Managing uncertainty: Innovation as a tool to address complex problems

We live in complex times in which the problems we face challen- ge traditional solutions. The triple crisis we face, environmental, health, and economic has transformed old problems and created new ones, demanding new solutions. After decades immersed in a paradigm based on the certainty of progress, today we again refer to the future as uncertain.

However, uncertainty is not something new. Public problems have become increasingly complex for decades. Its causes have become increasingly more difficult to identify and define, and neither clear responses nor clear solutions exist to address them. Citizens’ safety, urban segregation, obesity, and global warming are all public problems which lack effective solutions (Torfing & Triantafillo, 2016).

In the education sector, for example, the increasing complexity can be observed in relation to enrollment coverage at the primary and secondary education levels. During the second half of the 20th century the challenge of many countries faced had to do with achieving universal coverage of their school system. By the mid-1970s, Chile managed to do so at primary level (PNUD, 2017), and in the early 2000s, the coverage of secondary edu- cation reached 93% (SITEAL, 2020). This was accomplished through efforts focused on increased spending in the sector, higher teacher salaries, creation of the full school day, curricular reform, and the development of programs to improve the edu- cational opportunities in the most disadvantaged communities and institutions (OECD, 2017a).