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

Military contexts, perhaps because they have long struggled with the need for distributed authority and responsiveness, abound with examples of heuristics. Napoleon, for example, told his armies to ‘march to the sound of the guns’ instead of waiting for orders. Another example: when the battle plan falls apart – capture the high ground, stay in tou

Anthro-complexity The study of complexity as it is experienced in human systems, rather than mechanistic or natural (animal and geological) systems. Human systems have a higher degree of complexity for many reasons, including, for instance, the different behavioral patterns that identity-structures create and how they act within different contexts.

aporia, a state of authentic confusion i.e., being confused and aware.

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

Cynefin values coherence and difference, even though they are in tension. Too much difference and things become incoherent. Too much coherence and things become too homogeneous.

Elephant paths, or desire lines, are informal paths that pedestrians prefer to take from one location to another rather than using a sidewalk or, in our case, the paved garden paths.

At its most basic, Cynefin allows us to distinguish between three different kinds of systems: ordered systems that are governed and constrained in such a way that cause and effect relationships are either clear or discoverable through analysis; complex systems where causal relationships are entangled and dynamic and the only way to understand the s