Good management is hard, but someone has to do it (and here are some suggestions)

This 2nd edition of Journal of Management and Organisation (JMO) for 2018 offers a range of papers that present, tackle or even offer solutions to some of the difficult problems that challenge the supposedly ‘soft’ discipline of management. Although we are well acquainted with terms such as ‘turbulence’ and living in a ‘dynamic work environment’, the reality is that managers are increasingly operating in a world where they are no longer expected to simply resolve previously experienced problems. Managers of the 21st Century are now expected to innovate to solve unexpected and completely new problems. As the papers in this edition of JMO suggest, many of these problems are not actually new – the fact is that management is simply having to face problems that once could be hidden or even ignored. Each paper presented here will thus bring into the light a problem, from the complicated but perhaps low uncertainty (tame) to the critical problems when difficult or important decisions must be made. There are even some that may fit that black box category of being a ‘wicked problem’. Problem-solving skills are at the heart of much of what we teach in management education at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It was Rittel and Webber (1973) who suggested that problems could be conceptualised, through reference to the notions of certainty and complexity, as either tame, crisis or wicked. Tame problems are thus ones in which both the causes and solutions are already known, so they present a limited uncertainty. Although they may be complex, they can be resolved. This is the predictable type of problem-solving many of us deal with almost exclusively in teaching our management courses, because they are problems that are amenable to command and control solutions of management. The second type of problems, crisis problems, are also ones postgraduate students, in particular, may be taught about as part of their education. These are time pressured, they require urgent action and they may have serious consequences. Although they are often on a larger scale than tame problems, they are still highly amenable to management solutions (Chilingerian & Savage, 2005). In contrast, wicked problems are complex, often intractable and always without an obvious solution. These are the problems that are resistant to traditional management solutions. In addition to being intractable and/or novel, they are also often embedded in contradictory and volatile environments (Kolko, 2012). The term ‘wicked’ is not because they are ‘bad’ or even ‘evil’, but it is because they present problems of a darker or unsolvable nature (West Churchman, 1967). Within the organisational context, these are often social problems or ones that arise as the product of complex systems in which the solutions to one problem provide no insight into another or in which solutions are at best partial, or may even create further problems (Juzwishin & Bond, 2012). This means that wicked problems require multiple partial solutions. An important corollary that many researchers add is that solving critical and wicked problems needs more than just management; it needs ‘good’ management and leadership (Hutchinson et al, 2015). With this background in mind, we begin this edition of JMO with a paper that presents a problem that may be close to home for many readers of this journal, the notion of the fear of academic failure. This is not a lightweight problem, as the fear of failure is often compounded by being a problem that no one speaks of. It is this ‘hidden’ and undiscussed nature of failure that makes it even stronger. What is perhaps most important is that it is also a fear that is an increasing feature of working (let alone academic) life. It is for this reason that this first paper is a specially invited one from Marissa Edwards and noted academic luminary Professor Neal Ashkanasy. Their paper confronts the issue head-on with the apt