Why Some Problems Refuse to Be Solved: Wicked Problems
Why does fixing one thing so often just move the problem somewhere else? Why does a solution that looks obvious from the outside turn out to be so hard to land? And why do the people closest to a problem sometimes take years just to agree on what the problem actually is?
Questions like these usually mean you're not looking at an ordinary problem. You're looking at what's called a wicked problem, and there's a story from Ri-Bhoi district in Meghalaya that shows what that actually means better than any definition could.
A Thread That Kept Running Out
Kong Lyndah Lamare grew up spinning Eri silk the way her mother had, by hand, on a wooden spindle called a takli. It was slow work, hard on the hands, and around 2012 she stopped. Not because she'd lost the skill. Because there was nowhere to sell what she made.
She wasn't alone. Across the villages of Ri-Bhoi, women had the raw material, the knowledge, and the labour to produce Eri silk. What they didn't have was a market. Local cocoons were sold raw and cheap to traders from Assam, who processed them into yarn and sold that yarn back to the same communities at a premium. A day of spinning on the takli earned, at most, fifty rupees.
When the SELCO Foundation began looking at livelihoods in the region, they didn't arrive with a solution. They spent close to two years just understanding how people actually lived, and one detail changed everything: families were rearing silkworms mainly to eat the pupae, a household food source. The silk fibre was a byproduct, not the point. Any fix aimed only at spinning would have missed what the household valued most.
Working with the MOSONiE Socio-Economic Foundation, a small team of women who had been building trust in these villages since 2015, SELCO eventually landed on a solar-powered spinning machine, adapted specifically for Eri silk. It let women spin far more than the takli could manage, and because it ran on solar power, it didn't depend on a grid that failed constantly during the monsoon.
That should be where the story ends. It doesn’t.
Solving One Thing Reveals The Next
Once the machines arrived, productivity went up. But now there was more yarn than the local market could absorb. So a weaver named Kong Iaishah built a brand, Eri Weave, to carry the fabric further afield. The brand found real traction, and then it found a national one, an appearance on Shark Tank sent monthly sales from under a lakh and a half to thirty or forty lakh rupees within months.
That success created a new bottleneck. There wasn't enough raw cocoon being reared to keep up with demand for finished fabric. The constraint had moved upstream, from spinning to the very start of the chain.
Nobody planned this sequence. There was no theory of change written in 2016 that predicted a Shark Tank appearance or a cocoon shortage five years later. What kept the work moving was something simpler: a habit of asking what the real problem actually was, right now, and being willing to act on the honest answer instead of the one that had been planned for.
This is What a Wicked Problem Looks Like
The designer and theorist Horst Rittel gave this kind of problem a name in the 1970s: wicked, not because it's evil, but because it resists being solved the way an engineering problem gets solved. A wicked problem doesn't have one agreed definition; ask Lyndah, Iaishah, and SELCO what the problem was, and each would have described it slightly differently at different points, and each would have been right. It doesn't have a finish line; every fix here just uncovered the next constraint. And it doesn't hold still long enough for a single, static plan to survive contact with it.
This is why the SELCO-MOSONiE story is hard to summarise as one big win. There wasn't a single win. There was a sequence: drudgery, then a market gap, then a supply shortage, each one only visible once the last one had actually been solved.
What Made it Possible to Keep Working With
A few things about how SELCO and MOSONiE operated are worth pulling out, not as a checklist to follow, but because they explain why this particular tangle didn't just collapse under its own complexity.
They spent real time understanding the system before touching it, which is how they caught the detail about pupae being food first, silk second, a detail that could have sunk the whole intervention if missed. They looked for the one place in the chain, yarn production specifically, where a shift would move the rest of the system, rather than spreading effort evenly across cocoon rearing, spinning, and weaving all at once.
They designed around how women's days actually worked instead of asking women to reorganise their lives, which is why the machine could sit in a home and run in the two hours between the school drop-off and lunch. And they built in a way that let control shift outward over time: local technicians trained to maintain machines instead of calling in a specialist from Guwahati, Lyndah growing from a woman practising on someone else's machine into a trainer other women now learn from, MOSONiE choosing to stay a bridge between the community, the bank, and the market rather than becoming the owner of the whole system itself.
None of this made the problem simple. It just made it something people could keep working with, one honest constraint at a time, instead of something that had to be solved perfectly on the first attempt.
This Story is a Part of a Bigger Case Study
What we've told you here is one thread from a much longer piece we're building. Over the past several months, we've been visiting five organisations across our network, Tribal Health Initiative, SELCO Foundation, Mahila Housing Trust, WASSAN, and CInI, to document not what they've achieved, but how they actually work. We're interested in the reasoning behind their decisions, the structure and partnerships they've built, and the judgment calls that never make it into an impact report.
Most of the development sector talks about outcomes. Almost none of it documents the process and that's a real gap. The business world has spent decades building case studies that decode how an organisation actually operates, so other organisations can learn from the thinking, not just the results. We think this sector deserves the same kind of record.
The Eri silk ecosystem you just read about is one of those five. We're tracing SELCO Foundation's full arc in Ri-Bhoi, from the two years of listening before any machine arrived, through the partnership with MOSONiE, to where the ecosystem stands today. This case study, along with the other four, is currently being written and will be up on our website shortly.
Stay tuned!
Try it For Yourself
We've put together a Wicked Problems worksheet to help you map a problem you're working on along two axes: how many people it involves, and how technically complex it is. It's a simple starting point for a question worth sitting with. Where does your problem actually sit? And once you know that, what does it tell you about the kind of solution it needs?
If you'd like a copy of the worksheet, or want to talk through a problem you're wrestling with, write to us at info@centreforsystemspractice.org.
The Centre for Systems Practice is a SELCO Foundation initiative. If this piece was useful, our newsletter goes out every month with one piece of practical thinking from the field.
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