Dealing with threat adaptation: terrorism as a wicked policy problem

Terrorist attacks can be seen as perhaps the ultimate wicked problem. The attacks on the London Underground highlighted the processes around innovation within terrorist attack strategies and the ways in which asymmetrical... [ view full abstract ]

Terrorist attacks can be seen as perhaps the ultimate wicked problem. The attacks on the London Underground highlighted the processes around innovation within terrorist attack strategies and the ways in which asymmetrical conflicts elsewhere have contributed to the ways in which terrorists can become self starters. The subsequent murder of Lee Rigby in London highlighted the shift to a more low-tech approach to causing harm through the use of easily accessible items. The ability of radicalised individuals to find sufficient information from various sources to cause harm was also a key element in the attacks that took place at the Boston Marathon in 2013. The use of pressure cooker bombs was an innovation that was communicated by Al Qaeda through their on-line magazine Inspire. Within certain countries, notably the USA, access to such material is allowed under the terms of the U.S. Constitution and so the dissemination of such innovations is virtually unrestricted. Within the UK and other countries within the European Union, such access is more likely to bring the individual to the attention of the authorities. Ultimately, however, what is clear is that aspiring terrorists no longer need to visit formal training camps to become skilled but can acquire sufficient information from other sources to create weapons (albeit at increased risk to themselves). This shift in tactics away from spectacular events has generated considerable challenges around prevention and mitigation. Terrorism could be seen as the ultimate wicked problem for public management due to the adaptive nature of the principal actors, the improvements in communication and data transfer, and the learning that has been achieved in other conflict zones (and disseminated to interested parties). This paper is concerned with the challenges that terrorism generates for public management. It begins by considering the processes by which individuals can by-pass multiple layers of organisational controls in order to cause harm to the organisation and the requirements for mitigation that this imposes on public sector organisations. The paper begins by grounding the risks that are generated by home grown terrorists and insider threats within the wider literatures on human error, crisis incubation, and risk management as a means of contextualising a theoretical framework for considering the vulnerabilities associated with human agents who engage in hostile acts, the implications that this has for organisational controls and defences within the public sector, and the potential that this has to generate a wider crisis for the organisation.