by Joanne Murphy
- 22 October 2026
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Like a lot of people interested in leadership, I spend a lot of my time talking to leaders (and would be leaders) about the need to understand a problem really well. As Einstein was supposed to have said, “if you give me a problem and an hour to solve it, I’ll spend 50 minutes understanding the problem.” This is a pretty good approach and one which centers largely on problem definition, essentially the ideas and understandings that underpin our perceptions of what we see in front of us. There has been some great work done in this area, such as the distinctions between critical, tame, and wicked problems (Grint, 2005), that is helpful in understanding both the problems themselves and our appropriate responses.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in relation to what is one of the most pernicious and difficult challenges of our time, namely how to manage and move away from ongoing and deeply entrenched conflict — much of which is ethno-political in nature. My own work looks at how leaders respond to conflict environments and I’ve explored this in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Basque region, and in the current catastrophe that is the Middle East. I’m interested in political responses obviously, but also organizational and institutional “managing” of dangerous and difficult situations. While many of these conflicts are “hot,” others, such as the 30-year-long “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (NI), have been largely moved from an environment of violence to one of nonviolence. As we know, however, an absence of violence does not necessarily equal the presence of peace.
While NI is held up as an example of successful peace building and its leaders praised for their contribution to those ends, the actual reality is more complex. For anyone paying attention the past few weeks, the often-heralded peace process in Northern Ireland and the power sharing government which it delivered is looking increasingly like it’s on shaky ground. An old dispute — this time around a Protestant parade going through a Catholic area (a shorthand analysis of a complex and centuries old issue) — has convulsed the body politic and spawned a level of public discourse which feels like going back in time. And not in a good way (see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw23dn0xven7o for example).
There are few leaders who can’t (when pushed) identify a dragon problem in their own organization.
All this made me think that perhaps our problem categorization does not fully capture the reality of these wicked, intractable problems in complex contexts. When we think of wicked problems, we are, of course, drawing on significant work which identifies certain societal dilemmas as complex, poorly formulated, boundary-spanning issues, containing multiple stakeholders and a “no stopping rule” with the probability that any outcome is unlikely to satisfy all parties to the problem (Rittel & Webber,1973). This is juxtaposed with Tame problems, which are complicated but known and respond well to effective management, or critical problems, which justify command responses. But it seems that Wicked problems are also problems which have in them “clusters” of issues, concerns, grievances, histories, and challenges that have characteristics of their own.
One of these features is playing out in Northern Ireland at the moment and I have begun to think of it as a Dragon problem. I use that term because, as we know from fairy tales, most of the time the dragon is asleep, with slow wisps of smoke drifting from his snout and his wings folded tightly against its body. They’re pretty harmless asleep and maybe even interesting. But then, once in a while, the dragon wakes and with one roar the whole village is up in flames. So, the temptation with Dragon problems is to tiptoe around them, try not to disturb the fire breathing monster, and hope it doesn’t wake. But of course, that doesn’t deal with the reality of the dragon, and something always occurs in the environment to rouse him. The result can be carnage. We saw it in the Middle East with the Hamas attack on Israel in October of 2023 and we are now seeing a much lesser, but still enormously dangerous iteration, in NI.
The same things happen in all contexts of course — societal and organizational. There are few leaders who can’t (when pushed) identify a dragon problem in their own organization. The only coping mechanism for this is proactive, courageous leadership that addresses the danger before it awakes and combusts all around it. Hard to do when nobody wants to deal with the fire breathing monster in their midst, but necessary. “Whatever you say, say nothing,” wrote Seamus Heaney, the great Irish Poet. This has been the general coping method for Dragon problems. Heaney was talking about the NI Troubles and the way in which individuals, communities, and organizations manage the dynamics and dangers of what he called “neighbourly murder.” But the universal truth of the unspoken and its impact on the reality all around us is never more evident than in these simmering, deadly issues embedded within complex wicked contexts. The challenge of leadership is to surface these issues, to speak the unspeakable and to slay the dragon* before it slays us.
*Apologies to Dragon lovers!
References
Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of “leadership.” Human Relations, 58(11), 1467–1494. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726705061314
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
Joanne Murphy is Chair of Inclusive Leadership at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her research explores leadership, change and organisational development in political volatility, including environments affected by ethno-political conflict. She has worked with a range of organizations including NATO, UNESCO, the John Smith Foundation and the William J. Clinton Leadership Institute. Her fourth book Policing Northern Ireland: Leading through Crisis and Change is due for publication in 2026.
