The ill-structured problems that follow are taken from illustrations published in the journal Policy Analysis (now the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management) under the title "Department of Unintended Consequences!"
For several thousand years, Egyptian agriculture depended on the fertilizing sediment deposited by the flood of the Nile. No longer, however. Due to expensive modern technology intended to improve the age-old lot of the peasant, Egypt's fields must be artificially fertilized. John Gall, writing in the New York Times Magazine (December 26, 1976), reports that the Nile sediment is now deposited in the Aswan Dam's Lake Nasser. Much of the dam's electrical output is used to supply enormous amounts of electricity to new fertilizer plants made necessary by the construction of the dam.
University of Illinois ecologists can explain how certain harmful field mice spread from their native regions into areas where they had never before been found. They are using the new, limited-access, cross-country highways, which turn out to be easy escape routes with few barriers. Older highways and roads, as well as railroad rights-of-way, run into towns and villages every few miles and effectively deter mice migration. The Illinois group found that before interstate highways ran through central Illinois, one type of mouse was limited to a single county. But in six years of superhighways the four-inch-long creatures have spread sixty miles south through the center of the state. The ecologists are concerned lest the mice, a species that loves to chew on trees, become a threat in central and southern counties where apple orchards abound ( Wall Street Journal, December 1, 1977).
Edward J. Moody ... argues persuasively that worship of Satan has the effect of normalizing abnormal people. Thus, to "keep secret" from ordinary people their satanic power and existence, such persons are urged to behave as straight as possible. The effect, of course, is more effective social relations-the goal for which Satan's name has been invoked in the first place! (R E. Hammond, "Review of Religious Movements in Contemporary America," Science, May 2, 1975, p. 442).
Residents of San Francisco's North Beach areas must now pay $10 for the privilege of parking in their own neighborhood. A residential parking plan was recently implemented to prevent commuters from using the area as a daytime parking lot. But according to a story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian(March 14, 1978), the plan has in no way improved the residential parking situation. Numbers of commuters from outlying districts of the city have simply been changing their car registrations to North Beach addresses. A North Beach resident-now $10 poorer-still spends a lot of time driving around the block.
Choose one of these problems and write a short essay on how classification analysis, hierarchy analysis, and synectics might be used to structure this problem.