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daviding says: The web page has a link to a PDF, in which the footnote reads: "This paper is Chapter 1 of Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, by Jeff Conklin, Ph.D., Wiley, October 2005." If the challenge of a wicked problem wasn't enough, communicating a potential solution each new person coming to the problem creates its own issues. Dialogue mapping could provide some assistance in at least reducing the learning curve of the new participant on options, alternatives, paths and considerations already covered.

For a more detailed discussion of wicked problems, see Wicked Problems and Social Complexity, CogNexus Institute's most downloaded white paper. Problem wickedness demands tools and methods which create shared understanding and shared commitment. Following Horst Rittel's analysis, we have developed "Dialogue Mapping", based on Rittel's Issue Based Information System (IBIS), which provides an elegant way of dealing with the fragmentation around a wicked problem. Because the group or team's understanding of the wicked problem is evolving, productive movement toward a solution requires powerful mechanisms for getting everyone on the same page. There will be volumes facts, data, studies and reports about a wicked problem, but the shared commitment needed to create durable solution will not live in information or knowledge. Understanding a wicked problem is about collectively making sense of the situation and coming to shared understanding about who wants what. Dialogue Mapping is such a method, because it is an approach which is rooted in maximizing communication and coherence among diverse stakeholders. Dialogue Mapping -- the process of crafting IBIS maps interactively with a group -- is not a process in the traditional sense: it is a structural augmentation of group communication. It provides a group with an enriched Dialogue environment which both de-emphasizes personal dynamics (e.g. right/wrong or win/loose dynamics) and creates a coherent shared space for crafting and negotiating shared understanding.