| Sumario: | In today's turbulent times, it is becoming a strategic necessity to learn how to solve the right problems. Continuing to seek solutions to “tame problems” when those problems are really “messes” or “wicked problems,” such as nuclear power, is potentially catastrophic and therefore fundamentally irresponsible. Strategies for solving tame problems are qualitatively different from strategies appropriate for messes. Messes are puzzles, which must be sorted out, not solved. Moreover, the processes of solving and sorting differ qualitatively from strategies for dissolving the barriers to consensus implicit in wicked problems. There is a great danger that by solving the wrong problems, the tools for solving the right problems are undermined. The controversies over the use of nuclear power in America may indicate a paradigm of problem solving to come.
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