The problem with solutions

Associate Professor Naomi Barnes, QUT School of Education

Every crisis creates pressure for action. Whether the issue is housing affordability, cost of living, artificial intelligence, social cohesion, climate adaption or something else, public expectations demand policy leadership acts. People want their leaders to clearly identify the problem and announce a solution. There is an innate desire for stability that assumes a carefully and logically crafted policy will make a significant difference to uncertainty.

Unfortunately, the challenges of our time rarely fit this model.

We are increasingly confronted with what academics and commentators describe as a polycrisis or permacrisis. This is a condition where multiple social, economic, political and environmental pressures overlap and interact. Problems cannot be isolated and surgically removed. The outcome of such action is sometimes worse than the original crisis. Because crises are interconnected the consequences are difficult to predict, the decisions are under pressure from competing values. Basically, policy work in times of crisis can draw on very little in the way of clear-cut answers.

The future of governing must include policy leadership; decision making that demonstrates a capability for exercising judgement, not simply applying technical solutions from a limited repertoire of processes.

Until now, the belief that more information will lead to better judgements has dominated how decisions are made about social challenges. It makes sense – gather the evidence, identify the best practice through data about what works and what does not, and apply the solution. This approach has achieved enormous progress and evidence-informed policy making remains essential.

Current challenges, however, are revealing the limits of these technical approaches and the quality of the evidence informing policy.

To do this is to govern from a distance. The further policy actors are removed from the everyday realities of a crisis, the more likely they see abstract categories for intervention. What looks like a literacy crisis, an attendance crisis or a productivity crisis from afar may look very different to the communities living it. Observing a phenomenon is very different from understanding it.

Besides, no amount of information, no matter how valuable, can remove the need for judgement.

Best practice can tell us what worked well before. It cannot tell us what should be done when circumstances are unprecedented, values are in conflict or futures remain uncertain. A policy that succeeds in one community may not succeed in another. A solution designed for one problem may create unintended consequences elsewhere.

The task of contemporary policy makers is recognising the limits of expertise, not abandoning it.

Ancient philosophers described this capacity as phronesis, or practical wisdom: the ability to make sound judgements when rules alone are insufficient. It involves understanding context, weighing competing considerations and acting responsibly when there is no perfect answer.

At a time when public policy is focused on artificial intelligence, this may seem old-fashioned. But the central problem facing democratic societies has changed very little. Technologies of governance come and go. New systems promise greater efficiencies and more accurate predictions with better data. But they cannot determine what societies value, what trade-offs are acceptable or what responsibility we owe each other.

These decisions are human.

The Escher cube (or impossible cube), depicted in the illustration by QUT Bachelor of Design graduate Lucy Schramm, is a metaphor for how certain problems may appear simple at first glance (a straightforward cube, as depicted on the left), then impossible upon closer inspection (the impossible cube in the centre), then understood in their complexity when observed from a new perspective (the question marks emerging from the cubes on the right).

Technology is reshaping how we live and work. At the same time, culture, ethics and communities are shaping how technology evolves. The biggest challenges of our time sit where these forces meet.

The new Bachelor of Arts at QUT is designed for that intersection. As a university of technology, QUT brings a distinctive perspective to the humanities, combining critical thinking with digital capability, research expertise with real-world application, and creative insight with industry awareness.

Study public and social policy to shape fairer communities and influence decisions across government, NGOs and social services with the Bachelor of Arts (Public and Social Policy).