Wicked Problems: What Can We Do In This Time of Collapse?
Christian Sarkar and Philip Kotler
Idea Bite Press (March 2025)

If the world’s worst problems are interconnected, then their solutions must also be interconnected.

According to Phil Kotler, “This is not just a reference book for your library. I see Wicked Problems as a friend and guide in coping with daily life and its problems. Of all the books in my library, it is the last one that I would be willing to give up.”

Rather than placing my copy on a shelf, I keep it near-at-hand because every day I struggle to understand a world that is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall.

My thoughts and feelings about all the wicked problems in 2025 share much in common with William Butler Yeats’s thoughts and feelings 1919 when he reflected on his world:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Christian Sarkar and Philip Kotler have identified the multiple causes, multiple impacts, and multiple solutions of seven of the world’s most serious problems. They cannot be solved using traditional problem-solving approaches. “To understand a wicked problem, we must first be able to see the interconnections between the various factors which cause the problem in the first place. We must find a way to map out these relationships — what we call the ‘ecosystem of wicked problems.’

“That was how we started. Our goal was to find the points of leverage that govern the system — and we did. It turns out that one of the wicked problems —  Power and Corruption — is at the root of all other problems.

“We endeavor to explain why.”

The seven problems are best revealed within the narrative. The same is true of their causes, impacts, and solutions. My suggestion is that you check out the Contents and select one of the “WICKED 7” that is of greatest concern to you and begin there after you read the  Introduction, “A Letter to Humanity,” and then “ASK: Where are we going?” (Pages -1-36).

No brief commentary such as mine could possibly do full justice to the quality and value of the material that Christian Sarkar and Philip Kotler provide in Wicked Problems. I hope, however, that I have at least indicated why I hold that material in highest regard. My own approach is to work my way through each of the “WICKED 7” again (Pages 37-284).

Wicked Problems is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!