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

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

Cynefin is at its heart a decision support framework, not a method or model.

When we look at these two iterations side-by-side, the evolution of the Framework becomes clearer. When we are in any of the four domains of either Clear, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic, there are appropriate actions that can be taken. The Confused domain refers to a state of not knowing where to situate ourselves in the rest of Cynefin. It is, th

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.” – Blaise Pascal

“Designing rules assumes an ordered universe in which we can predict the outcome of a defined action and in which we can know the range of possible circumstances. Heuristics, on the other hand, provide more general guidance; they have a level of ambiguity which makes them more adaptable.

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,

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.

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

Time matters in human systems. The patterns we can observe today were shaped by the initial starting conditions of the system and many years of evolutionary change. This means that while complex systems are inherently unpredictable and non-causal, they have dispositional states i.e., they are predisposed towards certain behaviors. If we understand

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).