This afternoon I’m coming home after a morning running a short process for a church in Victoria, BC. The brief was pretty straightforward: help us decide between four possible scenarios about our future. Lucky for me, it gave me an instant application for some of the stuff I was learning in London last week.
The scenarios themselves were designed through a series of meetings with people over a number of months and were intended to capture the church’s profile for its future, as a way of advertising themselves for new staff. What was smart about this exercise was the fact that the scenarios were left in very draft form so there was no way they could be confused for a “vision” of the future. It is quite common in the church world for people to engage in “visioning exercises” to deal with the complex problems that they face, but such visions are doomed evermore to failure as the bigger organization is beginning to enter into a period of massive transformation and churches are suffering from all kinds of influences over which they have no control.
Visioning therefore is not as useful as selecting a lens through which the organization can make some decisions.
Each scenario contained some possible activities and challenges that the church would be facing, and the committee overseeing the work was charged with refining these down to a report that would, to use my own terms, be a collection of heuristics for the way the organization would act as it addressed future challenges.
Our process was very informed by some thinking I have been doing with Dave Snowden’s “Simple rules for dealing with complexity.” Notably principles about avoiding premature convergence, distributing cognition and disrupting pattern entrainment. Furthermore, the follow up work will be informed by the heuristic of “disintermediation” meaning that the team working on the project will all be working with the raw data. There is no consultants report here. The meaning making is still very much located with the participants.
So here was our process.
- At small tables of four, participants were given 5 minutes to read over the scenarios silently.
- We then entered a period of three 15 minute small group conversations on the topic of “what do you think about these scenarios?” Cafe style, each conversation happened with three different groups of people. I was surprised how much introduction was going on as people met new folks. The question was deliberately chosen not to be too deep or powerful because with a simple question, the participants will provide their own depth and power. When you have a powerful need, you don’t need to contrive anything more powerful than what people are already up for.
- Following the cafe conversations, a round of silent reflection in which people were given the following direction. “Express your preference for each of the scenarios on a scale of 1-7. Seven means “Let’s do it” and one means “No Way.” For each scenario write your preference on your post it and write a short sentence about the one concrete thing that would make your vote one point higher.” So there is lots in this little exercise. First it’s a way of registering all of the objections to the scenarios without personalizing them. Secondly it gets at concrete things that the team can do to improve scenarios and third it harvest preferences and not simple yes/no decisions which are not appropriate for this kind of work.
- At each table someone gathered all the posts its of the same colour and by colour folks came to the front and placed them on the scale. Doing it this way meant that no one was sure whose preference was going where and it also meant that people couldn’t revise their post its once they saw how the preferences were being expressed.
The whole thing took about 75 minutes.
The result of this sense making was the chart you see above. Two hundred pieces of finely grained information ordered by the people themselves. The project team now has at least three things they can do with this material.
- They can recreate the scale, as each post it is colour and preference coded. That way they have a rough idea of the scenario with the greatest support, and they can show anyone who wants to see metrics where we stand on the proposals.
- They can cluster post its for each scenario according to “work that will make it better” which means they don’t have to pay attention to the scale. The scale is completely subjective, but each of these post-its contains one piece of concrete information to make the scenario better, so in some ways the numbers don’t really matter. They can cluster these ideas by each scenario AND they can re-cluster them by each topic to give an idea of overall issues that are happening within the organization.
- If we wanted to go a step further, we could use these post it notes to do a number of Cognitive Edge exercises including a Cynefin contextualization (which would tell us which things were Obvious, Complicated and Complex (and maybe Chaotic) and we could also do some archetype extraction which might be very useful indeed for constructing the final report, which would stand as an invitation to thier new personal and an invitation to the congregation.
Back from London now from a four day deep dive into complexity theory and Cynefin practice with Dave Snowden and Tony Quinlan from Cognitive Edge. It was a packed full four days with many many many bits and pieces of philosophy, natural science, organizational theory and a few exercises thrown in. It was presented in a straight up lecture format, eight hours a day with one or two exercises and some short periods of conversation. The best reflection periods were the three to four hours afterwards with classmates engaged in what my new Welsh friend Sion Charles and I called “Celtic reflection” which obviously involves pints, craic and towards the end of the evening, a night cap of whisky (and I do owe you a round of malt Sion!). Oh, and really terrific chats about what we had learned and how it can be applied.
At least I was ready for it, having had several friends tell me that the pedagogy is all about “download from the front, try a few things at your tables.” When you know this is what you are going to get, you just go in prepared. It’s not how I teach, but then I wasn’t there to see an imitation of myself. I was there to hear the latest thinking from Dave (especially around the Cynefin sub domains, Cynefin dynamics and the other bits and pieces of theory he’s chasing down) and to hear practitioner stories and experience some of the methods, which Tony showered down on us on days one and four. I was alos curious to explore how Cynefin might better inform my thinking about developmental evaluation. I think now I have a good idea of Cognitive Edge’s approach with clients, and some of the heuristics and principles for applying Cynefin and designing exercises that help us work in the complex domain. And I have a few new lines of inquiry and practice around developmental evaluation that might make their way into some new teaching material, and perhaps a new offering.
I am not new to this framework at all, and it has been a staple of my work with clients over the past few years. I find that it helps to present a strong and clear sense of why you need to do things differently when you are faced with complexity. It helps us understand the point of dialogic approaches to problem-addressing, and in deeper applications, it helps us to adopt better strategic practices for working with emergent and evolutionary situations. I have even worked with SenseMaker(TM) on a project in the United States and learned quickly how people with traditional social science research mindsets hit the wall with gathering data for collective sense-making rather than expert analysis.
As a reference point I though I would gather together a few of my pieces on Cynefin, including videos of me teaching the framework, illustrated with stories from my own practice. So here is a recap of what I know about the framework so far, and it will be interesting to see how that changes as the future unfolds.
Video of me teaching
Webinar recording
Blog posts
I’ve had a couple of requests to share the exercise that helps people understand Cynefin physically. I’m happy to do so here.
I enjoy designing these kinds of exercises, as it gives people a number of ways of understanding the framework and I find that it actually helps the penny drop for folks who otherwise have a hard time groking the nature of the different domains. I am continuing to develop this exercise but here’s how I do it now:
1. Begin by having the group stand and clear a large space so that everyone can move around comfortably. To do this well, you need a large open space with lots of room for people to move. As you give directions, just give folks a simple instruction and don’t allow questions. They have to figure the rest out themselves. At the end of each mini exercise take a little conversation to reflect on questions such as “how did you do this?, what is happening here?, how did you gather data? How did you evaluate your efforts?” Use questions that are relevant to the applications of Cynefin you are dealing with.
2. Exploring the obvious. Have people divide into four groups (they don’t have to be even numbers). Instruction: “Organize yourselves by height.” Things to note: this can happen quickly, top-down leadership works well, it can be evaluated objectively. You can constrain the exercise further by instructing people to complete the task in 15 seconds. It is unlikely you will be surprised by the results of this exercise.
3. Exploring the complicated. Have people divide into four new groups. Instruction: “Organize yourselves by birth month and year.” Notes: there are many ways to do this, each can be objective;y verified. It requires getting hidden data that is easily discovered and top-down leadership still works well. You will find some surprising solutions for this problem.
4. Exploring the complex. Have everyone stand in a circle and introduce “The Systems Game” (I learned this version from Joanna Macy’s work). In this well known game, individuals must identify two other people and move to a place equidistant from each of them. You cannot let your “targets” know you are connected to them. It helps to demand that people try to achieve a high degree of accuracy in this triangulation. Done well, and with lots of space in the room, the group should be set into a pattern of constant motion. Notes: small rules initiate constant complex motion. You will see times when a group is clumped up and other times when it is spread out. Notice how some folks are naturally influential in the group – tall men wearing bright clothes seem often to have a higher number of connections to themselves. Notice how it feels to be constantly moving and adjusting. If people stop moving ask why (usually they are tired of the game, a fact of life that translates into dealing with real world complexity). Leadership is participatory and top-down leadership cannot help. When the group gets tired of the exercise, invite some probes to see what happens when certain people move. You will start to see the patterns of connection better that way. This is a good introduction to developmental evaluation. Once the system is at rest, it’s difficult to evaluate the connections. Probes (inviting certain people to move to a very different place, for example) gives us lots of information. Have the group devise their own probes to illuminate more of the situation.
5. Exploring chaos. Have people start “milling.” Milling is a practice from theatre training where participants are instructed to walk into space, rather than walk in a circle. Keep the speed medium pace, and ask them to listen to your instructions. Instructions proceed as follows:
- “When I say stop, stop. When I say go, go.” Do this for a while, giving commands to the group.
- “When I say clap, clap,. When I say jump, jump.” Do this for a while mixing up commands to stop, go, jump and clap.
- “When I say go, stop and when I say stop, go” Instroducing this kind of disruption starts making following directions difficult.
- “When I say bow, bow, when I say whoopee, shout whoopee! When I say clap, jump, when I say jump, clap.” Continue and increase the pace of your commands.
- “When I say shhh say shhh, when I say thigh, slap your thigh. Whoopee, bow; bow, whoppee…” We add one more pair of commands and continue disrupting people’s experiences.
- Continue to flip commands. It will get very chaotic.
Notes: “leadership” is increasingly difficult. Any strategy you develop for keeping the commands straight will be disrupted by randomized instructions. It takes a lot of attention to keep going, and eventually a breakdown is going to happen. Some will simply follow instructions as best the can, rendering the exercise simple. Others will try to devise coping strategies; others will give up and do their own thing. You could notice the tip from a simple exercise to a chaotic one and how difficult it is to cope as a group when you enter into chaos this way.
6. Exploring disorder. Have people divide the group into four groups. Invite people to organize themselves by a word that is both a verb and a noun. Pick one from this list. Words like this are sufficiently ambiguous that the groups have to figure out what is meant by the word before they can do the exercise. Any word will do. Notes: the group will become keenly aware of the difference between chaos and disorder. Have people reflect on their initial reaction to hearing the word. It is likely that each person instantly developed a strategy to address the challenge. you could slow the exercise down and have everyone take a minute to write down their strategy and then share them with the group. People will be surprised at the variety. This is a good lesson in what happens when a groups makes a decision without getting clear on what the problem is.
After the exercises I then give my own standard teaching of the framework, which can take from 30 minutes to an hour depending on how much discussion we have.
Hope this helps. Leave me a comment if you try the exercise so we can all learn from your experience.
Powerful day yesterday in our Art of Learning Together training in Asheville.
One of the ways I teach the Cynefin framework these days is by using a series of exercise to illustrate what it is like to be in each of the five domains. The exercise I use for the disorder domain is to ask people to organize themselves according to a word that is both a verb and a noun. This causes a bit of confusion especially if people start moving to organize themselves according to what they think I told them. This is exactly the way the disorder domain functions in Cynefin – as the domain of problems one hasn’t thought about, resulting in addressing them with strategies one also hasn’t thought about. That is what makes it different from chaos. Usually it is a short exercise that easily drives home the point.
I forgot the word I was going to use to prompt the exercise. Instead the word that came to mind was “economically.” Okay it’s an adverb, but it has multiple meanings and I thought it would serve. “Organize yourselves economically,” I said. I mostly thought that people would just get stuck in trying to define the word and then have their insights about what “disorder” means.
Instead the conversation got real. Fast.
You have to understand that this is a very mixed group of people, and economics is one of the ways in which this group exhibits tremendous diversity, and especially diversity that is hidden to the eye. Economics, money and wealth has a very sharp edge.
The group began feeling it’s way around the topic. All the domains came to life. One person offered the SIMPLE suggestion that we just stay in a circle as this is the most economical and efficient way to organize ourselves. Someone else saw this as COMPLICATED but solvable and began to offer insights on the nature of an economy, concluding that we could organize ourselves according to our net worth (and later, feelings of abundance, access to cash, actually cash in our pockets and other criteria). Soon we discovered the COMPLEX features of the problem. People had different relative wealths, they participated in all kinds of different economies and there was no static way to organize themselves. One person suggested that the little dynamic systems exercise we had done earlier was in fact the was to organize ourselves like an economy and still someone else suggested we break into groups and try and come up with a bunch of different solutions.
All this time the conversation became more and more fraught with emotion, with issues of visibility and invisibility, with privilege and possibility. There was a full range of emotions expressed including anger sadness, joy, frustration, impatience, relief, curiosity and indifference. This eventually became a chaotic conversation with everyone offering perspectives without any organizing scheme and several people offering solutions which were undermined by perspectives that made them unworkable (yes we could just throw a number into the middle to see how much wealth we collectively had access too, but there is no way I will betray my partner’s financial situation that way).
Eventually, after a couple of proposals made with half formed decision making processes, we passed a piece and had one round of circle that allowed for people to share their perspectives. and feel complete with the exercise.
It was powerful because the conversation exposed the differences in the group in a spontaneous way. We had lots of time built into our agenda so the hour or so we spent on the exercise could actually be accommodated and in the end it generated a lot of learning. It was an incredible illustration of how fraught the disorder domain is and why it is absolutely an essential element of the Cynefin framework. Here lie dragons. And it was a perfect illustration of the need to skillfully identify and deal with the ontological nature of the problems we face, because just addressing problems with knowledge can be undermined all the time with who and how people actually are, how they see the world and how they are oriented to their contexts.