Phenomenology The philosophical study of consciousness and experiences from the first person perspective.

Dave Snowden, whose work informs this book, defines sense-making as “making sense of the world in order to act in it.”

Principle 1: We embrace messy coherence

with all of this flux, language remains understandable to us. It remains coherent as long as the messiness is bounded by the rules or principles of grammar. In this way, language is an excellent example of messy coherence, or in other words coherent heterogeneity. We can accommodate differences within boundaries that ensure coherence. (For another

There are two principles that I’d like to highlight here: Bounded Applicability (most things have value if we understand the boundaries within which they are valid) and Coherent Heterogeneity (embracing as much diversity as we can without fragmenting or becoming incoherent).

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.

“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and between them, there are doors.” – William Blake

Introducing a state of Aporia, or deliberate puzzlement, allows us to present seemingly contradictory and competing understandings as valid and useful pieces of the bigger picture.” – Dave Snowden

The attempt to remove (or require) conflict, in many idealistic approaches that value stability or turbulence but ignore context, is the worst of all possible worlds. By always choosing one option or another, we can get the worst of both.”