Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Each educational institution is different. Every clinical setting is unique. Faculty members - clinical, academic, volunteer - are separated by discipline, history, and professional focus. Students begin at different places and learn in different ways. And yet, we focus on the standardization, rigor, and accountability to competencies and curricula in every facet of health professions' education. The search for consistency and control in such a highly variable system leads inevitably to intractable, wicked problems. Wicked problems are ones that cannot be solved using traditional methods. They are different from traditional problems, in that they are 1) defined differently from multiple perspectives, 2) appear differently in each different context, but follow consistent patterns wherever they appear, and 3) can never be completely solved. Problems that persist for educationalists in health professions meet these criteria and can be classified as "wicked" problems. Rather than solutions to wicked problems, practitioners must choose contextualized, iterative, incremental actions to influence their intractable patterns over time.
Highlights
At the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference in Helsinki, Finland in 2017, and Basel, Switzerland in 2018 approximately 150 and 100 health professions educators, respectively, engaged in an emergent dialogue process to address the wicked problems they face in their institutions
This paper outlines the intractable problems they identified, explains the shared nature of these diverse issues in terms of complex adaptive systems, shares the principles and practices that were applied during the session, identifies some of the options for action they developed, and proposes recommendations for future research and practice to expand the use of complex adaptive systems theory and human systems dynamics practice to address wicked problems in health professions education
We explore the connection between the three steps of the Adaptive Action cycle and the characteristics of wicked problems
Summary
Practices that were applied during the session, identifies some of the options for action they developed, and proposes recommendations for future research and practice to expand the use of complex adaptive systems theory and human systems dynamics practice to address wicked problems in health professions education. Given the complex nature of the challenge, a wide range of steps could make a difference in the wicked, complex, problematic pattern By sharing their experiences and observations, groups begin to generate new and innovative options for action. In their experience in the Open Space at AMEE in 2017 and 2018, individual participants saw and committed to new options for action They had stated their wicked problems in similar ways, but because their contexts were so different, their wise actions were diverse. The session served as an experiment and a " wise action" in building adaptive capacity for the complex field of health professions education
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