| Creating Designing interagency responses to wicked problems: A viable system model board game
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Abstract
Government agencies struggle to address wicked problems because they are open-ended, highly inter-
dependent issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. While both
quantitative modelling and qualitative problem structuring methodologies have been used to support in-
teragency decision making in the past, co-designing an effective interagency organization to collabora-
tively tackle wicked problems is more challenging. Few approaches have been developed to enable such
efforts. This paper explains how the viable system model (VSM) was implemented through a board game,
which was employed to co-design an interagency meta-organization that would be capable of more ef-
fectively collaborating to jointly address a wicked problem: international organized drug crime and its
interface with local gangs in Chicago, USA. The board game was developed to make the VSM easier for
the participants to learn, given that the cybernetic language and engineering-influenced diagrams in the
original literature can be off-putting to leaders and managers. The board game was used as the final stage
of a multi-method, systemic approach, which involved boundary critique and problem structuring as well
as deployment of the VSM. The research findings indicate that the VSM board game, used as part of a
larger mixed-methods systemic intervention, contributes to building trust in the value of systems think-
ing amongst the participants, and sets up a rich context for collaboration on multi-agency co-design. The
game therefore offers significant promise as part of the co-design of interagency responses to wicked
problems because it creates an embodied process for stakeholders to learn about the VSM. It also re-
duces the work involved in this learning. Thus, the game enables an effective appropriation of the VSM
language and criteria.
