An Assessment of Problem Difficulty

An Assessment of Problem Difficulty ^PDF - This chapter from Analytical Activism runs 13 pages. It blows a gigantic hole in conventional wisdom by analyzing what makes certain environmental problems easy or difficult. This leads to a number of startling conclusions. One is that the stratospheric ozone layer problem was not solved because of a breakthrough in international agreement. It was solved because it was an inherently easy problem, one with low change resistance.

But the most important conclusion is that the sustainability problem is so inherently difficult that it will not yield to normal, intuitive problem solving processes. Something entirely different that fits the problem is required, or we will continue to stare at decade after decade of solution failure.

From the table of contents, here's what the chapter covers:

"There are seven difficulty factors causing environmental problems to be difficult to solve. These factors are used to rate the top eleven environmental problems. The results explain why one has been easy to solve and the rest remain unsolved. The chapter argues that the main reason so many remain unsolved is the problem solving process used by the environmental movement is so immature that it does not fit the problem. It cannot handle the seven difficulty factors. Given the principle that the more difficult the problem the more mature the process used to solve it must be, it follows that the movement must switch to a mature process."

Below is the Problem Difficulty Grid: (Click on it for the larger version)