Distinguishing Collaboration From Other Group Work to Help Public Health and Other Sectors Solve Wicked Problems to...

Public health devotes significant resources to address "wicked" challenges, a term coined nearly 50 years ago to distinguish complex problems from tame problems. Tame problems (eg, building a hospital) may be difficult, but known experts and agreed-upon processes exist to address them. Wicked problems (eg, the obesity epidemic) seem intractable, with no agreed-upon solution or cause. Broad agreement exists that wicked problems require collaboration, especially in periods of hyperuncertainty, marked by the rapid onset of multiple wicked problems and uncertainty. One example of a recent hyperuncertain period occurred in 2020, beginning with major political shifts, followed rapidly by COVID-19, widespread social unrest, and multiple crises from extreme weather events (eg, hurricanes). With collaboration increasing, collaboration scholars lament the lack of broad consensus on what distinguishes collaboration from other group work (eg, coordination). Without a common understanding of and roadmap to build collaboration, public health is limited to address wicked problems. To support effective collaboration, we synthesized 4 decades of scholarship to identify where scholars across 3 related areas of collaboration literature are coalescing on the unique elements required for collaboration. From our synthesis, we created a new definition to distinguish collaboration from other group work, including its requisite key elements that public health can use as guideposts to collaborate effectively. We found no explicit focus on these key elements in the public health collaboration articles reviewed, a gap this article seeks to fill. Longer term, public health agencies and schools can use this work to bolster transdisciplinary collaborative problem-solving capacity.