The idea that we are living in a rational world where events flow smoothly from one stage of development to another, and we can calmy and cooly predict what the future might bring seems increasingly outdated on an almost daily basis.
Whether it is the impacts of climate change and global warning, increasingly disruptive and destructive adverse weather events and natural disasters, infrastructure failures, IT and satellite disruptions or the recent events that we have seen upturn pretty well everything that we thought we knew about the political frameworks that have set the foundations for our social, political, economic and security assumptions over the last seventy years – the whole world seems to have lost its bearings.
It is the middle of such chaos that the question can be reasonably asked: ‘Are we are going through a paradigm change?’.
If we are , then that brings a completely different set of challenges than if we were going through normal evolutionary or even revolutionary change.
In such a context, the issues are not so much ‘What shall we do?’ but more in the lines of ‘Does anyone have an understanding of what is going on?’.
This is the world of Wicked Problems, a concept developed from a seminal paper written by Horst Ritter and Marvin Webber in 1973 that asked exactly that question: How can we model and engage with a risk environment that is fundamentally irrational?
This latest session in the ISRM Global Student Network programme will examine that question from a number of perspectives and take the academic and conceptual ideas discussed in 1973 and out them squarely in the context of the challenges that we are facing in 2025.
Students and faculty from all of our academic network institutions are welcome to join us for what will be an hour of exploration and discovery, with the opportunity to add your voice to the discussion.
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