Still playing with the Cynefin framework and thinking about how it helps us to understand the processes for decision making and action in the domains of simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disordered domains.
Today talking with clients and friends we were discussing the “spaces inbetween,” especially with respect to cultures. In British Columbia, services are increasingly being separated between indigenous and non-indigenous service providers which isn’t a bad thing on the face of it, but the enterprise is being undertaken from a scarcity mindset. in other words, resources are being moved from one part of the sector to the other in a zero sum approach leaving people resentful and frightened of the spaces in between, which is the space that clients live in.
One of the results of this fear of space is a collapsing of leadership into a certainty based mindset. We look for the failsafe solutions and then implement, externalizing all that is unknown and unknowable. Increasingly however, there is a growing appetite among some leaders for the potential of the space of “not-knowing.” One can approach that space from the perspective of reductionist analysis, or one can embrace the possibility there. Working with emergence is not always a secure thing however, as you never know what you are going to get in this space. What is required there is principles and practices that help one to navigate and make good decisions in the complex, chaotic and disordered domains. In the simple and complicated domains, where analysis is an excellent approach, rules and tools are very useful. Previous experience, case studies and best practices are useful for simple problem solving.
Things become dangerous when we seek security in the rules and tools and try to apply them in the complex and chaotic and disordered domains. Often people will come to learning events with me and ask for a definitive list of situations in which a particular methodology will work. If I find myself saying “it depends” then I know I am dealing with that unknowable “space inbetween.” In that case I point to principles and practices. It sometimes leaves people frustrated, especially if they have come seeking rules and tools.
The goal here is to provide support for leaders who are prepared to enter the spaces of not-knowing and dwell there, sitting in the uncertainty and attentive to all the emotional difficulty that crops up. It also means taking a disciplined approach to working with safe fail experiments that allow for emergence that then gives you some indications of what is useful and what is not.
In a world besotted with analysis, this is a tough sell, and yet increasingly I meet decision makers who suspect that something is up with the way they have been taught to reason out every situations. Rules and tools are increasingly failing us as we become more aware of how difficult it is to manage in complex and chaotic domains. Principles and practices are much more useful.
As to what those practices and principles are, well, it depends. And that is an invitation to a jumping off point for diving in and learning together.
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Nice post on using the Cynefin framework to design an ideas generation workshop:
At a workshop I facilitated last week – the challenge was helping a team to generate new ideas for innovating their business – I used Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework to great effect. This was a smart crowd, who were willing to go along with our approach on helping them see new directions through a process of emergent discovery – but they wanted to understand why we were following this approach. For the many cerebral folks in this crowd, I explained the Cynefin framework – and they got it! We could have studied ‘best practices for establishing an innovation culture’, or we could have thoroughly analysed successful innovations of the past for ‘good practices’ and for discovering cause-effect relationships between new ideas and successful outcomes. But we didn’t. And they were ok with it once I explained to them why innovation and ‘best practices’ or ‘analytics’ don’t go well together, using the Cynefin framework. In short, I argued that innovation – the activity they wanted to engage in – has many characteristics of a complex adaptive system: cause and effect are not linked in a linear way, many agents are interconnected and interacting, etc.
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A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”
My answer was that it depends on so much. Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle. The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest” The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.
A story. Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed. It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work. We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us. From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns. The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.
So it depends. If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools. So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..
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Have you seen these doodle games from Vi Harte? Brilliant games to play with math. Or perhaps games to play that demonstrate how math works. This one is my favourite, but you might also enjoy Stars, Infinity Elephants or Binary Trees, among others.
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[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.