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Explaining Cynefin for strategy and decision making

August 13, 2015 By Complexity 10 Comments

cynefin in contextI have been teaching the Cynefin framework for a number of years now. Like Dave Snowden i learn as much or more from needing to share it than I do from actually deploying it.  I find myself sharing the framework for three applications: strategy and decision making, leadership and basic understanding of complexity.  Because the framework is both simple to describe and supported by a deep set of theory and practice, it is always a challenge to make my description simple enough to be understood, but full enough to be appreciated.

So I thought I would put out some step-by-step guides based on how I explain Cynefin to clients and in teaching situations.  This is the first one, on using Cynefin to introduce complexity and it’s implications for strategy and decision making.  I would love feedback in the comments, especially if I have used terms that are defined poorly or hard to understand, and also if I have made any leaps in logic that are too large to understand in one bound.  The goal is simplicity and clarity in description.

Cynefin, complexity and decision making.

1. There are two kinds of systems and problems: ordered and unordered.

2. Ordered problems are predictable and knowable, unordered problems are unpredictable and unknowable.  It is important to understand this point deeply, because this is a fundamental distinction that has massive implications.

3. Ordered systems have a reliable causality, that is, causes and effects can be known, and usually display a clear finish line.  Sometimes this causality is obvious to everyone, such as turning a tap to control a flow of water.  Sometimes this causality is only obvious to experts, such as knowing what causes your car engine to start making strange noises.

4. Unordered systems throw up complex problems and chaos.  Complex problems such as poverty and racism, have causality that that only be understood retrospectively, that is by looking back in time, and they have no discernible finish line.  We do a reasonably good job of seeing where it came from, but we can’t look at the current state of a system and predict what will happen next.

5. Chaotic problems are essentially crises in which the causality is so wild, that it doesn’t really matter.  For example, in the middle of a riot, it does you no good to understand causes until you can get to safety.

6. Because ordered systems display predictable outcomes, we can more or less design solutions that have a good chance of working.  We just need to understand the system well enough and enlist the right experts if it’s unclear what to do.  Once we have a solution, it will be transferable from one context to another.  Designing and building a car, for example.

7. Because unordered systems are unpredictable we need to design solutions that are coherent with the context.  For example, addressing the role of stigma in the health care system requires a solution to emerge from the system itself.

8. Complex problems can be addressed by creating many small probes: experiments that tell us about what works and what doesn’t.  When a probe has a good result, we amplify it.  When it has a poor result, we dampen it.  Strategies for amplification and dampening depend on the context, and the problem.

9. In ordered systems, linear solutions with well managed resources and outcomes will produce desired effects.  We can evaluation our results against our intentions and address gaps.

10. In complex systems, we manage attractors and boundaries and see what happens.  An attractor is something that draws the system towards it.  A boundary is something that contains the work.  For example addressing the effects of poverty by creating a micro-enterprise loan program that makes money available for small projects (attractor) and requires that it be paid back by a certain time and in a certain way (boundaries).  Then you allow action to unfold and see what happens.

11.  When you have a solution in an ordered system that works, you can evaluate it, create a process and a training program around it and export it to different contexts.

12.  When you have a solution that works in a complex system, you continue monitor it, adjust it as necessary and extract the heuristics of how it works.  Heuristics are basic experience based, operating principles that can be observed and applied across contexts. For example, “provide access to capital for women” provides a heuristic for addressing poverty based on experience.  Heuristics must be continually refined or dropped depending on the context.

Embracing theory

August 7, 2015 By Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Organization 2 Comments

bookcover

 

This week I have been a part of a series of meetings, gatherings and workshops around the release of a new book on Dialogic Organizational Development.  I contributed a chapter to the book on hosting containers.

Yesterday, the lead authors hosted a day long conference on the themes contained in the book and we delivered some workshops and hosted some dialogue on the emergence of this term and the implications for the field. Today we are at the Academy of Management conference being held in Vancouver where the lead authors, and some of the rest of us, are delivering a professional development workshop.

Over the past few days I’ve been reflecting on relationships between practitioners and academics, especially as it pertains to the development of learning and innovation in this field.  Traditionally, academics are suspicious of practitioners who fly by the seat of their pants, who don’t ground their experience in theory and who tell stories that validate their biases.  Practitioners are traditionally suspicious of academics being stuffy, jargony and inaccessible, too much in the mind and engaged in indulgent personal research projects.  Secretly I think, each has been jealous of the other a bit: academics coveting the freedom of practice and practitioners wanting the legitimacy of academics.

One of the things I like about this new book is that Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak brought together people from both fields to write the book.  Gervase is really clear that the role of researchers in this work is to help practitioners understand why things work.  This is a really welcome invitation as I have been working for a year or more led by Dave Snowden’s exhortation to us in the practitioner field to “understand why things work before you repeat them.”  For practitioners it is important to engage with theory.  If you don’t, you miss out on a tremendous amount of generative material that will make you a better designer and a better practitioner.

I am now interested in bleeding these distinctions between academics and practitioners and I think we both need to do this.  I think we are discovering that these days, practice is the fastest way to advance the field.  In fact we find researchers now trailing along behind practitioners sifting through the mess we leave when we do projects willy nilly, whether well planned or delivered based on a gut instinct.  Our practice evolves quickly because we only need work to be “good enough” in order to use it as a platform for further development.  We publish stories and learning instantaneously on our blogs and face book pages and listervs and twitter feeds.  Once academics get their hands on the data and take the time to analyze it and publish it, the practice field has moved quickly and may have evolved in ways that the academic conversation has been unable to anticipate.

For practitioners though it’s worth pausing from time to to time and working with the people that are trying to tell you what you are doing.  There is a tremendoous body of theory in philosophy, neurology, cognitive science, anthropology, and the natural sciences that is directly applicable to our field.  I find that many practitioners have one or two blind spots or reactions to theory: they dismiss it as too dense to get, they borrow it badly (usually as a metaphor, such as quantum physics being misused to talk about intention and influence) or they dive it.  I have been guilty of these in the past, and these days I’m trying to embrace theory much more deeply and work with researchers who are studying our field including folks like Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles, Elizabeth Hunt and Trevor Maber, just to name a few recent ones.  I invite you to do the same.

What Vimy Ridge says about who we should be.

July 22, 2015 By Uncategorized

My kids approaching the Vimy Monument

My kids approaching the Vimy Monument

I’ve been holidaying in Europe with the family this month – England, France and soon to Estonia.  I haven’t been blogging, just soaking things up and relaxing.

But today the kids and I went to Vimy Ridge and it kind of keeps with the theme of some of the reconciliation posts I made here last month.

It is said that Vimy Ridge was the event that defined the young Nation of Canada, which was only 50 years old when 100,000 of it’s men, women and children (yes many many soldiers were under age) assembled on the slopes of Vimy Ridge and launched the first battle in the Arras Offensive in April 1917, a battle that would lead to the stalemate being broken and the eventual victory for the Allied forces a year and a half later.

Almost 3600 Canadians were killed and another 7000 or so wounded that morning.  That is nothing compared to the losses of 150,000 French and Moroccan forces that tried to take and hold the ridge in the years prior to 1917.  But for Canada, that was and still is, the greatest single loss of life in a day of military action.

Much is made of Vimy, especially these days when Canada’s military role has now fully evolved from peacekeeper to combat again.  Vimy is often evoked to draw on Canadian sentiment to gather support for our military campaigns overseas.  As we approach the 100th anniversary of that battle, I expect the sentiment to be further reinforced, especially by politicians.

But here is the thing.  You simply have to visit Vimy to really understand this: if Vimy defined the kind of nation we are then it is a nuanced and complicated thing.  For our greatest ever battle was not celebrated by a triumphalist monument declaring our greatness (in fact a staue stomping a German helmet was rejected in the design), but rather a huge sombre memorial to the costs of war, and the responsibilities of peace.  There is simply nothing to celebrate at Vimy Ridge.  If you were to read into what Canada is by attending that site you will see the kind of country Canada is: brutal and unrelenting in its pursuit of a military (or colonial) objective, but capable of deep reflection almost immediately afterward.  Perhaps it was because Vimy was not a final victory, but simply a small part of a much much larger effort that the commemoration there is as sombre and reflective as it is.  Or perhaps it was just an acknowledgement that war is a steaming pile of horror often for unclear objectives or far distant motives of power and politics divorced from the sacrifice that actual soldiers suffer.  Our current government parrots this same pattern, championing new military actions, while ignoring the needs of veterans who return from these wars physically and emotionally scarred for life.

The monument itself consists of a number of important figures with names like Sympathy of the Canadians for the Helpless, The Spirit of Sacrifice, The Breaking of the Sword, Canada Bereft and The Mourning Parents.  Inscribed on the eastern side of the monument are the names of Canadian soldiers whose remains were never found.  The monument itself stands at the site of the objective of the battle and for several hundred meters to the west, the ground is still chewed up with craters and trenches, off limits because there is still unexploded ordinance in there, along with the bones of hundreds of human beings, blown to pieces in the battle.  It is a place alive with suffering, terror and death.  There is nothing beautiful about it, except perhaps for the birdsong, or the flock of sheep that graze the craters or the pines trees that lean upward towards the ridge top, appearing out of the corner of ones eye like some many soldiers charging for the top.

It is a place that is deeply moving and powerful and it does say something about the kind of country we can choose to be.  For I wonder if we have ever really enacted the spirit of Vimy Ridge.  Of course we are a country that is a small player in the military world, but when we fight we are ruthless.  But we are also a country whose defining battle resulted in a reflection on our care for the helpless, on the practice of sacrifice, on the breaking of swords, on the deep mourning of what has happened in the name of Canada, and of the care for those who have lost children.  In this way, Vimy says something about our national need to reflect and reconcile our actions with a morality that is lost in violence.  I wonder if we have actually done that.  I wonder if we can see this as an invitation to practice these principles in an ongoing way.  I wonder if in the spirit of Vimy Ridge, if we are living up to the ideals that are emblazoned in that massive marble statue on top of a lonely escarpment in Pas-de-Calais.

 

Practical reconciliation

June 7, 2015 By Uncategorized One Comment

Yesterday I read Taiaiake  Alfred’s provocative essay on reconciliation entitled: “Restitution is the real pathway to justice for indigenous peoples.” This will probably be a tough read for many people who are bought into the mainstream notions of reconciliation: that it’s about a state level response to specific actions without confronting a fundamental shift in the nature of the relationship  The idea of restitution is a powerful one, and today I’ve been thinking about what that means and why it is exactly the kind of call that should drive home the practical expression of reconciliation.  And I’ve been looking for hidden examples of where it is already occuring.

Today we are preparing to welcome our third Indigenous Focus cohort for the Leadership 2020 program.  This is a program that was developed by community service agencies working in child and family services.  The program ran our first cohort with leaders from this sector and they quickly recognized that they needed to train with their colleagues in the Ministry of Children and Family Services.  So we have run 8 cohorts now, seven of which have been blended cohorts with folks in the community and the ministry training together  Three of these cohorts have had an indigenous focus, which is to say that we are focused on the specific issues facing indigenous people and communities.  Participants are from many different backgrounds, ethnicities and communities but they are all working with indigenous children and families.

So that’s the context for this post.

Today my colleague Wedlidi Speck told me a story that fits in with Taiaike’s ideas, that give a clue about indigenous forms of reconciliation and restitution.  Back in the 19th century sometime, there was a massacre on the Central Coast.  Bella Coola warriors came and killed many people from the Kwikwasut’inuxw tribe.  In addition to killing many of the men, they took slaves to use and trade with other tribes. One of these slaves, Caribou Jack as he became known, was returned to the Kwikwasut’inuxw.  When he was freed, he was provided with a Kwikwasut’inuxw canoe that had been stolen and he paddled safely down the coast back to the survivors, where he was taken in and cared for.

What stands out for me in this story was how the people that released him (said to be Tsimshian) returned him freely, but also provided him with his own possessions, in good condition, which he used to get safely home.  There was no guilt in the story (and Taiaiake  writes about why).  But this was as much an act of restitution as anything.  The word in Kwa’kwala used to designate this return is “u’mista,” a word later used to name the cultural centre in Alert Bay.  The word is defined this way:

In earlier days, people were sometimes taken captive by raiding parties. When they returned to their homes, either through payment of ransom or by a raid, they were said to have u’mista. The return of our treasures from distant museums is a form of u’mista.

As a result of this restitution, it became possible for the tribes of the central and north coast to create agreements and relationships together.  Real ones.

In the work we are doing with child and family services workers, we see this happening every day.  The child welfare system is a fraught place for the practice of reconciliation.  At its worst, the system perpetuates colonization, and it is often roundly criticized for the role it plays in continuing the policies that were started in the residential school system.  And that is the story we often get, because criticizing the system and calling for its dismantlement gets a lot of airtime.

But there is a much different story that happens as well.  When it works – and that is largely up to the individual workers that make it work – the system can help restore community and families such that children can return.  The return of a child and the restitution of health and wellness to a family and a community is one practical expression of the kind of thing that Taiaiake  is writing about here.  And the fact that the people we are welcoming to Bowen Island this afternoon are right at the forefront of this work is humbling, whether they are working in family support, mental health, child protection, addictions and youth justice.  To see indigenous and non-indigenous people working together to figure out ways of engaging with better practices, with major systemic shifts and with a strong heart of justice is powerful.  It is an untold story of where restitution and reconciliation is happening every day.  A society that steals children unconsciously is fundamentally unjust, and everyone of these workers who is coming to this learning actively works to address that injustice.  It is not easy and making a mistake is dangerous.  It is not work for the faint of heart, or for those lacking courage.  But it is necessary and when it gets done well it is transformative

This is not perfect, but it has informed my views of reconciliation and helps me to see ways in which Taiaiake ‘s essay calls us to a deeper ground of engagement and personal involvement with the project of restitution in service of justice.  It’s a deep honour to see these folks struggle with it and it puts and invitation out to others.  How do you engage in the call for restitution?  How can you support the work that others are doing and where can you personally do that work too, at whatever level?

 

Reconciliation: a practical guide for non-indigenous people

June 2, 2015 By First Nations 6 Comments

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported out this week. It has finished its work, listening to the stories of the survivors of Indian residential schools, promoting dialogue and healing and urging Canadians to understand what is implied by reconciliation.

For many Canadians, the TRC’s work will receive a minimal passing notice in their day. They will have heard of it, they will probably know something of the history of residential schools, but they are unlikely to know how the legacy of residential schools plays out in contemporary society. Most non-indigenous people think it was “all in the past.” For most non-indigenous Canadians, residential schools was something that happened to others, who suffered injustice at the hands of people who are long dead.

So if you are a non-indigenous person, what does reconciliation mean to you? I think it’s important to understand that Canada was founded on two parallel strategies: brute force colonization and agreements meant to uphold the “honour of the Crown.” It’s kind of crazy. If you are an indigenous person you’re never quite sure if Canadian society is here to live up to its obligations or smash you in the face, because since the very beginning to the present day, one hand is offered in peace and the other is a fist.

And here’s what you need to understand if you are a non-indigenous person. If you are a Canadian, you are a treaty beneficiary, end of story. No matter if your family arrived in 1532 or last Tuesday. If you have Canadian citizenship you personally benefit from the treaty relationships that, over time, have made it possible for Canadians to own land, to develop resources, to use water, to hike in the forest, to grow things and make money. In exchange for the ability of the Crown to permanently occupy and use these lands, and therefore give you personally that same right, treaties created a relationship that is just as permanent with indigenous nations. If you are an advocate of “tearing up the treaties and starting over” then you are obligated to return your private land and all the wealth you have generated from Crown lands to the bargaining table. Because the very fact that you can live in this legal frameworks is a result of you personally being a treaty beneficiary. Yes, even in places where there are no treaties.

So the first thing you can do to advance the cause of reconciliation is to understand that you benefit from treaties, and that you personally have rights and responsibilities to First Nations that flow from this relationship. Some of these responsibilities are exercised through governments, but you pay for them personally with your taxes and that is as it should be. So remember this and remind others that Canada is a land founded on relationships and legally binding contracts and you have a duty to uphold the honour of the Crown’s end of the bargain. Not only governments. You, also.

Secondly, understand that First Nations are still to this day experiencing the brutal fist of colonization. When you see socio-economic statistics that talk about homelessness, addictions, abuse, diabetes and suicide rates that are far above the national average, understand that you are seeing colonization in action. When you see the rates of missing and murdered indigenous women and you see government’s luke warm response to this crises, understand that these girls and women are taking the full force of a society that still propagates violence against indigenous people with much impunity. When you hear of First Nations being steamrolled by global corporate interests like mines and tar sands operations and pipelines and fish farms against their consent and will, you are witnessing the same dynamics that were at play in the “dark days” of colonization and western expansion. If you think it was wrong then you must see that it is wrong now. Thankfully First Nations have more and more rights recognized in the Canadian court system and so it is harder and harder to be subjected to this kind of colonial activity. But you have to understand that this is not First Nations stopping economic growth: it is indigenous peoples using the Constitution of Canada to resist the abusive power of colonization. It deserves respect and support, because when Nations do this, they are operating within the legal framework of the country that gives you your own rights. To diminish their ability to do so would weaken the rule of law that benefits you.

Understanding that these two dynamics are at play is a practical, critical thing that all Canadians can do to make reconciliation real. And you can think about these things, see how they personally play out in your own life and address those who say that “treaties need to be redone” or “Indians get stuff for free” or “all that violence happened in the past” or “it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

We have to fundamentally restructure the relationship in Canada but it does not start with governments. it starts with you and me. Take this moment in time to take a step closer to real reconciliation and help the TRC’s process actually have a legacy. Don’t wait for other people to create that legacy for you.