Super-Wicked Problems and Rhizomatic Thinking
'Aha' moment!
The so-called super wicked problems describe situations whose complexity, unpredictability, and self-reference make it impossible to define clear or linear solutions. These are problems that have no identifiable beginning, no stable form, and, to make matters worse, given the modern need and demand for resolution, the ‘solvers’ themselves are implicated in perpetuating the problem. They are simultaneously cause, effect, and symptom, supporting the crises and ongoing collapse. Like ecological collapse, systemic social injustice, and planetary extraction, they are not problems that can be solved, but situations that are lived, felt, and experienced through implication.
In this sense, super wicked problems are related to rhizomatic thinking (Deleuze & Guattari), as both reject hierarchies and centralities. Like a rhizome or mycelium, these problems spread laterally, multiplying connections, creating detours, bifurcations, and unexpected recombinations. They do not have a single trunk or a predictable path. They are composed of multiple inputs and outputs, contradictory affects, and the illogical logics of the living world. While working for years with and through rhizomatic thinking, this connection with wicked problems only became evident recently, and it struck a visceral chord. It was one of those 'Aha' moments where I could discern the shared reality of the elusive hyper-problems and the complex, decentralised, rhizomatic thinking. What follows is a thinking with, sensing through this recently discovered affinity.
To think about perverse problems with rhizomatic lenses is to abandon the fantasy of the ‘single cause’ or the ‘definitive solution.’ It is to accept that we are always already inside, involved, entangled. It is to understand that the problem is not something to be mastered from a distance, but a relationship in which we are affectively, historically, and materially implicated. On this tangle, one does not navigate with colonial maps, but rather by underground affinities, by listening to the signs of the soil, and by following spiral narratives. Here, the practice is not one of resolution, but of collective dissolution, of composting, of small insurgencies that care without controlling, listening without simplifying.
As rhizomatic thinking proposes, super-wicked problems call for an ethics of relationship, not a clean cut, but a patient cultivation of the tangle. They call for the courage to be with the problem, as Donna Haraway invites us, and not to flee, remedy, or simplify it. Perhaps, more than solving, the invitation is to inhabit the problem following Vanessa Andreotti’s praxis, with tenderness and ferocity, like someone learning to breathe in the mycelium.
As bell hooks reminds us in Teaching Critical Thinking, thinking critically is not an intellectual luxury, but a practice of radical care, for oneself, for others, for the world. She states that critical thinking begins with the ability to listen with presence, to make space for complexity without reducing it. In times of multiple emergencies and contested truths, hooks offers us a pedagogy of rooting, a loving and undisciplined practice that does not separate knowing from feeling, theory from the body, or intellect from imagination. Inhabiting the problem, then, is also an educational gesture, a praxis, an experiential learning that does not fear paradox, but welcomes it as part of the fertile field where other forms of life and thought can emerge.
Linear Approach vs. Rhizomatic Approach to Problems
Please note that the goal is not to demonise the linear approach, but to decentralise it as the only valid model of thought and action. As Val Plumwood puts it, we are in the fertile binary realm and not using hierarchical, dualistic lenses. And yes, the rhizomatic approach echoes indigenous paradigms of complex relations.
On the Nature of the problem
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Simple or complicated, with defined cause and effect.
Rhizomatic Approach - Complex, tangled, relational, and unstable.
Entry point
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - A central, fixed point; ‘the problem’ is identified.
Rhizomatic Approach - Multiple entries and exits; there is no centre.
Objective
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Solve, eliminate, and achieve a clear and defined end.
Rhizomatic Approach - Inhabit, listen, metabolise responsibly.
Epistemology
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Based on control, measurement, and efficiency.
Rhizomatic Approach - Based on relationship, sensitivity, and multiplicity.
Expected action
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Quick intervention, correction, “solution”.
Rhizomatic Approach - Co-presence, prolonged listening, slow transformation.
Relational stance
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - External observer, expert who ‘knows’.
Rhizomatic Approach - Co-involved, engaged, continuous learner.
Time
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Urgency and immediacy.
Rhizomatic Approach - Longevity, organic rhythm, time of the earth.
Predominant affect
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Anxiety to fix or dominate.
Rhizomatic Approach - Curiosity, humility, fertile discomfort.
Pedagogical examples
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Action plan, diagnosis, goals and indicators.
Rhizomatic Approach - Living map, multivocal narratives, ecological metaphors.
Example of a metaphor
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Direct irrigation channel.
Rhizomatic Approach - Expanding and mutating mycelium.
Dominant practice
Linear Approach (Modern/Colonial) - Do something about the problem, fix it! Now!
Rhizomatic Approach - Be with the problem (Haraway), generate collective practices.
Emergency – Crisis or Bud?
We recall that the word emergency lives in a field of dissent. It has been exiled and colonised by modernity as a synonym for urgency, alarm, and crisis. A call for quick responses, immediate solutions, and operational constraints. Of course, modernity identifies itself with a perpetual sense of crisis and urgency, paradoxically ignoring the real crises, for it has long since collapsed its affective structures, the ones that would sustain “being with.”
At its deepest root, emergere in Latin means ‘to come out’, ‘to surface’. Something that sprouts, that reveals itself, that demands presence rather than enactment.
When we think of the super-wicked problems that cannot be solved, the logic of urgency tends to trample and shame the time of feeling, metabolising, and listening to what is being born. In a rhizomatic praxis, we reclaim the other meaning of the word 'emergency,' not as an alarm, but as co-emergence, a dance between fear and fertile ground. The difference between extinguishing the symptom or listening to what it brings may be the difference between repetition or regeneration. Rhizomatic thinking also helps us, by not seeking to resolve what emerges in a linear way, but by rooting ourselves in the tangle, without denying the discomfort. Not looking away. Co-emerging is learning to inhabit the paradox that something can be a crisis and a sprout at the same time.
References
Andreotti, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
hooks, b. (2010). Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York, NY: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Author in deviation from recognition. Faithful to confusion. Responsible for incoherence. And proudly dirty with attempts. This text includes contributions from an artificial intelligence, ACT, in the formulation of the list “Linear Approach vs. Rhizomatic Approach to Problems.” Sitting with the utmost discomfort of having been socialised (like almost all of us) in a world where image is currency, authority is built on distinction, and where authorial purity is a seal of legitimacy (although everything is always co-creation). Holding the complicity of the massive energetic and material extraction (in which all online stuff participates, along with our home kettles and most of modern life). Sitting with the risk of being associated with AI, I will be considered a lesser author, impure, manipulated, or even complicit in processes that facilitate the advance of fascism. Long exhale.
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Sofia, how do we encultured and encourage rhizomatic thinking in our networks? The push back to remain linear and simplistic is so high. Every week feels like another week of frustrating encounters.