but the child succumbed to her injuries en route. When the heartbroken Caroline McCready reached Crisfield after the accident, she endowed Edward W. McCready Memorial Hospital with money and property, in memory of her husband and daughter.

Built on a peninsula flanked by Daugherty’s Creek and Hospital Cove known as Cork Point, the hospital opened May 6, 1923, with nearly three dozen beds, becoming one of Delmarva’s largest hospitals at the time. In 1961, the hospital added a small addition. They built a nursing home in 1968 in memory of Alice Byrd Tawes, the mother of Governor J. Millard Tawes. The nursing home put McCready Memorial in rare company since even now few nursing homes in the area directly connect to a hospital.

Accessible by land, sea, and air, the hospital ministers to the residents of Crisfield and the surrounding Somerset County. In 1980, a $3.9 million replacement hospital connected the nursing home to the 1920s-era building. Now, they use the old hospital for clinics and administrative offices. In 2010, the hospital opened the Tawes Nursing & Rehabilitation Center. The four-story, $12.5 million design included a skilled nursing unit and assisted-living apartments on the top floor.

Using cloud-based computing, integrated project delivery systems, and information modeling, the hospital’s leadership has committed to creating new ways of doing business and supporting the community to help us all. They are wise and have an ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. They believe in the notion that while things are uncertain now, further investigation will reduce ambiguity. They have faith in the future.

In the first part of the twenty-first century, they started to see opportunities for aligning technology and people. They saw new tools and new ways of working popping up every day. Significant numbers of people were using information tools. The hospital knew that they needed live, reliable information that would be available whenever people needed it for whatever reason. Few believed that it was possible. Many were so wedded to the old ways that they passively or actively undermined progress in the early days.

By creating and managing information models with second-order leadership tools, they created a system that defines how projects ought to happen. Their approach requires defined working practices, methodologies, and behaviors. Their process overlays multistage prototypes and cost management onto the five-phase process that has been the traditional approach to projects. Cork Point projects are truly collaborative, reward exemplary work, and are flexible enough to respond to change and new ways of doing business.

The changes have taken a willingness to modify how the hospital does business and how it manages its projects. The changes took a commitment to embrace new technology. Most of all, they required a high level of personal and corporate responsibility. The hospital’s leaders use systems thinking to prepare for an uncertain future in the global economy. Their systems approach lets them understand things on a larger scale than we normally see around here.

The benefits to the community come from consistently applying and reinforcing the concepts that are the foundation of the Cork Point system. They use the best available tools for the job at hand. However, the tools are secondary. The goal is improved projects with positive outcomes, every time.

At Cork Point, they focus on providing sustained value for the community. They eliminate or reduce inefficiencies in the process. They eliminate tedious and repetitive tasks. They put in place systems that let them play what-if games. They test outcomes by changing variables and running their models at high speed. They use a comprehensive systems thinking process. The Cork Point Planning Team know that most people do not think particularly strategically… Not about their own lives, or the lives of future generations. So they created a system that lets them think about thinking about the future.

By doing this, they have become stewards of their resources. Their approach creates an archive of information in interoperable databases. They use this information to maintain and operate the facility, allowing others to benefit from it for many years to come.

Often it seems like people believe that we can solve environmental and facilities problems with traditional methods. They act like the problems can be handled by purchasing a new piece of software, training people more, or learning some new tricks. It is just not so. Treating these issues with the traditional approach has led to waste and declining productivity. We need to understand the subtleties that drive the changes to the world today.

That is what the county and Cork Point are doing every day.

SUBTLETIES

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.—Albert Einstein

First-order tools and techniques simply follow the rules and focus on doing-things-the-right-way. They are the foundation for expertise and process compliance.

Second-order techniques use first-order tools and higher-level skills to adapt, modify, and improvise to focus on doing-the-right-thing. They are targeted on achieving the end goal.

Complicated tasks can be difficult to understand as a whole, but they have an understood set of rules. If you follow the rules, step by step, you can solve complicated problems. Quadratic equations and building Boeing 747s are complicated tasks, but if you know the rules they can be completed successfully.

Tame problems are well defined with a straightforward problem statement. The ability to solve tame problems is a part of professional development and is a step toward mastery. They can be complicated, but you know when you have reached a solution. The solution is either right or wrong. You solve most tame problems using similar methods, and the result can be tested to determine whether it works or not. Most of the project management tools that we use in the early twenty-first century are designed for tame problems. Tools for managing tame problems can be called first-order tools.

Complexity does not follow the same pattern. The lacrosse coach cannot lay out every action in advance. Today a weak member of the opposing team could have her best game ever and score a hat trick. How can you plan for that? You cannot know where things are heading until other things happen. Things are likely to happen about which you have no knowledge or control over. The unknowns and uncertainties that characterize complex tasks make them difficult to solve with traditional tools.

With real-world experience, you can prepare for some of the known unknowns that happen in complex situations. Other things are outside of your control. It is the things you don’t know that you don’t know that make complex tasks so difficult to resolve. Farming is an example of a complex task. Many things can be planned; the farmer can choose the right time to plant and can use the land properly, but weather, pests, and all of the other things that cannot be controlled make the difference between success and failure.

Wicked problems are complex. Wicked problems usually involve significant numbers of people changing their behavior and mindsets. A wicked problem is a moving target. When you think you have solved a wicked problem, usually all that you have done is to identify a new problem. Even defining a wicked problem is in itself a wicked problem. Wicked problems do not have a stopping point. There is no test of solutions to wicked problems. Rather than right or wrong, a wicked problem can usually only be described by better or worse. Every wicked problem is essentially unique and can be considered a manifestation of another problem.

Complex or Complicated?

The ability to work with wicked problems and their complexity requires the leadership and expertise of a master. Tools for managing wicked problems can be called second-order tools. Second-order tools focus on systems thinking, appropriate leadership, and flexibility to respond appropriately to complex situations, and not to process compliance. Community planning, the environment, energy, sustainability, integrated practice, and most of the other issues that affect our future can be said to be wicked problems.

If a problem is wicked, the traditional approach doesn’t work. No proscribed linear approach will solve a wicked problem. The linear approach must develop solutions just to see the hidden issues and flush out the hidden stakeholders. As the unknowns and uncertainties form and you add more resources, the situation becomes worse. Approaches that use first-order management tools alone often do not perform as expected, even when used by trained professionals who have worked all their lives to gain expertise.

A significant percentage of built environment projects that have used traditional tools and processes can be considered failures. Traditional project management is usually unable to respond effectively to unknown situations. Wasted resources, cost overruns, missed schedules, litigation, lack of support, and many other problems are the result.

Some things do not change. Deeply buried within the traditional approach is an orientation to a linear process. Many of