I’m going to forgo the elephant in the room and get straight to the tiger on the bed. Not sure what I’m referring to? I’m talking about this defining image of the floods in Assam this year.
The tiger taking a breather in a home during its escape from the flooding in Kaziranga National Park (Pic: WTI)
You’re probably wondering what caught my eye about this image of the floods — other than the obvious. In my past life (in the olden days of 2018) I headed up Strategy for Balipara Foundation, a conservation non-profit based in the Eastern Himalayan landscape near Kaziranga. In doing so, I have seen the issues that led to images like this up close.
There is a strong parallel between the challenges that non-profits working in this complex ecosystems face and those that today’s businesses around the world are facing, and that parallel is what we call “Wicked Problems”.
A Wicked Problem is defined as a complex issue with numerous interdependencies that are impossible to untangle and isolate.
Now, how does the the tiger fit in? What we don’t generally question when we see images like this is how this tiger came to be here. As the grasslands of Kaziranga flooded, the animals from the forest began seeking higher ground, which for generations has been the Karbi-Anglong hills. However, here’s the glitch, our government in its infinite wisdom has built a national highway that sits bang in between the Kaziranga National Park and the Karbi-Anglong Hills. Then in order to encourage tourism to the region they have given out licenses for hotels and other businesses along the highway, which has also brought opportunistic encroachers along.
The animals now have no option but to attempt crossing a large highway while dodging vehicles, while undertaking regular migrations or seeking refuge from flooding. This exhausted tiger sought a night’s rest in a house next to a dhaba along the way.
The highway the Tiger had to cross to escape the flooding in Kaziranga National Park (Pic: WTI)
While most are probably thinking “well, then let’s just stop the floods to begin with, why is that so hard?” The truth is far more complex and nuanced. The annual floods are necessary for the rejuvenation of the grasslands of Kaziranga, and these grasslands, in turn, are essential for the survival of the famed one-horned rhino and other species native to this landscape. What we need to understand is that these floods have been happening from time immemorial, they have always been there and are inherently necessary and good for the ecosystem, what has changed is the intensity. While grasslands and forests and natural water sinks, the infrastructure we build disrupts the ecosystem’s ability to absorb this water making it concentrated in the smaller patches of grasslands still available, saturating the ground faster and spilling over when the soil can’t hold any more water.
So, what should we do? Can’t stop development, how will the region survive economically? Can’t transplant the highway, it would be nearly impossible and ‘cost too much’. Can’t stop the flooding, it will kill the ecosystem and the endangered species in it.
The answer like almost every wicked problem is one which requires nuanced thinking and considered intervention.
Often the popular discourse positions this as a tug-of-war between economic and ecological imperatives, an inherently narrow worldview that traps us in the same cycles of decision-making that lead to band-aid approaches that simply postpone and often amplify the consequences in the future.
A key to tackling these complex, interconnected issues is non-linear approach, because as new patterns increasingly deviate from previous norms our current, incremental approaches will only delay the impacts and allow us to tread water. If we want to thrive in the future we need to think of approaches that will help us leap-frog the existing norms. To thrive, businesses along with the development and social sector will need to adopt a more holistic view of the world. A systems approach focused not on saving the individual parts but on saving the whole. Apply this to the situation in Assam, where the animals and the ecosystem should be the centre of focus because No Ecosystem = No Animals = Bye Bye Tourism.
Seems easy enough, doesn’t it? Just like Apple said, “Think Different”. It isn’t just thinking differently that will get us there, it’s easy to say “we’re going to change” or “we’re adopting a <insert buzzword here> approach” but difficult to execute it in a way that goes beyond the PR and marketing copy. The change takes more than a couple of design thinking bootcamps, it takes finding the right partners to help, a constant willingness to iterate and adapt, the ability to look ahead and sift out the trends from the fads and most importantly a willingness to fail, dust yourself off and start again.
In short, approaching Wicked Problems will require us to build systems that are more resilient than they are strong — strong systems can be rigid and snap under pressure, resilient systems are flexible enough to adapt. So, get comfortable being uncomfortable. We won’t always succeed but we’ll learn to embrace the ambiguity and constantly adapt to the shifting paradigm, or the next time you may find that tiger in your boardroom, given that the doubling of India’s tiger population and the rapid pace of change in industry, this seems like a real possibility.
