Want to solve “Wicked Problems”? Hire more polymaths.
By: Viktoria Popova
Tags: Wicked Problem, Polymath, Interdisciplinary, Problem Solving, Nobel Prize

Want to solve “Wicked Problems”? Hire more polymaths.

Let’s Play!

Before we have a brief review of what problems are qualified as “Wicked Problems” and what people can be referred to as polymaths, here is a problem for you:

What letter of the Roman alphabet represents a number of years it took Scheherazade to tell her stories?

It has to be a single letter — not a combination of Roman letters (as in III or IV).

Let me give you a clue. But this clue will be in the form of another question.

What does a dot in the Morse Code, Euler’s number, and the number of years it took Scheherazade to tell her stories have in common?

Let’s look at all the “knowns” across the two questions:

We know it took Scheherazade one thousand and one nights Approximate value of Euler’s number is 2.71828 Even though most letters (except for 3 letters) in the Morse Code contain a dot, there is one particular letter that is represented by a single dot: letter E.

Now that we have three “knowns,” we need to find something in common across them. By the way, Euler’s number is designated by the letter … e!

So, going to the original question of finding a letter, it can possibly be a letter E. This assumption is corroborated by our findings for the second question (commonalities between a dot in the Morse Code and Euler’s number).

But what does the letter E have to do with a number of years it took Scheherazade to tell her stories. Now, let’s look at what “knowns” we have as far as numbers. We have 1001 days and we have Euler’s number 2.7. Since the question is about the number of years and we know the number of days, we can easily identify the number of years: 1001 divided by 365 is … 2.7!

And now we have the answer to our questions of “What letter of the Roman alphabet represents a number of years it took Scheherazade to tell her stories” and “What does a dot in the Morse Code, Euler’s number, and the number of years it took Scheherazade to tell her stories have in common”: Letter E.

I could have given you the clue of all clues and said that the letter we are looking for is the most common letter in the English alphabet but then we wouldn’t have had an opportunity to observe a play of interdisciplinarity in action that a polymath would use.

Examples of “Polymathians”

Scheherazade was a polymath. “She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments.”

So, is polymath like a polyglot? If a polyglot is a person who can speak several languages, does that mean a polymath is a person who is adept in several disciplines?

Not exactly. A true polymath is a person who is not only well versed in different disciplines but, most importantly, can integrate knowledge across disciplines/practices and produce new knowledge or innovative solutions to complex problems.

If you run the term “polymath” through google trends from 2004 to present, you will see that one of the top related topics to “polymath” is Leonardo da Vinci. His fame as one of the greatest painters (some would say THE greatest painter) does not do justice to the scope of knowledge, skills, and contributions that Leonardo da Vinci practiced. Examples are abundant but we will use one. An integration of his knowledge and skills in anatomical drawings, engineering, and mechanical functions is regarded as a precursor of biomechanics.

Why did I refer to Scheherazade as a polymath? How did she integrate her knowledge to create a new solution? As the story goes, after one night as a bride of the king (Shahryar), she was to be beheaded, just like other three thousand women before her. Using logical persuasion with a king who was driven by emotions of anger from betrayal of his first wife, was futile. Her solution was integration of knowledge across a wide range of fields to craft a “bedtime” story for the king, but she approached storytelling it in such a way that he asked for more stories, breaking his rule to let her storytelling continue through another night, and another night, and another, altogether a thousand and one nights. After a thousand and one nights, or 2.7 years, they bore three sons. A thousand and one nights of “therapy sessions” turned the king to a rational, wise, empathetic human being who no longer needed to feed his anger with daily beheadings.

Nobel Polymaths

Even though the Nobel Prize has distinct disciplinary categories, such as physics, chemistry, physiology (or medicine), economics, peace, and literature, many Nobel laureates find solutions to complex problems by integrating two or more disciplines. Here is a fascinating example:

A Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1988) was achieved by integrating a primary research question that originated in the field of biology and a methodology from the field of physics (a more detailed description here).

This example is not a single isolated occurrence. And there is a telling pattern to integration approaches: solution of a problem in one field is unlocked by identifying and applying a methodology from another field.

Notably, in some cases such achievements are the result of two or three scientists from different disciplines; the point is, however, that these scientists exemplify the concept of polymathy because each one of them is able to cross disciplines and collectively find an integrated solution.

“Wicked Problems”! Polymaths Needed!

“Ability to solve complex problems” is frequently listed as one of the job competencies applicants are expected to demonstrate. Another competency that I recently came across is to “Manage Ambiguity,” or to manage problems that consist of many unknowns and don’t have an evident solution.

This description (paraphrased from a job posting) is very similar to characteristics of the so-called “wicked problems”: several unknowns and no single correct solution. Other characteristics of “wicked problems” include ambiguity of the question itself — a guiding question to a wicked problem can not be easily formulated. A prime example of a “wicked problem” (actually it is referred to as a “super wicked problem”) is climate change. How do we formulate a question in such a way that it can be answered? We cannot. Rather it is a web of subquestions that are entangled in such a way that “solution” to one question may create an additional barrier to addressing other questions that are a part of the web.

What is not listed as one of the original ten characteristics of “wicked problems,” but has become evident to many of us who have taken part in solving complex problems, is their inherent interdisciplinarity. If we can use our polymath abilities and traverse knowledge across disciplines, whether with our own adeptness in several disciplines or our ability to communicate and understand the language and methodologies across organizational departments and stakeholders, we can find unique solutions to some of the seemingly unsolvable problems.