Authenticity statement: This post has been drafted by Claude from the What If manifesto and our own publications. It was then reviewed and edited by Ana and Thomas, in turns. It also comes with a list of references for your further summer reading and delectation.
Crises used to take turns. You handled one, caught your breath, then faced the next. That is no longer how it works. Climate, conflict, inequality, and the unknown consequences of artificial intelligence now arrive together and feed each other. Just recently, according to @Anupma Mishra on LinkedIn, German agency Mashup Communications got in the hot waters of AI summaries for exactly the opposite of what they were doing: their own campaigns about toxic workplace cultures have been taken as proxy for their OWN. Call that unintended consequences! And this is exactly what Adam Tooze (yes, we mentioned him before) calls the polycrisis — many crises interlocking and amplifying each other rather than lining up politely (and boy, we have a ton of such recent examples!).
The takeaway here is that the centre of the polycrisis is radical uncertainty and NOT risk. Risk can be calculated: you know the possible outcomes and roughly how likely each one is, whereas we’re facing more and more situations that are genuinely open, where the future will not hold still long enough to be planned against. This is the condition in which every act of communication now happens. Not the exception. The ground itself. The economist Frank H. Knight understood and wrote about this more than 100 years ago in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921). Mainstream economics chose not to follow his logic, and the rest is history and avoidable crises.
A mistake about categories
That’s the reason why our manifesto opens with the kind of problems we’re facing on purpose, because the mistake it wants to name is a mistake about categories.
In 1973, the planning theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber drew a line between two sorts of problem.
Tame problems are the ones that yield to standard procedures — clear objectives, measurable steps, a right answer you can check.
Wicked problems are complex, interconnected, and open-ended; they resist definition and have no single correct solution.
Later writers added a third tier: super wicked problems, like climate change and pandemics, which outrun even the organisations meant to handle them (Levin and colleagues; Wexler and Oberlander, 2020).
There is nothing wrong with tame methods on tame problems. Standard operating procedures, SMART objectives, and KPIs are exactly right for most day-to-day work, and that is where most practice legitimately lives. The error that keeps popping up in strategic communication and measurement circles is applying tame means to wicked problems. That does not just fail. It fails while looking managed, which is worse: a dashboard full of green while the actual problem drifts. It manufactures a false sense of security.
You can watch this happen in corporate climate work.
Net-zero pledges, carbon dashboards, and offset purchases are tame instruments — countable, reportable, reassuring. But a 2023 investigation into the world’s leading rainforest carbon-offset standard concluded that the large majority of the credits it examined were likely “phantom,” representing no real emissions cut (the certifier disputed the finding). Climate is a super wicked problem; it was met with a compliance toolkit; the toolkit produced tidy reports and a false sense of progress while emissions kept rising. That is the category error in one industry.
Where this comes from
This framing is not new to the manifesto; it is the spine of our work. The wicked/tame distinction has anchored our argument since the 2023 chapter Public Relations as Responsible Persuasion and the origin paper of the What If framework, Public relations, post-truth, and grand challenges (Stoeckle & Adi, 2023). Perhaps our sharpest treatment of the difference between manageable turbulence and genuine wickedness — the distinction between VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, but ultimately fact-based and manageable) and true wicked problems (socially incommensurable, no shared measure of success) — this is featured in our 2025 chapter on generative AI as a wicked problem (by the way, if you can’t find these but you want to read them and/or review them, get in touch!).
The point of separating these categories carefully is practical. If you misread a wicked problem as a tame one, you reach for the wrong tools and mistake activity for progress (say, you see carbon offsets are something to be managed and reported on without questioning thoroughly the question, the problem, the process or its sponsors and beneficiaries).
The reorientation
Organised persuasive communication (that’s Ana’s favorite term - but public relations and corporate communications, by whatever name) meets this moment still carrying commitments built for firmer ground. Excellence frameworks that assume the world can be managed to plan. Measurement designed mainly to justify a seat at the table (because, as Jim Macnamara put it often, comms are still seen as a cost in organisations that need to justify their existence and worth). And a long, studied silence about the field’s own uneasy relationship with persuasion.
Our manifesto is a reorientation away from all three:
toward responsibility and accountability at every level of the work;
toward the persuasion and AI literacies the work now demands (that both within the industry and beyond); and
toward an honest account of what this field is actually for in society, beyond the immediate needs of any one organisation (we’ve mused on that a few times and it gets thorny - on freedom of speech, the right to persuade, on regulation/certification - but that conversation must go on!).
What would “more than tame” look like? Not a better dashboard, but methods matched to the scope of the problem — scenario work that plans with uncertainty rather than against it, and deliberative formats that widen who gets to set direction.
When France and Ireland faced climate as a genuinely wicked problem, they did not reach for another compliance toolkit; they convened citizens’ assemblies to deliberate the trade-offs in public. Ireland called it the Irish Climate Assembly and France organized the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat. Still with a hint to deliberation, Martin Riecken calls for crisis comms to move away from approval chains to mandates (and if he doens’t know what he’s speaking of, we don’t know who does!).
That is the metamodern instinct this manifesto will keep returning to: hold the complexity, name it, resist the false fix, and move anyway.
It begins where an honest reorientation has to begin — not with a fix, but with the tensions that cannot be resolved, only held. That is the subject of the next post.
If this was useful, forward it to one person who’d get something from it.
References
Adi, A., & Stoeckle, T. (2023). Public relations as responsible persuasion: Activism and social change. In D. Pompper, K. R. Place, & C. K. Weaver (Eds.), The Routledge companion to public relations (pp. 302–314). Routledge.
Greenfield, P. (2023, January 18). Revealed: More than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows. The Guardian. (Investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial; the certifier, Verra, disputed the findings.)
Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2012). Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems. Policy Sciences, 45(2), 123–152.
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
Stoeckle, T., & Adi, A. (2023). Public relations, post-truth, and grand challenges: Better research toward social value. Organicom, 20(42), 86–102.
Stoeckle, T., & Adi, A. (2025). Strategic communication and generative AI: Creating or solving wicked problems? In Handbook of innovations in strategic communication (pp. 264–273). Edward Elgar.
Tooze, A. (2022, October 28). Welcome to the world of the polycrisis. Financial Times.
Wexler, M. N., & Oberlander, J. (2020). Public leadership and the wicked problem continuum. International Journal of Public Leadership, 16(4), 359–373.