Wicked Problems. A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems.
Surely you remember Iridium, Motorola Corporationâs $5 billion low-Earth-orbit debacle. Planned in the mid-1980s, the system was archaic by the time it was deployed in 1998, offering global communications from a brick-size, $3,000 phone at charges from $6 to $30 a minute.
Iridiumâs architecture locked it into massive upfront costs. The project was the worldâs biggest deployment of low-Earth-orbit satellites (known in the trade as LEOs), which hover a mere 483 miles above our heads, compared to 22,000 miles for geostationary satellites (GEOs).