Charities and other for-good organisations choose to tackle the wicked problems of our world because no one else can. Wicked problems are complex and interconnected social problems that defy a predefined solution. They are problems that require continual development of solutions that behave like Public Goods, which means they are not viable to be provided by the market. And they are problems that mostly affect the marginalised people in our society, which means the state does not tackle them as they do not affect the median voter. Charities tackle wicked problems through offering services that alleviate some the consequences of the problems and through affecting changes in the systems that cause wicked problems.
Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber were urban planners at the University of Berkley in California in the 1973 when they wrote an article called: “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”. In it they introduced what they called 'wicked problems'; problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise. Rittel and Webber said that wicked problems have 10 important characteristics:
Why should an almost fifty year old idea about urban planning be relevant to charities and the causes and problems they tackle? Well, the idea didn't stay with urban planning.
By 2007, 'wicked problems' had more proponents and a different name. Robert Horn, an American political scientist, called the phenomenon a "Social Mess" and described it as a "set of interrelated problems and other messes. Complexity—systems of systems—is among the factors that makes Social Messes so resistant to analysis and, more importantly, to resolution." According to Horn, the defining characteristics of a social mess are: