Wicked Problems in Health Professions Education: Adaptive Action in Action

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Each educational institution is different. Every clinical setting is unique. Faculty members - clinical, academic, volunteer - are separated by discipline, history, and professional focus. Students begin at different places and learn in different ways. And yet, we focus on the standardization, rigor, and accountability to competencies and curricula in every facet of health professions' education. The search for consistency and control in such a highly variable system leads inevitably to intractable, wicked problems. Wicked problems are ones that cannot be solved using traditional methods. They are different from traditional problems, in that they are 1) defined differently from multiple perspectives, 2) appear differently in each different context, but follow consistent patterns wherever they appear, and 3) can never be completely solved. Problems that persist for educationalists in health professions meet these criteria and can be classified as "wicked" problems. Rather than solutions to wicked problems, practitioners must choose contextualized, iterative, incremental actions to influence their intractable patterns over time.