“Employee engagement is a wicked problem”
Yves Vekemans, Co-Founder Bravos!

Yves Vekemans, the Co-Founder of the Bravos Awards, calls employee engagement "a wicked problem." That is the right word for it, and it matters more than people realise.

The term comes from a 1973 paper by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, two social planners at Berkeley. They were trying to explain why traditional problem-solving kept failing on certain kinds of challenges. They drew a line between two categories. Tame problems are like mathematics or chess. They have clean definitions, knowable solutions, and a clear stopping point. Wicked problems are different. They have no single formulation. No stopping rule. No way to test a solution as right or wrong, only better or worse. Each attempt at solving one changes the problem itself. And every solution has consequences you cannot fully predict.

Climate. Education reform. Poverty. Public health. These are textbook wicked problems.

So is employee engagement.

The reason this matters is practical. Most engagement programmes try to solve a wicked problem with tame tools. Run a survey. Score it. Build a programme. Re-run the survey. If the score moves, declare success. If it does not, change the programme. This is treating a wicked problem like a tame one. The two demand different methods.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts global engagement at 20%, down 2 points from the year before. Manager engagement fell 5 points in a single year, the steepest drop in over a decade. They estimate the cost to the world economy at $10 trillion in lost productivity. After two decades of serious investment in engagement work, the trend is going the wrong way. Wicked problems do that. They don't yield to programmes.

How I approach wicked problems

I have spent 25 years in environments where problems did not have clean solutions. 16 years flying fast jets in the RAF. 12 years running large operations across the Gulf. Across both, the work was the same. Make progress when prediction is impossible and the answer is not visible from where you stand.

The method I use has 3 steps.

Zoom out. Before anything else, get clear on what good actually looks like for your situation. Not in general. Not what someone else thinks engagement means. What does it enable for YOUR business that is not happening now? Until that picture is real, nothing downstream will work.

Next event. Pick one move. Not the whole plan. Not the final answer. The next thing you can actually do that takes you toward what good looks like.

Commit. Decide whether you can live with it going wrong. Name the worst case out loud. If you cannot accept it, pick a different move. Then act.

Then repeat the loop. Adjust as the picture changes. That is how you make progress through a wicked problem.

So what does this look like for engagement?

Start with zoom out. Stop measuring engagement as if it is the destination. Engagement is the floor your business is built on. The destination is what sits on top of it. Faster decisions. Better customer service. Lower attrition. Sharper thinking in meetings. Pick what engagement is meant to enable for your specific organisation. Then you have something real to aim at.

This is where most programmes fail. Nobody asked what they were for.

There is a useful parallel in another concept that has been similarly co-opted. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard researcher who coined the term "psychological safety," has spent years clarifying her own work. In The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2019), she defines it as a climate where people can give candid feedback, admit mistakes, and learn from each other without interpersonal fear.

The idea has been so widely misread as "create comfort" that Edmondson now spends as much time clarifying what it isn't as defining what it is. Treat psychological safety as comfort and you get a team where everyone is pleasant and nothing important gets said.

Engagement has the same shape. Treat it as the end goal and you get programmes that chase a score. Treat it as the floor that enables harder, more useful work, and you get a different conversation entirely.

Then the next event. What is the first move? It is rarely a survey. It is rarely a vendor selection. It is a conversation with your leadership team about what good would actually look like for your business. One hour, asked properly, is worth more than a quarter of programme planning. If the leadership team cannot agree on what engagement is meant to enable, no programme will fix it.

Then the commit. Most CEOs and owners I work with get stuck here. They ask: what's the cost?

The real cost of this work is leadership attention. It is the scarcest resource in any business. Programmes, surveys, and platforms are small line items by comparison.

Here is the part worth sitting with.

If your team is disengaged today, you are already spending leadership attention on the consequences. Performance conversations that go nowhere. HR cases. Customer complaints rooted in service breakdowns. Hiring rounds because the best people are leaving first. Meetings about morale.

The attention is already going somewhere. Engaging intentionally doesn't add to the load. It redirects the same attention from symptoms to causes.

The tolerable worst case of committing for a year is misallocated leadership attention for 12 months. Real, but bounded.

The worst case of not engaging is the same problems compounding. Disengagement quietly erodes performance, then visibly. By the time it is a board-level issue, the cost is multiples higher.

The downside for one is bounded; for the other it compounds. Once you see it that way, the decision becomes obvious.

Wicked problems do not get solved. They get approached. Honestly, methodically, one move at a time.

Engagement is the floor your business is built on. Get clear on what is meant to sit on top of it for your specific situation. Pick one move. Commit to a tolerable worst case. Repeat.

That is how you approach a wicked problem.

Paul Littlejohn is a former RAF fast-jet pilot and operations executive based in Dubai. He is an adjunct faculty at Hult International Business School and a coach in the Bravos ecosystem.

Sources cited:

• Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.

• Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report.

• Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. John Wiley & Sons.