Tom Graves / Tetradian

As you’ll see from the comments to my previous post on Cynefin, Dave Snowden again kindly came back with an appropriate critique:

The fact that order exist in nature (a constrained system that prevents agent action independent of the system) does not entail the statement that therefore all things can be reduced to order.

If you look at this from the perspective of constraints, relaxation and imposition then a lot of the problems you state above go away and there is no need to see order as an abstraction it is a phase state.

Looks like I need to do a fair bit of study on the theory of constraints…

But in some ways that isn’t related to the points I was trying to make. I fear we may be talking at slight cross-purposes here: surely the idea of a ‘phase state’ is an abstraction? a way of trying to shoehorn complexity into the knowable space?

Perhaps I could try tackling this a slightly different way…

Two quotes come to mind. One is a phrase that I think comes from James Gleick’s Chaos: “it turns out that behind apparent order lies an eerie kind of chaos; and behind that chaos lies an even eerier kind of order”. The kind of ‘order’ in the known-domain is not so much simple as simplistic, and to try to make it work in the real world we rapidly find ourselves making things more and more complicated, to cover more and more ’special-cases’ – in other words, we find ourselves in the knowable-domain, but still clinging to a strict concept of cause-and-effect, a linear notion of ‘order’. Hence Dave’s descriptions of those two domains as the ‘ordered’ side of the framework. But at some point we realise that even that isn’t going to work – usually because we run out of time to deal with the inevitable ‘analysis paralysis’ – which is when we switch over to the ‘unordered domains’. But even here we still cling onto the idea of ‘order’, although now it takes the form of Gleick’s ‘even eerier kind of order’, as attractors and constraints and so on. So what I’m suggesting here is that ‘unordered’ in Cynefin is perhaps a misnomer: it’s still ‘ordered’ – a different kind of abstraction, but still an abstraction. With all of the problems that that entails.

As I said in the last post, it’s essentially a philosophical position: we can choose to believe that “order is real”, or we can choose otherwise. I’m with Feyerabend: I don’t believe ‘order’ has any inherent reality – it’s a tool that’s useful for sensemaking, but that’s it.

In essence, it comes down to a question of ‘truth’ versus ‘usefulness’ – otherwise known as science versus technology. (Technology is not ‘applied science’ – though that’s something to be argued in another post!)

Which brings me to the second quote, or editorial headline, rather, from the current issue of the BMJ: “Cardiovascular risk tables: estimating risk is not the problem, using it to tailor treatment is”. Risk-tables are classic examples of artefacts of complex-space: we can model the attractors, the constraints and the rest of the respective collective risk. Insurance people then move sideways into the knowable-domain to calculate required profit-margins and the rest, in terms of the collective risk. But the moment we think that these tables tell us much about individuals, we’re in deep trouble – straight into the Gambler’s Fallacy, in fact. The notion of ‘order’ fails us, because it assumes that an abstraction about a generalised collective (i.e. pattern, law, etc) will apply to any individual which might appear to belong to the set described by that abstraction. But in terms of set-theory, if the individual only intersects with the abstraction’s set – in other words, is not entirely enclosed as a subset – then other factors may come to play, which may take priority over the expectations of the abstraction.

(To give another medical example, there was an article many years ago in World Medicine with an allegorical tale of “Ulbricht the Badger’s Guide to Immunology”. The key point was that whilst we understand extremely well why people fall ill, we still understand very little about why they don’t fall ill – and even less about how they have the temerity to fall well when we don’t expect them to do so!)

Many people make the mistake of thinking that chaos-theory and attractors and the like make the unpredictable predictable. They don’t: they make the type of unpredictability, or degree of unpredictability, more predictable, but that’s it. The ‘order’ they describe is that, ultimately, there is no order. Kind of a paradox, really, but there ’tis.

Which comes back to the practice of business, and business-consultancy. It’s not an abstraction: we have to find a way to get real results, in the real world. Which happens to be made up of individual instances. Which damn well ought to tell us that, at best, we are always dealing with some of the ‘unorderedness’ of the Cynefin chaotic-domain, and probably some of the Cynefin ‘unknown’ as well. If we start to believe that ‘order is real’ – that the real world is somehow ‘wrong’ if it fails to match our expectations – then we’re on the slippery slope to the inane world of Victorian medicine, in which surgeons routinely reported “operation successful, but patient died”…

Science expects ‘fail-safe’ conformance to its ‘truth’; but technology aims for useful approximations – hence ’safe-fail’. (Therein lies another post I ought to write, about ‘Inverse Murphy’.) In technology, we take an occurrence which is probably rare in nature, and provide conditions under which it becomes more and more probable – but as any maintenance engineer would warn us, we don’t delude ourselves into thinking we have any real ‘control’ over what happens. However probable it may become, it is never more than probable: it never becomes certain. The delusion of ‘control’ is useful when we’re dealing with incidents en masse – as in risk-tables and the like – but it’s not useful once we come down to the infinite complexities of individuals.

Hence, in Cynefin terms, we start off in the ‘unknown’ space; we’re usually wisest to start sensemaking in the ‘unordered’ space, working orderwards (clockwise) from chaotic, to complex, to knowable, to known. Dave describes this as “from exploration to exploitation”, but I’d suggest it’s better described as “from exploration to planning for exploitation” – because to do the exploitation, we need to work back to unordered in order to deal with individuality, the ‘market of one’ and suchlike.

So I don’t see how descriptions of phase-states and the like actually help that much in this – true, they’re not the same kind of ‘order’ as in the known and knowable domains, but it’s still ‘order’, still an abstraction. Useful for planning, for sense-making – but sometimes dangerously misleading at ‘the coal-face’.

Sure, attractors and constraints and the like are a heck of a lot more useful than Taylorism when we’re dealing with the messy complexity of the real-world: but if we’re not careful, the notion of ‘order’ itself – in whatever form it may take – can lead us straight back to what is really nothing more than a subtler form of the Taylorist trap. Guess that’s all I’m saying, really.

Another trail following up on Dave Snowden’s comment to my previous Cynefin post, and specifically to this one assertion of Dave’s:

Order exists in the real world.

Sounds obvious: but does it? Does ‘order’ really exist? Or do we simply hope it does?

I know, I know – this’ll sound at first like one of Tom’s dreaded semantic quibbles. But in fact it has huge ramifications, both theoretical and practical, for Cynefin and for how we tackle complexity in business and elsewhere. What it comes down to is this:

• if order is real in the physical sense – a physical fact – then ultimately everything is reduceable to the Cynefin ‘known’ domain
• if order is not a physical fact – is in any way an abstraction from physical fact – then ultimately the only thing that is ‘real’ is the Cynefin central ‘unknown’ domain; any ’sense-making’ – interpretation of ‘order’ – would be an arbitrarily-selected filter on that reality, with all the conceptual, operational and other dangers that that would imply

The classic Taylorist machine-metaphor for business assumes that order is real – in effect, that the ‘known’ is the only Cynefin domain that is real, and that all the others are simply mistakes for which others should be punished. Yet that in turn is derived from arrogant Victorian assumptions about social hierarchy as ‘the natural social order’, and the circular-reasoning of Huxleyan/Darwinian notions of ’survival of the fittest’, underpinned by a seriously-mangled misunderstanding of the limits of Newtonian science. As Cynefin shows us so well, it doesn’t work: it’s only an abstraction, not ‘reality’ itself – and punishing people for failing to conform to our assumptions is neither realistic nor effective…

By current standards, the Newtonian ‘known’ is also very poor science: the cutting edge of current science is closer to the Cynefin ‘complex’ domain, with a few hints towards the ‘chaotic’ domain. A present-day equivalent of Taylorism’s claims to ’scientific management’ would be based much more on complexity and systems-theory, for example.

But it’s questionable that there could ever be such a thing as ’scientific management’, because as Paul Feyerabend argued in Against Method, the only valid principle in science is “anything goes” – order is not ‘real’, it’s only an abstraction. Each of the Cynefin domains is a description of a different type of order – but each is still an abstraction. The only part of Cynefin that is ‘real’ is ‘the unknown’. And the further away from the ‘known’ domain we get, the closer we get towards what is real.

So Dave’s move from the ‘unordered’ domains – more accurately, the not-linear-cause-and-effect domains – to the ‘ordered’ domains (in other words from ‘chaotic’ and ‘complex’ to ‘knowable’ and ‘known’) is just a means to simplify sense-making, and to generalise principles that can perhaps be useful in working with the real world. But doing so increases the abstraction – it moves further away from reality. And the danger is that the ‘known’ domain creates a delusion of control – comfortable for many, of course, but often lethal, especially in contexts such as social work where people are forced to adapt to the system, which is then supposedly ‘true’ because people have adapted themselves to the system… To apply Cynefin in practice, we must move back again in the opposite direction, from the ‘ordered’ domains back to social complexity, then to the chaotic-domain ‘market-of-one’; and then ultimately accept the humility that all we can do is do what we can in the inherent unknowability of here, now, in this place, this context.

The crucial concern here about order comes down to two views:

• order is real, therefore it is true, therefore the world must adapt itself to fit that order – or that the world is at fault if it does not match that order
• order is an abstraction, therefore the concern is about whether that abstraction is useful in guiding adaptation of our responses to the natural ‘un-order’ of the world – that we need to adapt to the world, not the world to our ‘order’

These are, in essence, philosophical positions: archist versus anarchist. And whilst I’ve no doubt many people would prefer the former, I’d place myself firmly in the latter category: I’d describe myself as a ‘business anarchist’, because that’s what works in the real world of business-activities. In my experience, my understanding as a business consultant, the moment we say that “order exists in the real world”, we automatically set ourselves up for failure, because every assumption about order will eventually lead us dangerously astray. Order is an abstraction: it is merely useful, not ‘true’. Hence in business as much as in science, the only valid principle that does not impede progress is “anything goes”. And the limits on that ‘anything goes’ are not some external notion of ‘truth’, but vision and values – honesty, integrity, social responsibility and much else besides.

Cynefin provides us with a useful framework, indicating the appropriate ways to respond in terms of different types of ‘order’. But whatever type of ‘order’ we work with in Cynefin – known, knowable, complex, chaotic – it’s still only ‘order’. It’s still only an abstraction: it isn’t ‘real’ as such. We forget that fact at our peril.

This one will probably only make sense to those who have some experience of Cynefin (see also Cognitive Edge) – but it should be useful anyway even if you don’t.

The diagram shows the usual layout of the Cynefin domains – unordered on the left, ordered on the right.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this whilst working on the SEMPER book – hence reviewing my notes from the original Cynefin course I did with Dave some years back.

Idea I’m working on is about where the action needs to happen in the real world. As I remember, Dave said that we need to bring everything from the unordered domains (complex, chaotic) into the ordered domains (known, knowable) in order to work on them. And he’s right, if our aim is to make sense of what’s going on – hence Cynefin as a ’sense-making’ framework.

But I’d argue that he’s not right when we actually come to apply that sense-making to a real context in the real world. To do the latter, we have to move back again, from the ordered into the unordered, because at some point, and to some extent, the real world is inherently always either complex (if we have numbers of instances large enough to derive patterns) or chaotic (the single point of contact, or ‘market of one’).

More to the point, if we use Dave’s approach alone (i.e. unordered to ordered), we’ll be straight back in the same mess that we’ve always been with the positivist, ordered view of the world (regulation, analysis and so on) – it’s never been a high-survival tactic to try to force the messy complexities of the real world to fit in with some arbitrarily-chosen ‘rules’ or ‘laws’, and then complain when Reality Department won’t go along with our assumptions. :wrygrin: Instead, we need to respect and work with the fact that reality is complex and chaotic. Hence the need to move back from ordered to unordered at the point of action. Which ain’t going to be popular with the control-freaks and bean-counters, of course, but that’s their problem, really.

Dunno whether Dave’s shifted his thinking on this point in the past few years – he probably has, though I haven’t seen anything on it in published work – but it’s a suggestion to think about, anyway.