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

Finding your Way around this Book A celebration of beautifully entangled complexity

Domains – Cynefin is a typology that describes three primary types of systems: Ordered, Complex, and Chaotic, each defined by the type of constraint, or absence thereof.

Organizing Principles: the Spirit of Cynefin

Constraints or boundaries create coherence.

When we find ourselves in the in-between spaces, the liminal space, our task is to be mindful of suspending judgment, keeping our options open and enabling action that allows novelty to emerge and patterns to stabilize.

phronesis to reference Aristotle. The latter is a type of practical wisdom, translated by the Romans as prudentia, which comes from providentia, meaning foresight and sagacity.

Sophia is a combination of nous, which has a sense of discernment and epistēmē, which in the modern day would be science: knowledge that is teachable and built through logic.

Cynefin is also part of a body of work looking at the dynamic interplay between deductive, inductive, and abductive sense-making.

1. Formation