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?
I adore Alicia Juarerro’s work. So much so that I just watched a short video and spent the last hour writing about it. Here’s what I’m learning
Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher whose thinking about causality, complexity, action, and emergence has been critical to some of the ways in which folks like Dave Snowden have thought about this field. Her book Dynamics in Action is a really important read, packed full of thinking about complex systems and constraints. It’s a hard book to get into – indeed advice I have had from others is “start in the middle” (a helpful enabling constraint) – but worth the read.
But if reading philosophy is not your idea of a fun pandemic activity and you’d like a tiny primer into her work, I strongly encourage you to watch this 27-minute video of her presenting on emergence, constraints, and closure. Watch it first and then come back to these notes, for I am going to summarize her ideas and bring them into more common applications. I’ll probably end up carving massive holes in her thinking – so feel free to correct my takes here – but here’s what got me thinking.
Juarrero presents on three main topics, emergence and constraints, context-free and context-sensitive constraints, and closure.
Emergence
Here are her main points:
- Nature uses constraints to generate emergence and sustain it. Constraints both limit and enable.
- Evolution selects for resilience, adaptability, and evolvability.
- Resilience is sustained by micro-diversity.
- Ecosystems are sustained by distributed control rather than governing control. The key is in the links.
- The emergence of novel practices – innovation – cannot be caused, but novelty can be enabled. You do this by catalyzing conditions that allow innovation to occur.
- Think of constraints as phenomena that change the likelihood of things, and the probabilities of what is going on.
SO the conclusion from this section is pretty straightforward. One cannot simply say to people “INNOVATE!” and expect emergence to happen. In order to create the conditions for novelty, one must change the interaction between the people in the system. You can do that in any number of ways, by changing a constraint. Everyone will be familiar with what happens when you are given a task with a constrained amount of time in which to complete it. The pressure of a deadline sometimes creates the conditions for novel practice. By cutting your available time in half, you will discover that a solution that requires an hour will not work, and you may discover that you can find a way to do the task in 30 minutes.
Folks are. discovering this all the time right now. Being forced to work from home is suddenly creating all kinds of novelty and innovation. Many people are discovering that the commute is simply not worth it. Some are finding that they cannot do their work from home and so must find new jobs or new ways to do what they did before. Being forced to isolate has created the conditions for emergence and innovation, and not all of it is successful. Complexity-informed governments have created temporary universal incomes to enable people to be safe to fail. This is not the time to force people to “stand on their own two feet.” If you want people to stay at home, you have to enable them to do that in order to disrupt the pandemic, otherwise, they will have no choice but to head out looking for jobs, thereby increasing the spread of COVID-19.
Context-free and context-specific constraints
This is important and dense stuff, and Juarerro gets this from Lil Gatlin who wrote about it as far back as 1971, but here are the main points:
- In a system, the probability that something will happen vs. something else happening is due to constraints.
- A system with no constraints is “smooth,” in other words there is an equal probability of anything happening.
For example, if I give you a random number sequence like 761893826544528… what do you think the next number will be? In a random system, there is an equal probability that the next number will be between 0-9.
Now If I give you this number sequence: 123456… there is a much higher probability that the next number will be a 7. Why? Because the way to make some things more likely than others is to provide constraints. In this case, the constraint is your bias that the number sequence is not random and you are entrained to expect a 7.
So then what of constraints. Juarerro says:
- All systems come with built-in probability: it’s more likely to be one thing or another. Probability is determined by two types of constraints: context-free and context-sensitive.
- A context free-constraint is like a bias, or an assumption, or a preference.
- A context-sensitive constraint is something that is conditional on a state in the context.
For example, you might say “I like walking on the beach” and that is a context-free constraint that might help you get a date. But a context-sensitive constraint like “If it is raining, I hate walking on beaches” is helpful for your date to know so they don’t invite you out for a beach walk on a rainy day, thereby ruining the chances of romance.
(“But you said you liked to walk on beaches!” is not an endearing thing to say to a waterlogged and miserable partner)
This is useful for innovation because a context-free constraint – like a shared purpose – can help give a sense of direction to work. Developing a new shared purpose will cause some things to be more likely than others. If you decide to stop farming and start building cars, you will be unlikely to be found buying seeds, discussing the weather, or thinking about crop yields. You will be more likely to be focused on supply chains, manufacturing efficiency, engineering, and roads. But in both cases, the higher level context-free constraint is the need to make money.
Context-sensitive constraints begin to give a system coherence. A context-sensitive constraint creates an interdependence or an interrelationship between to parts of a system. Hating rain makes one’s mood dependant on rain, and that can govern or enable a whole set of behaviors. If you end up with a friend who loves rain and one that hates rain, the probability of enjoying each other outdoors on a rainy day decreases radically. But it also means that two people may find that they both love being indoors playing board games while it is raining outside. Sustainable long term relationships are dependant on people finding novel ways of being together as their context-specific constraints change. This is called resilience: the ability to maintain coherence while changing.
Juarrero then talks about some useful kinds of constraints:
- Linkages and relationships: innovation requires interaction and collaboration and interdependence among what will become the components of a larger system.
- Catalysts: things which, given their presence, make other things possible. Catalysts act to break patterns or to create new ones and can sometimes become attractors in their own right.
- Feedback, especially positive (reinforcing) feedback between parts in a system which increases the likelihood of emergence.
- Rhythm, gait, cadence, sequence, order, and timing – temporal constraints – which are very helpful context-sensitive constraints that make things interconnected and interdependent in time as well as space.
In my work as a facilitator and a consultant that helps people innovate, I catalog these attractors with the ABCEI acronym, standing for Attractors, Boundaries, Connections, Exchanges, and Identities. These constraints can all be found active in systems and sets of problems. When people tell me that they are “stuck” we can usually find some of the constraints at play that are causing that state of affairs. Once we have put our finger on something, it’s a good idea to try catalyzing that constraint to see if we can break it or tighten it as need be, to create the conditions in which another course of action is more probable.
For example, today I was coaching someone to use Zoom. She had read the documentation and watched videos, but she had context-specific questions about the application. Clearly she needed more connection with someone who had more experience than she did. So I tightened that connection with her and focused the exchange of information. I started by giving her a tour and I showed her things, but when when I was going too fast she slowed me down, and ask me how she could do those things. Responding to this new constraint on our session – her desire to learn hands-on – I shifted her identity and handed her the power to host our meeting and she took a turn making breakout groups. The whole session took a funny turn when we ended up chasing each other through ten breakout rooms we had created.
By the end of the session, she had enough information to be able to schedule and host a Zoom meeting. She took on the mantle of “Zoom host” an identity that an hour previously, we didn’t even know existed.
Learning like this is emergent and one can work with constraints to discover new ways to teach, new ways to learn and play, and new things to do to address old problems. Constraints-led learning is major field of pedagogy and my friend Mark O Sullivan, a football coach with AIK in Stockholm, is one of the leading proponents of this way of learning skills and teaching the complex sport of football.
Closure
The last part of Juarrero’s talk is about closure, the essential dynamic that makes emergence possible. She says:
- Loops create novelty and innovation. When a loop closes, what emerges is cohesion and cohesiveness.
- Autocatalytic, circular causality and closed positive feedback loops generate novelty.
- Parts interact and when the loop closes, an emergent whole is created, and when that loops back it influences the parts: cultures, systems, organizations, communities, identities,. These are all cohesive and influence parts that come into the system.
Stuart Kauffman’s work on evolutionary biology and autocatalytic systems describes this process beautifully. Essentially the ancestors of all living things are small contained systems of molecules that act on one another. A interacts with B to create C and C interact with A to create B, and suddenly you have a coherent system that “creates itself.”
At the cultural level, look at the way that feedback loops and closure create communities online, for better or worse. In highly partisan contexts, “echo-chambers” are simply autocatalyzing social systems, where biases are reinforced, shared purposes are strengthened and new identities are formed and stabilized. This can create such deep attractor wells into which people fall, almost like cults. Family members can no longer relate to them, they become unable to work with people who are different than they are, especially those who are considered “the enemy.”
Closure creates identity and landscapes of mountains and valleys that Juarrero talks about toward the end of her talk. A mountain might represent an idea that is unthinkable – having dinner with your racist uncle – and a valley might be a much easier, more preferable, and more possible outcome, such as going to a rally for racial justice with your friends. The way in which constraints have closed and looped and fed back information to you in your life will determine which of these two scenarios is most probable. When you choose dinner with your uncle. everyone will express surprise. They never saw that coming. You must have climbed a mountain to make that possible.
Juarrero ends with a really important point about what happens with context-specific constraints operate in a closed system: you get identities, cultures and mindsets, which themselves become context-free constraints for new things entering the system. If you have ever had the experience of moving to a new place you know this well. On our island where I live we have a “Newcomers Guide” that talks about practical realities of becoming a Bowen Islander. It contains a helpful mix of tangible facts – like where the school is, and how to check the ferry schedule. But it also contains insider information about the emergent characteristics of Bowen Island life that have grown out of our interactions with each other and our environment over many decades. These include things such as “Someone flashing their hazard lights in the rearview mirror is not being a jerk. They are a firefighter on their way to a call” or “Don’t ask online for whom an ambulance siren was sounding…” The original guide was written in 2016, and I can already see where things need changing, although the heuristics by which one shod live here, seem robust enough for now.
Like everything associated with complexity these three simple concepts – emergence, constraints, and closure – are easy to see, difficult to unpack, and powerful in practice. Go read and listen to Alica Juarrero though, and be grateful, as I am, that someone as brilliant as her has done the heavy lifting for us.
I live on an island, literally. It is a small community located near Vancouver, home to 3750 people in the winter and perhaps 5000 or so in the summer. Living on an island attunes one to the realities of working with bounded spaces. There is really only one way in our out of here, through the ferry, so it is a good chance to explore and learn about self-organizing systems. And as anyone who has visited an island knows, every one has its own unique culture and character, developed through decades of living in tightly connected, tightly bounded community.
During the pandemic, all I can see are islands within islands within islands, as each of us retreats into heavily bounded spaces, contained within other heavily bounded spaces and so on. Holonic containers repeating at fractal scales. Our word is organizing itself to defeat a virus that can permeate all but the most impermeable boundaries, and for a complexity worker, it is fascinating.
Complex adaptive systems consist of agents operating within bounded spaces. The five main factors that influence self-organization in complex systems are:
- Connections between agents in the system and the Exchange between those agents.
- The Identities that those agents have, in any given context.
- The Attractors and Boundaries that form the spaces in which agents interact. These contain and constrain the behaviour of the agents in the system.
The world is fractal at the moment meaning that these systems are nested within one another; the whole of one system becomes a part of a higher level space. Levels look like this:
- As a person, I try to keep the virus from entering my body
- I am in a relationship with two other people in my home and we are trying to keep the virus from entering our home. Our Chief Public Health Officer calls these “bubbles,” defined right now by people you can touch.
- Our bubble lives in a community and we must be very careful to keep at least two meters away from other bubbles so that we can keep the virus from entering our bubble. “Don’t connect the bubbles” is the heuristic here.
- Our community is very highly contained, being an island, and we have to do everything we can to limit the connections and exchanges we have to other communities.
- All of us together are living in a province that is itself contained and has limited connection with other provinces in our country. As a result, differences are appearing in how each province is handling the crises. and so far ours is doing fairly well.
- Our country is also bounded and contained, with very little international travel, and so we are also starting to see differences in how different countries are handling the pandemic, even close neighbours like Canada and the US. Anyone arriving in our country to stay must self-quarantine for 14 days and that is an order that is enforceable.
- And then of course, here we are on earth, perhaps yearning for an escape to a cleaner place, but no such place exists.
So it is clear that the two main factors influencing the pandemic are boundaries and connections at this point. Managing these is what we are doing now. Public health is about influencing behaviour, and as behaviour is an emergent property of people interacting within systems, it can only be influenced by changing the conditions for self-organization. Health authorities are applying tight constraints on Boundaries and Connections in order to influence behaviour and within each of the various levels, in the hopes that behaviours will change and we will ‘flatten the curve.” The challenge, as always, is that you cannot predict what will work and what won’t, so you need to try things and see what happens and adjust. Lots of adjustment has been going on and we can see a gradual tightening of Boundaries and narrowing of connections. Just as you are supposed to wash your hands and not touch your face, people in communities are expected to keep physically distant from one another and stay at home as much as possible.
Application in practice
By all accounts, this is working in British Columbia, where I live. All of our nested holons are engaged in the same project so that even with outliers who are disobeying the public health orders and recommendations, we are generally operating at the moment within the capacity of our health care system. Of course, things can change very quickly and so our daily reports have contained a mix of the carrot and the stick: praise at the efforts that are paying off, and a dire warning that we have not yet reached our peak and that the choices we make now will determine how many people literally live or die in the next few weeks and months.
Our only metric that matters is the curve. Exceeding the capacity of our health care system to provide care will trigger a massive escalation in this crisis meaning even tighter constraints. Currently, we are managing well, and we haven’t had any major tightening of constraints since March 18 for the general population.
As a case study, the way the British Columbia government has handled the pandemic is an excellent example of managing in complexity. I put this down to our Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Dr. Henry is trained in public health and preventative medicine, which is itself a complexity field. She was the operational lead in Toronto during the SARS epidemic in 2003 and she subsequently worked on the ebola and H1N1 outbreaks. She knows her stuff.
Her advice to British Columbians has been a mixture of heuristics – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, practice physical distancing – and orders that make it illegal to gather in groups larger than 50, and by law officers have been empowered locally to enforce physical distancing orders around much smaller groups in public places. This shows excellent use of what we try to teach with Cynefin: the proper application of the right use of constraints and practices for the type of situation at hand, with sophisticated monitoring, openness to change, and decisive action. My confidence in her is unparalleled. This is what a top rate complexity-informed leader looks like. Her actions and her influence have been widely praised and as a result of her leadership at this moment, people in our province generally feel safe.
What I worry about now
From a complexity perspective, the worry is what might happen to the connections and boundaries that are currently the most important constraints at play. In general, the tighter you make a constraint, the more catastrophically it fails and so there is a fine art to finding just the right balance to manage the disease and not provoke widespread social unrest. Even though we would all be 100% safe if we were locked in our houses and forced at gunpoint to stay there, this would probably provoke a massive social reaction that would defy that order en masse, creating the perfect conditions for 100% of the population to contract the virus. Likewise, a too lackadaisical attitude will not be effective in keeping people separate. There are already concerns that the March 18th order needs to be tightened to groups of less than 50. At this point, I think everyone would agree with that. The major boundary violations have been happening in house parties which is very dangerous as one infected person at a party will almost certainly infect everyone else who will take the virus home to their own generally tightly constrained bubble. Within bubbles, we don;t have boundaries, so the virus spreads by jumping across a boundary at one scale and finding it’s way into a bubble at a lower scale.
This has massive implications especially for people whose ability to adhere to orders and practice good heuristics is compromised by poverty, disability, or disempowerment. A general population health approach allows for flexibility in the system so that in principles, those who cannot adhere to the highest standard can nevertheless do their best. Our federal government emergency benefit, which looked initially like a $2000 a month income supplement for any who need it, now appears to be excluding up to a third of workers in our country. This is NOT the time to exclude people who would otherwise need to go out into the community to find work. The simplest solution would be to make that benefit available to all, to protect renters and homeowners from losing their homes during this period and housing homeless people properly in empty hotels instead of on uncomfortable cots in conventions centres and hockey rinks. Our society’s unequal in-bred distrust of the poor and disabled will have massive consequences if we don’t get this right.
At the best of times our system lets hundreds of thousands of people fall through the cracks. These days what will also certainly fall through the cracks is the virus we are trying to contain, simply because we don’t trust poor people.
On our island, we have asked that no one come and visit us, as we try to limit the connections with the outside world. This is because within the bubble of our island we have self-organized practices and systems that are working to care for our community. We are a small island, tightly connected, and our community crisis infrastructure is very small. People coming to live in the summer homes, or coming to visit for the day don’t know the protocols that have developed here and many small communities are reporting that visitors are more cavalier than residents are. Indeed this article names the problem of uncontrolled connections between bubbles as a major issue for small towns. (The lede phrase “wealth is the vector” is a powerful statement of the truth). Small communities are fragile social ecosystems. An outbreak of COVID-19 on our island, for example resulting from a visiting infected boater who doesn’t understand or follow our social practices, could ravage our General Store staff and would have a catastrophic consequence. We would quickly run out of food options and have no choice but to make more frequent trips to the mainland, thus increasing the exposure and overall exchange bandwidth for the virus to move.
Other constraints are also playing into this. Our island is an interesting Attractor for people who have been cooped up in their homes for months and the weather is changing. It will be very hard to stop people visiting on the ferry or on boats and so our ferry company has begun making serious discouraging announcements about visitors to small islands and our tourism association has been ramping up the message. With a sunny long weekend coming up, I believe that we need to make ourselves less interesting as a catalyst. I imagine the provincial government will be driving home that message too. Already ferry runs between the mainland and Vancouver Island have been massively reduced, with several reserved only for cargo. Entire routes have been shuttered.
Identities too become an important aspect to play with. We see our provincial government and health officer praising British Columbians and reminding us that we are all in this together. they are trying hard to get everyone to belong to the same team, and showing the results is a good way to reinforce that identity. Using wartime metaphors, while not especially helpful, nevertheless have the effect of getting folks into a serious mode of action. Our health officer sprinkles her messages with calls to be diligent over one’s own role, and have kindness and compassion for others. She refuses to condemn people for momentary or temporary violations of physical distancing practices (she says “you don’t have the full picture of what your neighbour is up to, so don’t be quick to judge”) but has no qualms using her authority to enforce orders against house parties and large outdoor gatherings.
It’s interesting times to be sure, but it has been a living and breathing example of how complexity thinking is providing the best way through the pandemic. I hope you are currently living in a jurisdiction where your decision-makers understand this, and I know many people are not. To you, my friends, all I can say is make sure YOU take a complexity-informed view of the situation and keep your bubble as tight as a little rocky island.
Every year, to celebrate St’ David’s Day, Dave Snowden has shared a series of posts on the evolution of the Cynefin framework. This year he introduced the newest version. The framework changes, because as we use it, it has an evolutionary journey towards “better” and more coherent. Not every branch in its evolution has had helpful components, but I find the current iteration to be very useful because it is both simple to use, easy to introduce, and yet has quite a bit of depth.
During the pandemic, I’ve been using this version of it to help people think about what to do and this is how I propose to tour you around it as well.
First, it’s helpful to orient people to the framework. To begin with, it has five domains: the one in the middle, plus four others. It’s helpful to think of the domains as a slope, starting high in the bottom right and tapering counterclockwise around to the bottom left. The domain in the middle is the most important for me, and the most underappreciated. It is the domain of Confusion (it used to be called Disorder). The domains on the right side are “ordered” meaning that stuff there is largely knowable and predictable, and problems are solveable. These Clear or Complicated domains are, distinguished by the number of interactions going on – the more parts in the system, the more Complicated it is – and the level of expertise required to know what the answer to a problem should be.
The domains on the left side are “unordered” meaning that situations are unknowable and unpredictable. This is the world of Complexity and Chaos. These are distinguished by the way the system changes, self-organizes, and creates emergent phenomena. Complex systems exhibit emergence and self-organization, and Chaos exhibits the lack of any meaningful constraints a sense of randomness and crises.
The further you go counterclockwise, the more unordered and unstable the system is. If you go clockwise, you introduce stability and order to the system. Stability lies clockwise of where you are now and instability lies counterclockwise. It is important to note that this is true until you get to the boundary between Clear and Chaos. That is like a cliff. One falls off of the Clear domain into chaos and it is difficult – if not impossible – to recover and clamber back up to the well-ordered world with Clear answers.
Most helpful for understanding strategy and the use of the framework is understanding how constraints work. From Clear to Chaos, one can move through the framework using constraints: Clear systems have fixed constraints that can break catastrophically and can be repaired easily f you know what you are doing. Think of a water leak. If you know how to repair it, it is a simple matter to do so. If you don’t, you fall off that cliff into Chaos quite quickly, and it takes a lot of time to get back to normal.
Complicated systems allow for a little more latitude in practice and so have governing constraints, such as laws and procedures. Break them at your peril, but also discuss them to make sure they govern activity in the system well.
Complex systems are characterized by enabling constraints which give rise to all manner of creativity, emergence and self-organization, but which can also be immutable. Think of the laws of physics or principles of evolutionary biology that seem to generate a huge variety of systems and living beings. But we don’t have a creature that can breathe by oxidizing neon, because neon doesn’t oxidize.
Constraints in complexity can be quite tight and still contribute to emergence and creative action. Think of the way the rules of the haiku form don’t tell you what to write, but instead offer guidance on the number of syllables and lines to use: three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. These simple constraints give rise to tremendous creativity and inspiration as you work to create beauty within a distilled form.
In Chaos the absence of constraints means that nothing makes much sense, and all you can do is choose a place to act, apply constraints and quickly sense what comes next. This is what first responders do. They stabilize the situation and then figure out whether a technical expert is needed (to operate the jaws of life) or whether the situation needs to be studied a bit more (so we know how a pandemic actually occurs and the different ways a new virus operates in the human body).
That’s the basic orientation to the framework. There are additional features above that are helpful to note, including the green zones of liminality and the division of the Confusion domain into A and C, standing for Aporetic and Confused. Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, which is just fine. Sometimes things need to remain a little murky for a while. “Confused” refers to the state of mind where you just aren’t getting it, and you don’t understand the problem. It’s often the result of a failure to see past one’s own biases, habits, and entrained patterns of solving things.
Contextualizing your problem
One meaning of the Welsh word “Cynefin” is “places or habitats of multiple belonging.” The name of the framework references the fact that in any situation of confusion, you are likely to have all five types of problems or systems at play. So when you are working on trying to understand a situation, start by assuming you are in Confusion. As much as it is tempting to look at all situations related to COVID-19 right now as Chaos, they aren’t. In fact, the desire to do see them that way is actually a key indicator that you are in Confusion. When I am teaching this framework, I sometimes label this domain “WTF?” because that is precisely what is happening here. We don’t know what’s going on, we’re confused, and we’ve never been here before. Any data you collect about a problem should all go into the Confused domain first.
From there you can ask yourself where things belong. This is called a Cynefin contextualization and is a core Cognitive Edge method for working with Cynefin. It works like this: you literally put as many aspects of your situation on individual post-it notes as you can, put them in the middle of a table and sort data into basic categories according to these criteria:
- If the aspect is clear and obvious and things are tightly connected and there is a best practice, place it bottom right.
- If the aspect has a knowable answer or a solution, has an endpoint, but requires an expert to solve it for you, put it top right.
- If the aspect has many different possible approaches, and you can’t be sure what is going to work and no one really has an answer, put it top left.
- If the aspect is a total crisis, and you are overwhelmed by it, put it bottom left.
- If you can’t figure out which domain to put the aspect in, leave it in the middle for now. NOT EVERY POST IT NOTE NEEDS TO GO IN THE FOUR OUTER DOMAINS.
Now you have a table with five clusters of post-it notes. You can do lots of things with your data now, but for me, the next step is to have a look at the stuff on the right side. Make a boundary between the stuff you can do right now (Clear) and the stuff you need an expert to help you with (Complicated). You can cluster similar pieces of data together and suddenly you have little projects taking shape.
In the top left corner (Complex), make a distinction between things that are more tightly constrained and things that are less tightly constrained. Think of this domain as a spectrum from closed to open. For example, moving my work online is constrained by needing a laptop and some software, and a place to work and some hours in the day to minimize interruptions. Those are fairly tight constraints, even though I know that I’m not going to get it right the first time around and no expert will solve it for me. I have to make it work for my context. Figuring out how to manage a team of eight people from home is much less constrained, and even comes close to chaotic. So that gives you a sense of the variety possible as you move from the boundary between Complicated and Complex and the boundary between Complex and Chaos. And you can see now why the liminal spaces exist there too. It’s not always clear cut.
Anything else on the left side that is overwhelming is in Chaos, so leave it down at the bottom left. If it is an actual crisis, you probably should take care of it right now and then come back to your framework later!
Stuff that is still confusing stays in the middle and you might want to take a crack at sorting things into Aporetic and Confused. An example of Aporetic might be trying to figure out whether you have the virus or not without being able to get tested. Because you can’t know for sure, you have to hold that knowledge in suspension and let your actions be guided by the idea that you might have it, but you might not too. But you might. You just can’t know right now.
So now you have options:
- For Clear aspects, just do them. Don’t put them off either, because failing to do so will drop you into chaos. WASH YOUR HANDS OFTEN FOR 20 SECONDS WITH SOAP. That’s an order. Orders work well here.
- For Complicated aspects make a plan. You might be able to find someone to help you learn the technical aspects of setting up a zoom meeting. You’ll definitely find videos and technical documentation to help you do it. You can learn that skill or find someone who knows it. This is what is meant by Sense-Analyse-Respond. Do a literature search, listen to the experts, and execute.
- For Complex problems, get a sense of possibilities and then try something and watch what happens. Figuring out how to be at home with your kids is pure complexity: you can get advice from others, talk about with friends and strangers, read blog posts and tweets, but the bottom line is that you need to get to work and learn as you go, engaging in a rapid iterative cycle and see if helpful patterns emerge. As you learn things, document practices and principles that help guide you in making decisions. If rules are too tight, loosen them. If the kids need more structure, apply it. Finding those sweet spots requires adaptive action, and learning as you go. Here we talk about Probe-Sense-Respond. Don’t worry about collecting tons of information before acting: it won’t help you past a certain point. Act on a hunch first and monitor the results as you go.
- Liminal complexity means that you are choosing to enter into proximity to either Complicated or Chaos. if you apply constraints (like enforcing rules on the kids) you are moving complexity towards the ordered domains. That might work, but too much rigidity will create problems. On the other hand, if your constraints are too rigid you may find yourself unwittingly creating patterns that make it hard to flow with the changing times. And so you release the constraints until you can discover something new and helpful, and then apply constraints again to help you manage in complex times. An example might be adopting the assumption that you are a carrier of the virus and letting that assumption guide your behaviours. That helps you to make choices that will probably benefit you and the people around you. (And here are some heuristics to practice with if you have kids at home during the pandemic)
- For chaos, you are going to need to apply constraints quickly and maintain them until the situation stabilizes. That might mean self-quarantine if you are infected and sharing a house with others. It might mean relying on emergency services to impose those constraints for you.
- For confusion, think of this as the top of the fountain and as new data enters your system, add it there until it trickles into the right domain. I like to revisit things that are in this domain from time to time, because as I get to work on stuff, sometimes my confusion about other things disappears, or sometimes I find a true paradox that can never be resolved and those are delightful in themselves.
So, to conclude
In summary:
- Cynefin is a five (expanding to seven) domain framework. Whatever you are doing probably has aspects of all the domains at play at any given time.
- If you need to learn something, or discover new things, loosen constraints. If you need to stabilize a situation, tighten constraints.
- In the Ordered domains, rules, laws, and experts are helpful and should be obeyed. In the unordered domains, principles and heuristics should be adopted that are coherent with goodness, safety, and care, to guide behaviour and learn new things.
- In chaos, stabilizing the situation is most important. Act now to restrict your actions and once things are stable, make the next move.
Be careful, be aware, be connected, learn and share as you go. None of us have been here before, so offer grace and support. Try to look at what is happening and suspend your judgement. Don’t spread information unless you know it is reliable, and help each other out.