I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things.
Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach a two hour session to some amazing social justice activists in Eastern and Central Europe, who are fighting for things like environment justice, and racial and gender and sexual orientation equality, among other topics. I get to teach about working with complexity.
As part of that, I will elaborate on my little model of constraints, which for the record is now described as Connections, Exchanges, Attractors, Boundaries and Identities the short form of which is CEAB(I). In this blog post I’ll explain why.
These five types of constraints essentially cover all the ways that complex systems or problems are constituted. They function as a mix of constraints that govern and constraints that enable. These two terms come from the work of Alicia Juarrero and Dave Snowden. Governing constraints stop certain things from happening (a door keeps the public out, a bolt attaches two pieces of metal). They create a limitation on action. Enabling constraints create a space, a context or a container in which action can happen within boundaries. They are essential for emergence and coherence in a complex system. Think about form in poetry, or the kinds of direction that managers give their workers. If these constraints are too tight, we compromise and stifle emergence. If they are too loose, we create too diffuse a context for action. A manager that says “do whatever you want” is going to make trouble in the organization. So too will one who says “let me review every single move you make.” Managing enabling constraints is really the high art of working in complexity especially as you can never know in advance what “too tight” and “too loose” looks like.
So far so good.
Now this little model, CEAB(I) can be used to both analyse a situation and to take action to change that situation. When I am confronted with a stuck problem in ir near the complexity domain, I will often do a quick survey of the constraints that are active in the moment. From a social action perspective, lets just look at a relatively straightforward (!) case or trying to change policy around affordable rental housing. What are the constraints at play that create the emergent situation of “unaffordabilty?” Here are a few sketched out thoughts:
CONNECTIONS – Landlords can use AirBnB to get a better revenue stream rather than long term rental; tenants need to be “connected” to find good deals;
EXCHANGES – Insiders in communities recommend “good” tenants to landlords, thereby gaming the market for accessibility to affordable spaces;
ATTRACTORS –Landlords have few incentives to offer long term housing over short term rentals that give them more flexibility; landlord regulations make long term rental prohibitive, but lax regulations on BnB’s make it easy to rent short term; high mortgages and house prices mean landlords charge high rents to recover costs.
BOUNDARIES – Government regulations make developing a suite to be prohibitive (secondary suites are often banned in residential neighbourhoods due to concerns about traffic and noise); restricted zoning means rentals are located only in certain places making them more scarce and therefore higher priced on the market; lack of rental increase guidelines that allow landlords to charge maximum rather than affordable rents.
IDENTITY – Renters perceived as poorer than the home owners in the surrounding neighbourhood; rentals and density considered undesirable as it is perceived to lower property values; density considered a change to the character of a neighbourhood opposed by people with a vested interest in the status quo; fear of outsiders or transient residents.
Okay. You see where this is going. Complex issues are so named because these factors (and many many more) work together to create the emergent characteristic of unaffordable rents.
To change the system we need to change the constraints.
There are some high value targets. For example, you could create a governing constraint in the system that bans rents above a certain price point and creates expensive fines for breaking that law. This may have the unintended consequence of forcing rentals OFF the market and possibly into shotr term rentals OR having a black market emerge of unregulated suites and apartments. It may limit the supply and force renters into tent cities for example, creating another situation. On the other hand such a law may give everyone clarity and force a change for the good. But this is a very high energy solution and requires a great deal of power to effect.
At the other end of the spectrum, you could create different kinds of connections in the system. You could ban AirBnB (as some jurisdictions have done) but also incentivize rentals by providing a property tax breaks to people renting out affordable suites or apartments. Tenants can organize to strike against high rents by creating tight connections and limiting the exchanges that go between them as a class and landlords as a class, forcing political action.
You could also change the nature of the problem by allowing different kinds of rentals (such as secondary suites in single family homes, which happened in my community and instantly increased the amount of rental housing in the stock). Potential renters could form new connections, such as co-ops and co-housing groups (or indeed create tent cities) to create new forms of housing and community.
The four constraints of connection, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries offer places for action. As you go from C —-> E —-> A —> B you require more and more power to act. Creating and enforcing boundaries is very difficult for community organizers to do. But creating new connections and changing the exchanges that happen are accessible tools for people without formal power in a system. This is how people organize and build movements for change. If your hands are not on the levers of power, you need to mobilize to get them there.
Identities are a special class of constraint, and everyone plays in this space. You are often forced into a certain class by the ethos of a culture: in a white supremacist culture like Canada, BIPOC people are often marginalized as outsiders. But white people have choices about using power and privilege, to either uphold the status quo or change it. Identity and context play together. Some people are able to code switch, or form alliances, or play along with epectations and then make surprise moves. The film Black Klansman is a great example of this. How you name yourself, appear, code-switch, separate and join groups is a tactical consideration for making change. Do you join certain clubs and networks to gain influence? Or is it better to stand outside the system and protest? Do you join the mainstream or offer alternatives? Do you participate in advisory panels or critique and tear down the process? Or do you do all of these simultaneously. Identity and identity politics are a big deal.
To set up new attractors and new boundaries is possible only if you have some power. That power can be formal coercive power, or it could be charismatic influence. Even a social movement without policy making capability can force change through boycotts (limiting exchanges), shifting the story (through re-casting identity), creating alliances (connections acorss power gradients) or creating alternative glimpses of the future (off the grid experiments, tent cities communities) that might force policy makers to stabilize good ideas or finally confront the constraints that create problems by breaking them.
Being effective in mobilizing for change requires a huge amount of creativity, collaborative relationship, collective intelligence, and situational awareness. You need to ask:
- How does this problem work?
- What do we have the power to change?
- What do we not yet have the power to change?
- What can we change now that will create more stories and examples of what we want to see and fewer examples of what we don;t want to see?
Then you make small plans, try to catalyze new patterns in the system and see what happens. And you fail. A LOT, which is something that all activists know, but which doesn’t stop them from organizing and working anyway.
A long ramble, but hopefully it gives you a peek at some of the thinking that I’m doing about how power comes into play in influencing complex systems and addressing complex problems. Let me know what you think in the comments.
I was watching this great interview with Roger Penrose this morning speculating on the origins of the Big Bang, and sharing some of his most recent thinking on how the universe might be in an eternal cycle of recreation in which, at certain points in the cycle, size and time don’t matter.
My early morning mind connects a lot of things together, and today that video led to a reflection on smoothness and lumpiness. And the universe, mushrooms, and jazz.
One of the fundamental patterns in the universe is that there are clumps of matter. This always amazed me. The idea is that at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was smooth and evenly distributed, and therefore every possibility was in play. Think of it like a calm lake. In wintertime time, if there is no wind and nothing else disturbing the water, it forms smooth ice, with no lumps or pits.
But often lakes freeze while there are waves on the surface, and the water becomes “lumpy.” In other words, if you lay a flat board down on the ice, there are places where the ice touches it and places where it doesn’t. Something influences the system and it gets lumpy.
The same is true of the cosmos. As Penrose says in the video, the sun is over there and not here. It emerged from a smooth cloud of gas, but now it exists next to places where it doesn’t exist. Gravity does that work, creating attractor basins in space-time into which stuff falls. A spaceship travelling close to the sun will fall into it and become part of the sun. One that travels near and stays outside the boundary – the event horizon – will pass on through space. There is a point somewhere on that boundary where you cross from probably to certainly.
In a lumpy universe, some things are more likely to happen than others. There is not an equal opportunity for things to emerge in every place at every time. It is highly unlikely that a black hole will emerge spontaneously in the centre of the earth, but it is a near certainty that one will emerge when certain types of stars die.
This lumpiness is caused by constraints in the system. An unconstrained system is just smooth and random with equal opportunity for anything happening, even if that opportunity is equally near zero. But a system in which gravity exists, for example, will become less random and star get more ordered. Certain things will happen and not happen. Certain constraints are immutable – such as gravity – and so, will influence stuff, in the same way, every time. (Penrose talks about how gravity is constant in the universe regardless of time and size).
At smaller than cosmological scales this we see this same pattern repeating. Yesterday I was out hunting mushrooms, and I am learning that certain species – like the boletes I found – will live in certain places, around the roots of mature cedar trees. There is no point looking for them in the alders. The constraints of the system help you find them.
In the same way, after 40 years of playing guitar and appreciating jazz, I am finally learning how to play jazz guitar, and I am learning about how the music moves, why we are likely to find a dominant fifth between a minor second and a root major seventh chord.
In mushroom hunting, one must sink into the system and observe it deeply to learn about how mycorrhizal fungi live. Understanding the constraints makes it more likely to find these beauties, and every time I pick one I get this strong sense of joy at having joined the system so closely that the mushroom and I could find each other.
There isn’t much I can do to influence a bolete to grow in a place it doesn’t want to grow. But if I wanted to cultivate boletes, I’d have to start by growing a forest.
With jazz, however, there is a lot I can do to mess around with the music. It’s true that a ii-V-I chord progression is nearly ubiquitous in jazz standard repertoire at all kinds of levels of scale, from single melody lines to whole songs. Its a reliable pattern and if you are lost in improvising, it’s something you can often come back to, to find your way back to the melody.
But the other thing about the ii-V-I is that is can make a creative musician lazy. It is so smooth and reliable that it can become too constrained and one falls into repetitive patterns, just “going through the changes” and not adding anything interesting. When I am trying to find chord voicings for songs I’m learning, my teacher will often say “hey trying adding that sharp 11 to the chord” and instantly something different happens, some delight emerges, a new colour appears. Not only that, but the alteration gives me more options for what the NEXT chord voicing might be, because adding that sharp 11 note makes my ear want to go to a different place. It gives me permission to move somewhere I had never imagined before.
This is what we mean by “enabling constraints.” In jazz, you have a choice about what you do with the enabling constraints. You can try to improvise within a tight framework of standard chords or start finding “adjacent possibles” – notes that sound good because you have altered a chord in such a way that a new note or interval comes into play. These alterations are small. They need to be because they have to work both with the base chord you are altering AND link to the new place you are going. There is a logic to this, and you’re working within constraints.
And of course, you can utterly dispense with this logic too, choosing to play entirely improvised music. But even total improvisation finds a “lumpiness” around emergent patterns. It might be a rhythmic pattern, a dynamic move between soft and loud, or a small set of notes or intervals. It might be a moment in time that repeats or a call and response with another player. Free jazz and improvised music is not random music (although it can often sound that way). It is a natural evolution of art that discovers emergent attractors and uses them as enabling constraints to create some lumpiness, to lightly constrain creativity and see what might happen. Sometimes it fails completely and sometimes incredible experiences are had.
You’ve read this far, maybe hoping for a conclusion, but I feel like leaving this post here with a question. What does this make you think of? What does this musing about lumpiness, likelihood, cosmology, mushrooming and jazz leave swirling around in your brain?
Edited later to add some theology: if I understand Penrose correctly, the only thing that survives the cycles of universe manifestion is gravity, which means that, at least in my theology, gravity is God. And gravity pulls things together and provides perturbations in smooth fields that help create new things, which kind of equates with own humble theology…so more to think about…
James Gleick, the author of the classic book “Chaos: Making a New Science” has written a terrific review of Jill Lepore’s new book “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”The book covers the origin of data science as applied to democracy, and comes as conversations about social media, algorithms, and electoral manipulation are in full swing due to the US election and the release of The Social Dilemma.
Gleick’s review is worth a read. He covers some basic complexity theory when working with data. He provides a good history of the discovery of how the principles of “work at fine granularity” helps to see patterns that aren’t otherwise there. He also shows how the data companies – Facebook, Google, Amazon – has mastered the principle of “data precedes the framework” that lies at the heart of good sensemaking. For me, both of these principles learned from anthro-complexity, are essential in defining my complexity practice.
Working at fine granularity means that, if you are looking for patterns, you need lots of data points before seeing what those patterns are. You cannot simply stake the temperature in one location and make a general conclusion about what the weather is. You need not only many sites, but many kinds of data, including air pressure, wind speed and direction, humidity and so on – in order to draw a weather map that can then be used to predict what MIGHT happen. The more data you have, the more models you can run, and the closer you can come to a probable prediction of the future state. The data companies are able to work at such a fine level of granularity that they can not only reliably predict the behaviour of individuals, but they can also serve information in a way that results in probable changes to behaviour. AS a result, social media is destroying democracy, as it segments and divides people for the purpose of marketing, but also dividing them into camps that are so disconnected from one another that Facebook has already been responsible for one genocide, in Myanmar.
Data preceding the framework means that you don’t start with a framework and try to fit data to that matrix, but rather, you let the data reveal patterns that can then be used to generate activity. Once you have a ton of data, and you start querying it, you will see stable patterns. If you turn these into a framework for action, you can sometimes catalyze new behaviours or actions. This is useful if you are trying to shift dynamics in a toxic culture. But in the dystopian use of this principle, Facebook for example notices the kinds of behaviours that you demonstrate and then serves you information to get you to buy things in a pattern that is similar to others who share a particular set of connections and experiences and behaviours. Cambridge Analytica used this power in many elections, including the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum as well as elections in Trinidad and Tobago and other places to create divisions that resulted in a particular result being achieved. You can see that story in The Great Hack. Algorithms that were designed to sell products was quickly repurposed to sell ideas, and the result has been the most perilous threat to democracy since the system was invented.
Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable but using data you can learn about probabilities. If you have a lot of data you gain an advantage over your competitors. If you have all the data you gain an advantage over your customers, turning them from the customer to the product. “If you’re not paying, you are the product” is the adage that signals that customers are now more valuable products to companies that the stuff they are trying to sell to them.
Putting these principles to use for good.
I work with complexity, and that means that I also work with these same principles in helping organizations and communities confront the complex nature of their work. Unlike Facebook though )he says polemically) I try to operate from a moral and ethical standpoint. At any rate, the data we are able to work within our complexity work is pretty fine-grained but not fine-grained enough to provide accurate pictures of what can be manipulated. We work with small pieces of narrative data, collecting them using a variety of methods and using different tools to look for patterns. Tools include NarraFirma, Sensmaker and Spryng, all of which do this work. We work with our clients and their people to look for patterns in these stories and then generate what are called “actionable insights” using methods of complex facilitation and dialogic practice. These insights give us the inspiration to try things and see what happens. When things work, we do more and when they don’t we stop and try something else.
It’s a simple approach derived from a variety of approaches and toolsets. It allows us to sift through hundreds of stories and use them to generate new ideas and actions. It is getting to the point that all my strategic work now is actually just about making sense of data, but doing it in a human way. We don’t use algorithms to generate actions. We use the natural tools of human sensemaking to do it. But instead of starting with a blank slate and a vision statement that is disconnected from reality, we start with a picture of the stories that matter and we ask ourselves, what can we start, stop, stabilize or create to take us where we want to go.
In a world that is becoming increasingly dystopian and where our human facilities are being used against us, it’s immensely satisfying to use the ancient human capacities of telling stories and listening for patterns to create action together. I think in some ways doing work this way is an essential antidote to the way the machines are beginning to determine our next moves. You can use complexity tools like this to look at things like your own patterns of social media use and try to make some small changes to see what happens. Delete the apps from your phone, visit sites incognito, actively seek out warm connections with real humans in your community and look for people that get served very different ads and YouTube videos and recommended search results. Talk to them. They are being made to be very different from you, but away from the digital world, in the slower, warmer world of actual unmediated human interaction, they are not so different.
Postscript
Over the past few years, my work has taken shape from the following bodies of work:
- Dave Snowden’s theories of anthro-complexity, which forms the basis of my understanding of complexity theory and some of the tools for addressing it, including facilitation tools and Sensemaker.
- Cynthia Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry, which is a developmental evaluation approach that uses stories and methods of sensemaking that she partly developed with Dave and then subsequently. I use her software, NarraFirma, for most of our narrative work now.
- Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics is a set of tools and methods for working with complex adaptive systems.
- The facilitation and leadership practices from the Art of Hosting which help us to develop the personal capacity to work dialogically with complexity.
It is the most human thing to recognize patterns. We are attuned to rhythms in nature that repeat: seasonal changes in the land around us, the ebb and flood of the tide, migrations of birds, the ripening of fruits, flows of water and the rhythms of the day.
We also see shape and line and image, and our brains even impose order on otherwise random images like cumulus clouds in a summer sky or inkblots on a therapist’s couch.
As babies, we recognize the similarities and differences that are crucial to our survival. The sound of our mother’s voice, the patterns of contrast on the faces of our caregivers, the smells and tastes of our parent’s skin. Familiar patterns distinguish safe situations from dangerous ones and they help us to stabilize and regulate our emotions.
Patterns are simply things that repeat and that we recognize as being similar to something we have seen or experienced before. Patterns may vary in detail, but they repeat in form. You recognize a house, even when all the houses in your village are different. You can feel anger even when different words are said. You know a soccer team is playing a high press or a low block tactic even when different teams use the strategy. The presence of patterns is the absence of randomness.
When you see a pattern there is likely a good reason for it. Nothing in nature repeats unless there are underlying conditions that cause it to repeat. In complexity, these are called constraints, and once you start understanding them, you begin to develop a range of options for seeing, creating and shifting patterns.
Constraints and Cynefin
One way to think about Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework is to see it as a spectrum of constraints. Moving from clear to chaos, you can think of different problems as systems as exhibiting less stability, more self-organization and emergence until you get to a totally chaotic state in which everything appears to be unconstrained and random. This little diagram above shows you what I mean.
Moving from left to right, constraints get tighter, situations become more stable and more predictable. Any move in this direction will make a pattern more stable and enduring. It also requires more energy and resources to maintain it, so one has to make choices about which stable pattern to invest in. Creating a fixed relationship between agents in a system means that it is harder for them to form connections outside the system. That is desirable when you need a guaranteed repeatable outcome, such as on an assembly line, but it’s a bad way to create community.
In contrast, moving from right to left, constraints get looser and situations get less stable. Any move in that direction will break down stability and allow for new patterns to emerge. However, because you are introducing more randomness into the system, you can never be sure if the new patterns will be helpful or not, so you have to watch them very carefully and support the ones that give you what you want. You can try to influence the emergence of beneficial patterns by trying new things, to see if new relationships will form. If they do, and things work well, you can create agreements to stabilize what is working. But if you go too far in breaking down existing patterns you can create chaos.
In Chaos, the only thing that helps is the rapid establishment of tight constraints to create some stability. Think of what happens when first responders arrive on the scene of a fire. You get authoritative directions and are told what to do and where to go. You accept a level of bossiness from others that you would never accept in your daily life. In Chaos it is easy to impose constraints, but very difficult to loosen them. Just think of your experience with the pandemic.
Constraints: places to intervene in a complex system
In her classic on systems thinking, Donella Meadows writes about the 12 places you can intervene in a system. These are useful for nested and ordered systems, and in some ways, her typology moves from clear to complex as it moves up in scale from local to global. It’s helpful, but the work of Alicia Juarerro, Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang provides a simpler way into understanding the places to intervene in a complex adaptive system.
If we are looking to create or change patterns around us – to stabilize things that are beneficial or disrupt things that aren’t working – complexity thinking gives us a few things to try. In my practice I have these down to five constraints that you can try influencing:
Connections. One way to identify a pattern is to see how the elements in the system are connected. Connections limit action, as I point out in the example above. If I have to report to you every day in person at 9am, that constrains my action. The people in my community share a kind of connection with me that others don’t. Those with whom I make music, or study complexity, or support the Vancouver Whitecaps FC, have a different connection. If I want to change my life I can sever or create new connections with others. I can tighten up a connection – call your mother! – or loosen one (let your child explore the world a little more on her own).
Exchanges. If you think of connections as a kind of fibre optic cable then exchanges are the data and information that pass through it. You can have more or less bandwidth in an exchange and you can choose what to pass over it and with what quality. For example, I have a high bandwidth exchange with my partner in which we can talk about anything, in virtually any way, and that comes from 30 years of being together. In other relationships, I exchange different information in different ways.
Information in connections and exchanges is influenced by things such as power. A twelve-year-old child shouting obscenities at me is quite different from my boss doing the same thing. When you have power, you have to be aware of how you are using it, because it affects the system. If our connection is rigid – for example, if I am a prisoner and you are the prison guard – your power over me can be coercive and brutal if you want it to be. If you can use violence against me, I will either have to submit to you or fight back. But in more equitable relationships and connections, the exchanges can be reciprocal, power can be shared and what is exchanged is more creative, collaborative and emergent.
Connections and exchanges between agents or parts in a system are a rich place to intervene. But connections and exchanges are also constrained within what we call “containers.” These are spaces and contexts, physical, social, even psychological, inside which people act. Containers are made up of Attractors and Boundaries. Attractors bring us together around something and boundaries create differences. If you want to change the container or the context in which things are happening, you can try creating an alternate attractor and see if the system reorganizes around it. We do this all the time with rewards and other extrinsic motivations. If my kid can’t see that good grades are their own reward, gamifying school work with different rewards and levels might help to pick up the grades. Or not. It’s worth a try. Likewise if I feel that my relationship to a person is stuck in a rut, we might do something different together, go on holiday or climb a mountain, or meet in a different place and simply having a different attractor in our midst will help us to relate differently. This is why groups often use things like ropes courses to explore collaboration. A different attractor catalyzes different actions.
Attractors influence patterns of attention. If you are wondering why no one comes to your events, it’s all down to how you compete for their attention. Marketing is all about attractors.
Boundaries are what we usually think of when we picture a “constraint.” It gives you images of a fence or a wall inside which something happens and outside of which something else happens. Boundaries create differences and differences help new patterns to emerge. If our boundary is too tight, we can become too inwardly focused and learn nothing new. And so we talk about “expanding our horizons” or “getting outside the box” which is an indication that if we are to discover different things, we need to open up the boundaries that keep us separate from the world.
But sometimes we need to tighten boundaries as well to differentiate ourselves from others. We are currently doing this in the pandemic at a personal and a national level, managing bubbles, trying to find the right balance between being safe and being connected. We could stop the pandemic by having everyone spend one month in isolation, but the cost of that to people’s mental health would be immense. So managing boundaries is critical.
Issues of inclusivity and exclusivity are always at play when you create a boundary. Someone is always left out. Removing boundaries altogether does not create a more inclusive situation, it creates chaos. Inclusivity is about providing different ways for people to enter into a context, and then how to connect and exchange once they are there.
If there is a pattern of differentiation to address there is almost always a boundary constraint that is giving rise to it. Changing boundaries changes the way one context is different from another. Sometimes you need more difference and sometimes you need less.
Identity. In most natural complex adaptive systems, the above four constraints – connectinos, exchanges, attractors, boundaries – are the ways in which the system organizes itself. In human systems, however, and in the field of anthro-complexity, identity is a crucial fifth constraint. Identity influences much of how we show up as humans. It can create new boundaries and attractors and it influences how we connect and exchange. Identity can create commonalities or differences – both of which can be helpful or destructive – and changing identity is perhaps the hardest thing for humans to do. We are built and maintained by the stories we have about ourselves and the stories that others tell about us. To make matters more confusing, we all have multiple identities. Within us intersect our nationality, gender, race, history, culture, age, status, power, role, family and so on. We can lock into people that we perceive as the same as us – which is helpful for safety and having a shared context – or we can actively seek out people that are radically different from us – which is necessary for learning, creating new things and developing resilience. In my own practice, I choose to work on teams that have much diversity – focusing specifically on diversifying gender, cultural background and expertise. Even small teams of two or three people with as much diversity as you can find end up being incredibly resourceful for working with all the aspects of complex systems because we can centre or de-centre particular identities given the changing context.
Recognizing taht we all carry multiple identities allows us to be different from each other when we need to be, and come together around commonalities when we need to be. In healing divisive dynamics in a system, finding common identities is crucial, even if these identities are not exactly relevant to the problem at hand. In overcoming problems of stuckness, where we are falling into an echo chamber, differences of opinion are essential if we are to confront an ever-changing world together.
In human systems identity is everywhere.
Constraints are your friend. Becoming good at spotting them and then experimenting with them is the journey towards the artistry of complexity work. It is creative, collaborative work as well, needing lots of eyes and ears and hearts and minds to discern what is happening and look for ways to make things better, to stabilize the things that are working or to break down the patterns that don’t.
How are you using constraints in your work and life?
“Figure it out…that’s what I say…figure it out…”
Another reference from Letterkenny to start a blog post, another southern Ontario expression that means “it’s obvious, what’s the problem?” or “just do it.” Here in B.C. there is a similar expression: “give your head a shake.” It’s supposed to indicate that everything you’re making complicated is really just pretty simple.
The Cynefin framework is like that. It gives you something to help you give your head a shake when you are confronted with a confusing situation. The framework is useful in so many ways, but here are a few that help you get started using it.
If you’re confused, just stop for a moment and think about it. Cynefin, is a decision-making framework. It helps you to decide what to do. So when you DON’T know what to do, the Cynefin domain can help you figure out what kind of problem you have and what to do about it.
There is nothing wrong with being confused, that is why I consider the middle domain of Cynefin the most important one. Confusion has the benefit of inviting us to stop and figure out what’s going on. It’s not the same as chaos, where we have to act in order to preserve ourselves or restore order. Confusion is the pause that makes us question what is going on. So the first benefit of Cynefin is that it has a place for confusion, and I invite folks to enter to the framework from that point.
Is this knowable or not? At a high level Cynefin divides problems into ordered and unordered problems. An easy way to know which one you’re facing is to ask yourself questions like this:
- Does this problem have a stable solution?
- Is there someone out there who knows for certain what to do?
- Can I learn how to do this myself, and get repeatable results?
- Can I predict the outcome of my actions with certainty?
- Have I solved this kind of problem before?
If you answer “yes” to one of these questions, then you know you are in the ordered domains. If it is a thing you can do on your own right now, using best practices from the past, you are in the clear domain. If it’s something that an expert can do for you – someone who has the answer and can fix the problem – you are in the complicated domain.
If you answer no to these questions, then you are in the unordered domains, and probably in the Complex domain. If you are panicking, in the middle of a crisis, or in some kind of physical or emotional danger, then you are in Chaos, and you’re probably not sitting down to think about what domain you are in, anyway.
Ordered problems are pretty straight forward to solve. In the ordered domains we solve things with a linear sequence of steps that goes like this:
- Understand the problem
- Decide what makes sense to do
- Do it
- Evaluate the results
In the Cynefin world this is basically what is meant by “Sense – Categorize – Respond” or “Sense- Analyse – Respond.” The results of your actions will be almost immediately clear to you in these types of problems. Either you have fixed the problem or you haven’t. The more complicated your problem, the more expertise is required to both solve the problem and evaluate the results, but at the end of the day things are doable and solvable and it’s clear to everyone that the intervention worked.
If it’s Clear, just do it. Clear problems are easily solvable by doing things that you’ve done before. You might think that Clear and obvious problems shouldn’t be confusing at all, but sometimes we get into tricky situations where our minds cloud our thinking. We can overthink something or stare at a problem, not sure of what we are looking at. I have often had that experience while using public transit in unfamiliar cities. I stare at the ticket dispenser not knowing what to do. Sometimes it takes a person behind me to point out the big STEP 1, STEP 2 and STEP 3 instructions for me to see how to actually buy a ticket. Because systems are different in different places, and design isn’t always awesome, I often get confused the first time I travel in a new city. Once I figure it out though, I never have that problem again.
If it’s Complicated get an expert to do it. A Complicated problem is solvable, but not by me. It’s why I hire people to do my books, maintain my webserver, fix my car, repair my appliances, or maintain my musical instruments. If something is Clear to you and not to others, there is value in your knowledge, and so folks that have specialized problem-solving expertise make their living charging money for this value. There is something immensely satisfying about solving problems, and many folks that I know who work constantly in the unsolvable world of complexity, have hobbies that are are merely Complicated. Knowing that a problem is Complicated is a great relief, and then it’s just down to finding the right person to do it for you.
The secret to unordered domains is working with constraints. This is a tricky one to get, but basically the first thing to know about the unordered domains is our standard Western models of linear problem-solving don’t work here. The reason for this is that things are non-linear and emergent in this domain. Problems seem to spring up from out of the blue, and if we try to figure out what caused them, we head down rabbit holes. The system that gives rise to problems is unknowable in its totality, so we can feel free to release ourselves from needing to know everything and concentrate instead on finding patterns. Noticing patterns in unordered problems is hugely valuable. When we see patterns, we can hypothesize that things are probably Complex. When we can’t see patterns, things are probably Chaotic.
In the unordered domains, expertise is not helpful on its own – there is no one with an answer – but experience can be helpful. What IS helpful is gathering a larger number of people together to look at a problem and see if they can find patterns in it.
If it’s Chaotic, apply constraints until it is safe. Chaos is defined in the Cynefin framework as the absence of constraints. Ther is nothing holding the system together and everything seems random. In those situations, applying a tight constraint can help stabilize the situation to the point that you can think about what to do next. Think of a first responder to a fire, who establishes a perimeter around a burning building, orders people to evacuate and follows clear procedures to suppress the fire with water or chemicals. Applying constraints on behaviour and firm boundaries around situations helps to control it. As you gain control of the situation you can loosen the boundaries, let people back into the area, remove safety gear, cruise the area for hot spots or other dangers.
In psychological chaos, such as times when one is afraid, anxious, panicked, or reliving a trauma, constraints can be immensely helpful in self-regulating. Many therapeutic modalities that work with trauma help give people tools to control their breathing, bring their awareness back online, and gather themselves up. One doesn’t;t use these interventions in every moment, but they are helpful in the moment of panic.
If its Complex, work with the patterns. Finding patterns and understanding them is the key to working in complexity. A pattern is basically anything that repeats over time. Patterns represent some stability in a system and they are held in place by constraints. Once you find a pattern, you need to figure out if it is one you want to keep or one you want to disrupt. Either way, finding some of the constraints that keep a pattern in place helps you to work with it.
Think about forming healthy habits. For me working on my own health has been a decades-long struggle to eat well and exercise. I’ve tried lots of diets – from vegetarian to paleo – and found that the best way to eat well, at least for now, is to eat out of a small bowl using chopsticks. Why? Because those constraints help me be more mindful about the food I eat and the quantity of it I consume. Given a bag of potato chips, my salt and fat-loving body will eat the whole thing. Given a small bowl, and a slower way to eat, I find I can stop much sooner. Likewise with exercise. I have learned that if it is a huge production, I won’t get myself together, go out to a gym, and go through a routine using a bunch of equipment. Instead, for the past year, I have followed a simple set of bodyweight workouts from DAREBEE which has highly constrained the activity I do. For the first time in my life, I have stuck to a daily fitness regime and I’m healthier and more fit than I have been in years.
Complexity requires trial and error and lots of experiments. In the Cynefin world, we use the phrase “Probe – Sense – Respond” to capture this idea. Basically, because you can’t know what will work, you try a bunch of things to shift unhealthy patterns and stabilize healthy patterns and see what works. If you are getting better results, you do more of that. If things aren’t working well, stop doing that. In complexity conflicts get resolved by people DOING things, not arguing over them. We can make better decisions when we have some data that comes from action. If people have different ideas about what to do, invite them to take on small experiments to see if their ideas are promising. You can even have people do two opposite things – “we’ll take the high road and you take the low road” – and see how they compare. Experimenting with action is a far better way to find promising practices than constant arguing about the “right” thing to do.
So there are a few ways in which Cynefin helps you to figure things out. If you are an experienced practitioner, what would you add to this list? If you are new to Cynefin, what resonates most with you?