Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making Into the Fabric of Our World ED02

Methods, tools, and frameworks, however, are not universally applicable; there are no silver bullets. We articulate this in Cynefin with the term ‘bounded applicability’ i.e., we believe that most things are useful within certain boundaries.

Many of our methods are scaffolds, they create temporary structures within which new meanings can emerge.

I have always used frameworks to force insight. It’s an old trick of rhetoric: start in front of a large audience with the sentence “There are three key aspects to [name of topic]...” and even if you only think of one at the beginning, the other two will always come to mind; to what I call the prepared mind. So my flip charts have been about forcin

The primary definition of Cynefin, is at its heart, about a flow of engagement over time with things known, unknown and unknowable, loved and unloved, all of which entangle our lives and create meaning.

I close my eyes and inhale deeply. Hold for ten seconds. I breathe out. Hold for ten seconds. This is a sequence I repeat whenever I start to feel anxious or tense - emotions I experience much too often for my liking these days.

“It describes that relationship: the place of your birth and of your upbringing, the environment in which you live and to which you are naturally acclimatised.”

Cynefin is an enigmatic word with a broad and deep meaning. It is a dynamic word that speaks of flow through time and space; a multiplicity of tangled connections; of community.

Klein et al., 2006 (1) define it as “Sensemaking is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.” Whereas, Maitlis and Christianson, 2014 (2) define it as a process through which individuals or groups work to gain insight into

Order in Cynefin divides into two domains: 1) Clear (constraints are rigid or fixed and the relationship between cause and effect is self-evident and clear to any reasonable person) and 2) Complicated (causal relationships exist but require expertise or analysis to discover them. Constraints are governing, providing confidence in the boundary of ex

Order – To accommodate the disconnect between reality (ontology: how things are), perception (phenomenology: how we perceive things), and knowledge (epistemology: how we know things) in human systems,