• destivia: @ebuise @tetradian @richardveryard Never forget a ‘model’ is always only a preliminary version of how we see or want to see reality.

After which, yes, the whole happy ‘passel o’ rogues’ piled in, all in their different ways:

• richardveryard: @destivia @ebuise @tetradian We can only replace a model with a better model, despite what Saint Paul says (1 Corinthians 13).
• ebuise: @destivia @tetradian @richardveryard Nice! In a way, a (coherent) set of principles is a special kind of model… #insight
• richardveryard: @ebuise @destivia @tetradian I have difficulty with the idea that a set of principles is supposed to represent some aspect of reality.
• destivia: @ebuise @tetradian @richardveryard Indeed.
• ebuise: @richardveryard @destivia @tetradian A few hours ago @krismeukens tweeted: “The core of strategy work is discovering the critical factors and designing a way of “coordinating” and “focusing” actions to deal with them.”
• Aren’t principles derived, directly or indirectly, from this proces? And as such related to reality and steering into future realities?
• ebuise: @richardveryard @destivia @tetradian Can’t aspired directionality of the future be related to reality?
• krismeukens: @ebuise (cc @richardveryard @destivia @tetradian) indeed, that is my current thinking
• krismeukens: @tetradian In near-realtime would sensemaking not just be limited to deal with it as either simple/chaotic?  Sense-catorize or just act?

I caught up with the conversation at this point, and given that my name had been invoked right the way through the above – even though I hadn’t been there – I thought I’d better join in:

• tetradian: @ebuise cc @richardveryard @destivia ‘aspired directionality of future’ – agreed: that’s a primary role of principles

And, of course, the ongoing problem with Cynefin had been invoked as well:

• tetradian: @krismeukens Cynefin’s Act>Sense>Respond is inadequate/incomplete – see later part of http://bit.ly/AxCDSB and posts linked from there

I ought to expand that Tweet here, because the above ‘explanation’ suffers from the dread 140-character limit on Twitter. As described in the SCAN posts – perhaps particularly in ‘Comparing SCAN and Cynefin‘ and ‘Belief and faith at the point of action‘ – I would answer ‘Yes’ to Kris Meukens’ question “In near-realtime would sensemaking not just be limited to deal with it as either simple/chaotic?” (‘Chaotic’ being the nearest Cynefin equivalent to what I’ve termed the ‘Not-known/Faith’ domain for sensemaking and decision-making respectively). The point is that in near-real-time, there isn’t time for anything else: in particular, no time to think, hence, no time for Complicated or Complex (the equivalent of the latter described in SCAN as the ‘Ambiguous/Use’ domain).

The catch is that whilst Cynefin’s definition for tactics for the Simple-domain – ‘Sense-Categorise-Respond’ – does match up quite well with what happens on the Simple/Belief side, the defined tactics for the Chaotic side – ‘Act-Sense-Respond’ – for the most part do not line with what actually happens. Or rather, they sort-of-describe one particular type of tactic that can be used in that domain, but in many if not most cases those tactics are exactly what not to do.

More on that in a moment; for now, back to the Twitter-stream:

• tetradian: @krismeukens one-liner: Cynefin is to Chaotic as SixSigma is to Complex: its basic concepts dont match to the needs of the context
• transarchitect: @tetradian @krismeukens True Tom.
• krismeukens: @tetradian @richardveryard I have the impression that often the ‘dynamics’ aspect of cynefin is forgotten http://bit.ly/sXeDBp [PDF]
• tetradian: @krismeukens it’s the ‘dynamics’ of Cynefin that are the problem… for Chaotic, they all consist of ‘running away’… //  Cynefin’s so-called ‘Chaotic’ is domain of uncertainty in real-time action: ‘running away’ is not sustainable/viable tactic…

This obviously needs some further explanation, so we’ll go to the original source as pointed in Kris Meukens’ link above: Kurtz & Snowden, ’The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world‘ (2003). The following (presumably (c) Kurtz & Snowden, used here under ‘fair use’) is its Figure 4, ‘Cynefin Dynamics’:

The Simple and Chaotic domains are on the lower-right and lower-left respectively. For now, we’ll ignore the paths that only go between Complex, Complicated and/or Simple (3, 4, 5 and 6), and focus only those that apply at real-time, Simple<->Chaotic (1, 2) and Chaotic<->Complex (7 and the various orange-line paths).

[Path 3 links to Simple, but tends to occur at significant distance from real-time: it's typified by PDCA-style learning-loops and the like.]

Paths 1 ‘Collapse’ and 2 ‘Imposition’ are generally well-known and (fairly)-well-understood. When the expectations of Belief (Simple) don’t match up to reality, there’s often some kind of ‘Collapse’. (That’s actually a failure-mode: it doesn’t describe how we can intentionally move into the ‘Chaotic’ when we acknowledge that the current belief-set doesn’t work.) Once in the Chaotic, and if panic is allowed to take hold, very often there’s an attempt at ‘Imposition’ of order – an assertion of ‘truth’ that pulls the context back into the Simple. (This too is often a failure-mode, by the way – especially if the imposed ‘truth’ likewise doesn’t match up with reality.) That Imposition typically occurs because someone decides to ‘take action’, the Act-Sense-Respond sequence: but what it causes is usually a failure-mode, a collapse back into the over-Simple.

The unnumbered orange-line paths illustrate well what I mean by ‘running away to the Complex domain’. Having arrived in the Chaotic domain, the Act-Sense-Respond tactic is used to elicit and grab at a momentary idea or sense-item and ‘escape’ to the Complex domain, to assess or analyse or analyse what it is or how it could be used. Rather than ‘holding the space’, the Act part of the tactic itself causes the retreat to the Complex. And in doing so, it moves out of real-time: it doesn’t work with the Chaotic as it is.  We might also note that whilst some of the orange pathways dead-end in the Complex domain – for example, ideas that, once assessed, turn out to be unusable – the paths that do ‘succeed’ all end up in the Complicated-domain. In effect, what the Cynefin-dynamics are suggesting here is that the only valid place for new ideas is ultimately in the domain of Complicated ‘control’ – in other words, right back in the same old trap of Taylorism and ‘scientific management’ again.

[This is one of several aspects of Cynefin that make it all too easy to misuse to delude worried business-folk into believing that the the deep complexity and chaos of the real-world can indeed all be subject to 'control'. Still seems to me that there are some real ethical concerns about the structure of Cynefin that really do need to be addressed... but that's just my opinion, of course...]

Path 7 ‘Divergence-Convergence’ indicates a slightly more refined version of the orange-lines paths: iterative rather than ‘one-shot’, but still centred on the Complex-domain, away from real-time action and real-time decision-making. This is what I mean by ‘dipping the toes into the chaos’: it’s a useful and valid way to garner new ideas, yet it still doesn’t work with the Chaotic as it is – like a mouse snatching the cheese, it’s grabbing some tasty morsel and then running away as fast as it can.

What there isn’t in any of the Cynefin-dynamics or other Cynefin descriptions is anything that does work with the actual nature of the Chaotic mode: for example, all the classic tactics for keeping the panic at bay, such as meditation and so on – and also ‘pre-seeding’ the space with principles and the like (which is where we started this long Twitter-conversation ). In fact many of these tactics are the exact inverse of the Cynefin pattern: rather than the “don’t just stand there, do something!” of Act-Sense-Respond, what we often most need is “don’t just do something, stand there”! That’s what I mean when I say that the Cynefin required-tactics are too limited here: Act-Sense-Respond does apply in certain cases, but it only matches up with a small subset of what we need to do (or not-do), and often it is just plain wrong.

Note too that, in terms of the Cynefin-dynamics above, the only pathways that remain in the near-real-time space are the Collapse/Imposition pair – which happen to represent a classic cyclic failure-mode.

In short, the Cynefin-dynamics give us a very incomplete picture and, at best, rather unhelpful picture of decision-dynamics at real-time, and tell us almost nothing about what actually does work in the near-real-time space.

So I hope you can see from this that there are some serious problems here that are just not being addressed in Cynefin: this is serious critique, and certainly not deserving the kind of petty personal putdown-attacks that have been the usual response from that direction. Sigh…

Anyway, back to the Twitter-stream:

• krismeukens: @tetradian it is not exactly running away, it is approaching it for the moment being in a “simpler” way through a reduction of reality
• tetradian: @krismeukens ‘reduction’ – sort of. I’ve gone into this in a lot of detail in my SCAN posts http://bit.ly/wSOAm0 (still a work-in-progress)
• krismeukens: @tetradian categorization versus sensemaking?
• tetradian: @krismeukens categorisation is sensemaking – (mostly Simple-domain sensemaking, in essence, but still a form of sensemaking)
• krismeukens: @tetradian Well yes // But there are 2 things here: 1 categorize in which domain the problem is, the meta-level so to say. 2 how the make sense of it.
• tetradian: @krismeukens ’2 things here’ – yes: recursion. without which Cynefin doesn’t make sense. and which it apparently does not allow. go figure? // ”does not allow” – at least, I’ve been savagely attacked each time I’ve tried to introduce the topic. Your Mileage May Vary etc
• tetradian: @transarchitect addendum to one-liner: Cynefin fits well with Complex, as SixSigma fits well with Simple: problems arise when out of scope
• transarchitect: @tetradian @krismeukens let’s not get too academic about this. C. is just another usable lens. #complexity
• tetradian: @transarchitect yeah, true. it’s just I’ve been attacked so often about trying to make it work that it’s something of a red-rag now…
• transarchitect: @tetradian above understands what’s below; not the other way around. I’ve been defending myself #complexity 2 decades: useless
• tetradian: @transarchitect “defending myself” – my commiserations, good sir… [don't quite agree re 'above/below' - more like mis-intersecting sets?]
• krismeukens: @transarchitect @tetradian yes, lens that is excellent metaphor
• tetradian: @krismeukens @transarchitect “lens” – yes – which brings @richardveryard’s concept/practice of ‘lenscraft’ back into this picture? // problem with Cynefin is that it claims to have full lens-set for all contexts, but does not cover ‘Chaotic’
• krismeukens: @tetradian @transarchitect this must be an attractive discussion as it gains new followers in search of a? date fo?r this w?eekend haha
• tetradian: @krismeukens are there other followers to this? – i thought we were just having a Standard Academic Argument between ourselves…

I had to duck out at that point, to do some promised tech-support for a colleague: we parted, with quick thanks shared all round. But a few other Tweets popped up in the stream somewhat later:

• hjarche: @tetradian just dipping into this discussion but “Act = running away” not an inference I ever made w/ Cynefin // I’ve no time to get too deep on this today but I will dig through all the refs & links later @transarchitect @snowded
• ImaginaryTime: @hjarche @tetradian @transarchitect @snowded Neither did I. Important to note one can also enter Chaotic domain intentionally (innovation).

Innovation is described above: quick summary is that it’s sort-of implied in the Cynefin-dynamics path 7 ‘Divergence-Convergence’, but note that it only links to the Complex: there’s no path described for innovation at real-time, the Simple <-> Chaotic link.

On “Not an inference I ever made w Cynefin” – a valid point, though I hope from this post above that the reasoning behind that inference is now clear. And, in turn, the reasoning why I now strongly recommend to not use Cynefin in its standard form in enterprise-architecture.

Anyway, enough for now: over to you, perhaps?

I’ll be providing some detailed worked-examples of SCAN in the next few posts or so, but I’d better get these questions out of the way first, because otherwise someone or other will jump at me about it if I don’t. The quick answer is, yes, there are solid reasons for all of this, and no, this isn’t ‘having a go’ at Cynefin or anything else. Okay?

To answer each of those above questions in turn:

• making sense – and making sense fast - of things that don’t yet make sense, is an essential business requirement, in enterprise-architecture and in just about every other business-discipline
• what we often need for business-sensemaking is something simple, fast, and easily memorable, yet also has all the sensemaking depth behind it – and SCAN supports that need
• the aim is to simplify, not complicate – the main reason for SCAN is to uncomplicate something that’s become almost hopelessly complicated and problematic
• the two frameworks may look similar on the surface, and I’ve intentionally designed SCAN so that they can be used in parallel, but they actually have significantly different roots, roles and methods
• in practice, in most of the business-domains I work in, usage of Cynefin seems a bit like TOGAF for enterprise-architecture – just about everyone says they use it, but almost no-one actually seems to use it as per the published specification

That last point has lead to lots and lots and lots of fights over the past few years: too many fights, between too many people, in which I’ve too often found myself in the painful position of pig-in-the-middle… So in the hope that it’ll defuse some of the drivers for at least some of those fights, what I’m aiming to do here is:

• separate out two fundamentally different types of sensemaking – ‘considered’, versus ‘business-speed’
• explicitly acknowledge that Cynefin fits well with the needs of ‘considered’ sensemaking
• describe how and why Cynefin has proven problematic in ‘business-speed’ sensemaking
• how SCAN sets out to resolve each of those issues, specifically for ‘business-speed’ sensemaking

There’s some overlap between SCAN and Cynefin, obviously, because both are tools for general-purpose sensemaking; but the key point is that they serve and emphasise different business needs.

Business roles

Making sense, to support good decision-making, is an obvious business need.

In practice, there are two fundamentally-different kinds of business sensemaking:

• ‘considered’ – analysis and experimentation, classically done by consultants, professionals, senior management and strategy staff
• ‘business-speed’ – categories, checklists and personal judgement, classically done by line-managers, supervisors and front-line staff

The crucial distinction is available time. If we had the time at the front-line to make a proper ‘considered’ assessment and decision, we’d do so: but we rarely have that luxury. So at ‘business-speed’ we have to make do with a different kind of sensemaking: it’s not as pretty, not as precise, not as ‘scientific’, but it’s pragmatic and practical. Simply what works, at the time, in the time available.

In other words, both kinds of sensemaking are ‘true’, for a given value of ‘true’. The practical question is about which kind is more appropriate – more useful – for a given business need.

Cynefin explicitly positions itself for ‘considered’ sensemaking. To use the Cynefin terms, it emphasises the Complicated and, especially, the Complex domain. I believe it’s fair to say that it aims to elicit insight and understanding by focussing on nuance and subtlety, on emergence in complex adaptive systems, and so on. We do get the most ‘scientific’ results this way: but it takes time.

SCAN explicitly positions itself for ‘business-speed’ sensemaking. To use the Cynefin terms, it emphasises the interplay between the Simple and Chaotic domains. It uses classically simple-yet-powerful techniques such as recursive checklists, to access the full depth of sensemaking whilst still maintaining full business-speed.

In short, the frameworks’ roles and emphases are not the same: as above, they’re both about sensemaking, but they service somewhat different business needs.

Framework roots

Cynefin’s roots go back to at least 1999, and are primarily in the sciences. As its Wikipedia page puts it, “the Cynefin framework draws on research into complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive science, anthropology and narrative patterns, as well as evolutionary psychology”.

SCAN’s roots go back to at least 1986 (the ‘swamp analogy‘ for sensemaking), and are primarily in pragmatics. There’s a lot of science and more behind it – for example, on Jungian psychology and the tetradian, cognitive psychology, textual deconstruction, real-time learning and real-time decision-making – but the focus is always on real-world practice.

In other words, one has a science focus, the other a technology focus. It doesn’t make much sense to try to assess either one solely in the other’s terms.

Practical problems with Cynefin

This section describes some practical problems that I and others have often come across whilst trying to use Cynefin with everyday business-folk in enterprise-architecture and the like – in other words, primarily in contexts that demand ‘business-speed’ sensemaking. I’ll also describe how SCAN addresses and, I hope, mostly resolves each of those problems.

I know it sounds petty, but often the first hurdle is just the name ‘Cynefin’. Even the pronunciation is problematic: I’ve come across several people who’ve talked excitedly about ‘sign-fin’ – which is how standard-English would (attempt to) pronounce ‘cynefin’ – and get very confused when someone else uses the proper Welsh-style pronunciation ‘kuhnevin’.

[It's not that the Welsh pronunciation is 'wrong', because obviously it isn't. It's just that it confuses people, and gives an unfortunate impression of an 'in-group' who know how to pronounce it properly, versus an 'everyone-else' who don't.]

By contrast, SCAN is pronounced exactly as per the standard-English spelling.

We’ve had similar problems around the meaning of ‘Cynefin’. The Wikipedia page explains it as follows:

Cynefin is a Welsh word, which is commonly translated into English as ‘habitat’ or ‘place’, although this fails to convey its full meaning. A more complete translation of the word would be that it conveys the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we can only be partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc.

In practice, with front-line managers, I’ve possibly lost them at the first word, probably lost them at ‘Welsh’, and definitely lost them by the time we bring ‘habitat’ or ‘place’ into the picture – let alone ‘multiple pasts’ or anything else. I then have to do quite a long explanation as to how and why, yes, this is about business-sensemaking, and it’s useful and important. That’s if they allow me any time to do it, which often they don’t… which doesn’t help.

[Again, this is purely pragmatics: the richness and depth of the word 'cynefin' is indeed valuable, yet the lack of self-description in the name makes it that much harder to get started.]

By contrast, SCAN says straight away what it is and does: we do a scan through the context to make sense of what’s going on.

Cynefin also depends on special meanings of common terms. The worst problems have been around ‘complex‘: Cynefin uses this in the specific sense as in complexity-science, but that’s landed us with huge arguments with IT-folks and others who’ve always used ‘complex’ to mean ‘very complicated’. We’ve had similar arguments around ‘complicated‘ itself; and likewise ‘chaos‘, which Cynefin uses in an uncommon way, quite different from the colloquial usage. Even ‘simple‘ has turned to be not as simple as we’d thought.

[Once again, this is purely about pragmatics: those special-meanings in Cynefin do enable much more precision, but at a significant cost in understandability and versatility, especially at 'business-speed'.]

By contrast, SCAN provides suggested, colloquial terms for what are essentially similar sensemaking-domains to those in Cynefin, but beyond that it leaves terminology intentionally open. Surfacing personal interpretations of terms thus itself becomes part of the sensemaking process.

In my experience, perhaps the most serious problem has been that Cynefin presents way too much scope for methodological confusion – and especially so when people try to use it for sensemaking at ‘business-speed’, where everything will be pared down to the bone, whether we like it or not. The most obvious of these confusions is that it looks like a straightforward two-axis matrix – which it isn’t. Visually, it’s presented as a categorisation-framework – which it isn’t. (Or is. Or isn’t.) There are those four straightforward domain-categories that everyone sees – the SCCC-categorisation of Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic – but then there’s the fifth-domain of Disorder – which is both a domain in its own right and the backplane for everything else – and the ‘squiggle’ – which frankly takes too much effort to explain.

Then there are all the Cynefin methods behind it, which in principle are grounded in complexity-science and so on, but often don’t match up with how most people understand ‘complexity’ in just about any discipline other than complexity-science. In sensemaking at business-speed, we simply don’t have time to do that kind of translation between disciplines – hence no surprise that key nuances get lost in the non-translation. And the general opacity and special-meaning-after-special-meaning of the methods mean that there are – as I and far too many others have discovered the hard way – all too many options for ‘illegitimate’ usage of Cynefin, and not many ‘politically-correct’ usages that actually do make practical sense in our work-domains. So in practice we end up saying, yes, it’s a sort-of four-category framework that isn’t, sort-of, that’s why it has those pretty curved boundaries, sort-of – and then just kind of hope for the best, hiding behind cautious phrases such as ‘inspired by Cynefin‘ and suchlike. Which is not a good way to use anything.

Sure, Cynefin’s terminology is wonderfully precise, and likewise its methods: in skilled hands, and given enough time, it really can work wonders. But in practice, all too often, it’s been a bit like letting business-folk loose on a typical EA toolset: it’s so dependent on everything being done exactly right, that it doesn’t take long for the whole thing to turn into an impenetrable tangle of misunderstandings and confusion – the exact opposite of what we’re aiming for in business-sensemaking. And for ‘business-speed’ sensemaking, we simply don’t have time to sort out that kind of mess.

[A reminder again that I'm not saying Cynefin is 'wrong' - because clearly it isn't. All I'm saying is that these are the kinds of methodological problems that I've seen arising time after time, in real-world practice, in enterprise-architecture and the like.]

By contrast, SCAN is bald and straightforward: it makes no pretence of being more than a simple cluster of four categories, arising from a plain ordinary two-axis matrix – and if we want to, it can be used, and useful, just like that, with nothing else. (In fact it can even be used as a single-axis ‘matrix’ – the tension between Simple and Not-simple, known and not-known.) It can, however, also go a lot deeper than that – yet all still with the same set of categories, all of the way.

A bit more detail on SCAN

The real power of SCAN comes not from the frame itself, but from what happens when we use that frame in conjunction with an equally straightforward set of systems-thinking principles. We can use those principles to any extent and any depth that we need – including none at all.

To use that usefully-precise Cynefin terminology, we could split those principles as follows:

• Simple: repetitive rotation between multiple views or perspectives or focus-themes – such as in a checklist or, here, a simple four-category frame
• Complicated: reciprocation – balance across a system – and resonance – the ‘snowball effect’ (positive-resonance) and damping (negative-resonance)
• Complex: recursion – self-similarity at different levels – and reflexion – patterns, particularly ‘the whole contained within the part’
• Chaotic: cognitive-dissonance – deliberate-mismatch to trigger ideas – and serendipity – allowing ideas to arise in unexpected ways

In terminology that might be more familiar for enterprise-architecture folk, this is about iteration and allowing emergence of new ideas and requirements, much as in any of the Agile development methods. It’s done at real-world speed, not ‘sit-and-think-about-it’ analysis-paralysis; there’s an explicit architecture to it, but it’s not the old Waterfall-architecture of ‘big-requirements-up-front’. It’s kept as simple as possible, but it’s not simplistic: there’s real depth behind it, whenever we need.

What we’re after – one of our key success-criteria – is when someone says, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way…”, and then develops the whole discussion in a new and different direction. In other words, useful insights, arriving ‘from nowhere’, at business-speed.

In essence, SCAN is a ‘stealth’ form of context-space mapping. For simplicity, it’s constrained to a single type of base-map, but we can still apply any other overlay – including the Cynefin frame – to use as a cross-map in conjunction with any or all of those systems-thinking principles above. So it’s simple enough, and familiar enough, not to scare people off: yet we can go down into whatever depth we desire – or dare – in whatever little time as there may be available to do it.

Different trade-offs, different roles

To me, as a practitioner, I’d guess that the key difference between Cynefin and SCAN is that they make different trade-offs between precision versus flexibility, sophistication versus simplicity, and several other suchlike themes. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this difference would be the comment of an old friend of mine, who said that his greatest challenge as a mathematician working in aircraft-design was to make his mathematics sufficiently imprecise to be useful.

Another anecdote comes to mind here, a conversation some years ago in Lisbon. One of the people there was passionately holding forth about the inadequacies of English as a language: “We should all be speaking French!”, he exclaimed. “French is the language of diplomats! It is exact; it is precise.”

“The advantage of French is that it’s precise”, was the quiet reply. “The advantage of English is that it isn’t.”

Cynefin’s advantage is that it’s precise, a science-based ‘language’ appropriate for the needs of complexity-consultants engaged in ‘considered’ sensemaking.

SCAN’s advantage is that, by intent and design, it isn’t precise – which makes it a better fit for the more pragmatic needs of ‘business-speed’ sensemaking.

Different trade-offs, different roles.

Different choices.

But probably important that we don’t mix them up?

Over to you for comments and suchlike, anyway.

[Note: the focus of this post is solely on practical use and avoidance of misuse, and (I sincerely hope) should not be controversial. (In a few places I do state my personal and professional opinion, but that's about the limit of what might be construed as 'controversial'.)]

The core purpose of Cynefin is to support sensemaking in complex contexts, such as occur frequently in the business-domain. As such, it would be of obvious interest to enterprise-architecture and related disciplines, especially in strategy-development and in addressing ‘wicked-problems’ and ‘pain-points’ in the business context.

I regard it as important here, for enterprise-architecture, to view Cynefin as ‘just another framework’. In a sense, it’s comparable with other well-known business-sensemaking frameworks such as Business Model Canvas. The main difference is that Cynefin has more potential for general-purpose business-sensemaking, rather than solely in a single domain.

As a quick overview, the Cynefin framework consists of:

• a core graphic, shown with varying content on a fixed base-diagram
• a set of methods for narrative-enquiry and the like, such as ‘butterfly-stamping’ and ‘clustering’
• a software package named Sensemaker, for visual presentation and interpretation of results

I’ll skim through these in reverse-order.

Sensemaker package

I have not used the Sensemaker package, so will make no comment there, other than to say that, from its published description, its use would seem peripheral rather than central to enterprise-architecture.

Methods

Cynefin methods are only available to those who’ve taken the Cynefin/Cognitive Edge training course.

I took the Cynefin course in 2003, and learnt the set of methods that were extant at the time; to my knowledge, not much has been added since then. Of these methods, my personal experience is that in most cases I haven’t found them useful in enterprise-architecture. (They’re no doubt valid, I just don’t happen to have found them useful for the kind of work that I do.)

For most enterprise-architecture purposes, I tend to use other narrative-oriented sensemaking techniques such as Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis, and, perhaps especially, Nigel Green’s VPEC-T. I’ve also developed a variety of techniques of my own, as documented in my books on enterprise-architecture – particularly context-space mapping in Everyday Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Canvas in Mapping the Enterprise, and Five Elements and the SEMPER diagnostic in SEMPER & SCORE.

The only Cynefin technique that I do still use regularly is ‘clustering‘, moving annotations on sticky-notes into clusters that seem to make sense. Note, though, that the same technique is common to most other sensemaking-frameworks, such as Business Model Canvas: see the book Business Model Generation for detailed examples of the technique and its use.

Core graphic

The core graphic is the only part of the Cynefin framework that most people see, and hence know as ‘Cynefin’. Although the layout has remained much the same since the start, the content and presentation have changed somewhat over the years. This is the current version as shown on its Wikipedia article:

Most people seem to see this as four domains in a simple two-axis frame, though without axis-labels. In fact there are not four but  five domains, including the central Disorder domain, which is fundamental to the Cynefin model.

[There's also a sixth mini-domain or sort-of-domain, shown as the little squiggle at bottom-centre. I forget what this represents, but it's rarely mentioned, does seem to be optional, and does not seem to be fundamental to the model's use.]

The four domains – Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – represent distinct ‘ways of knowing’, or ways of making sense of ‘the unknown’, the central domain of Disorder. The central domain always exists; the other domains are, in effect, overlays on top of Disorder.

I’ve not seen any explicit description as to why the domains are placed in this specific layout. The one part that often is explained is a distinction between ‘order’ – Simple and Complicated – versus ‘unorder’ – Complex and Chaotic – which in this layout is, in effect, a kind of horizontal axis. Yet there does not seem to be any vertical axis as such, and there are certainly strong assertions that it should not be interpreted as a two-axis frame.

Various texts are overlaid onto the four domains to identify and describe these ‘four ways of knowing’. Two of these sets of texts are present in the diagram above; I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen other sets over the years, in various versions and presentations. These texts would represent the ‘official content’ for the framework.

There are also two other parts of the framework that are less well-known, and in general only appear in certain earlier versions of the diagram: the Cynefin-dynamics, and the relationship-mappings. The Cynefin-dynamics represent moves between sensemaking-domains, and are important in making sense of a total context, especially over time; the relationship-mappings – typically shown as little ‘pyramids’ – represent strong or weak ties in relation to a hierarchy, and are significant for social-network mapping and the like.

So to summarise, the core diagram consists of:

• mandatory: central domain of Disorder
• mandatory: four sensemaking domains, currently labelled Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic
• mandatory: graphic layout, including curved boundaries (not straight boundaries) between domains
• mandatory: specified sets of text-content, mapped to each of the four sensemaking-domains
• optional: sixth (unlabelled) domain
• optional: order / unorder axis, implied as horizontal on this graphic-layout
• optional: Cynefin-dynamics
• optional: relationship-mappings

There may be a few other optional items, but essentially that’s it. So if we turn this round, we can then see some of the constraints on the potential use of the Cynefin core-diagram in enterprise-architecture and elsewhere:

• any model that does not include a central domain of Disorder is not Cynefin
• any model that does not use four sensemaking domains, or uses other labels for the four domains, is not Cynefin
• any model that uses a different graphic-layout, or that uses straight domain-boundaries, is not Cynefin
• any model that uses any domain-partitioning other than as specified is not Cynefin
• any model that uses any text other than that formally specified, is not Cynefin
• any model that applies any vertical axis is not Cynefin
• any model that applies any horizontal axis other than order/unorder is not Cynefin
• any model that describes any inter-domain dynamics not otherwise formally specified is not Cynefin

In practice, what this comes down to is the following:

• there are very tight constraints on what can be called ‘Cynefin’
• in enterprise-architecture, most usages of what is described as ‘Cynefin’ are actually not Cynefin

Clearly there’s a very important distinction here between usage of Cynefin-proper, and the use of ‘Cynefin-like’ concepts that are either incorrectly described as ‘Cynefin’ and/or used in ways that differ from those specified in Cynefin-proper.

I perhaps need to emphasise this point, for everyone’s sake: anything that does not conform exactly to the Cynefin specification should not be called ‘Cynefin’. In practice, this probably applies to most usage of what is called ‘Cynefin’ in enterprise-architecture.

On usage of Cynefin-proper in enterprise-architecture, my own personal experience is that it can be useful, but is incomplete and even misleading in certain areas – particularly for sensemaking and decision-making on uniqueness and the like in the Chaotic domain, as I’ve described in several posts here. Cynefin does have some potential uses in enterprise-architecture and the like, but for almost all of these there are appropriate alternative tools, techniques and frameworks. Overall there seems to be so much confusion, so many misconceptions, and so much baggage around the whole framework, that, wherever practicable, it’s far safer and far wiser to use those alternatives instead. To be blunt, I would strongly recommend that, unless absolutely unavoidable, Cynefin-proper should not be used anywhere in enterprise-architecture and related disciplines.

Use and re-use of Cynefin-related concepts

Some of those alternatives may incorporate use or re-use of concepts that are either directly or indirectly related to some of those within Cynefin-proper. Key examples include:

• the SCCC categories – Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic
• the order / unorder axis – Simple/Complicated versus Complex/Chaotic
• relationship-strength mapping
• context-space mapping using the Cynefin core-graphic as a base-map
• domains as disciplines, and inter-discipline dynamics

The SCCC categorisation is enormously valuable in enterprise-architecture, with applications in a very broad range of types of sensemaking and decision-making. The categories are often used within a single-axis or two-axis layout, in a wide variety of forms, in a very wide variety of cross-maps. Note, though, that unless it uses the exact layout of Cynefin core-graphic and other constraints as above, this is not Cynefin.

The order / unorder axis and its crosslink to the SCCC categories is also enormously valuable in enterprise-architecture. It indicates, for example, where current IT-systems are likely to work (order) or not-work (unorder). It also indicates the crucial transition from ‘controllable’ (true/false logic) to ‘not-controllable’ (modal-logic, ‘direction’ rather than ‘control’) at which the Complicated transitions into the genuinely Complex – a point which many IT-folk still fail to grasp. And it also marks a key distinction that is fundamental to service-design and much more: that in the order-domains Einstein’s dictum applies, that ‘madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results’, whereas in the unorder-domains the dictum inverts, such that ‘madness is doing the same thing and expecting always to get the same results’. Although it’s used in Cynefin, the ‘unorder’ term was originally developed by Cynthia Kurtz: see her weblog for more details about her own Confluence framework. Note, though, that if used outside of the context of Cynefin-proper, this is not Cynefin.

The relationship-mapping is useful mainly in specific aspects of enterprise-architecture, such as social-network mapping or organisation-architecture. It was incorporated into early versions of Cynefin, but was again originally developed by Cynthia Kurtz: see the updated ‘Braid’ model on her weblog. Again, though, note that if used outside of Cynefin-proper, this is not Cynefin.

As described in the previous post, context-space mapping is a sensemaking technique that uses an arbitrary base-map and arbitrary additional overlays – all selected according to context and need – as a ‘seed’ around which appropriate insights may coalesce. Because of the usefulness of the SCCC-categorisation, the Cynefin core-diagram is often used as a base-map for this purpose. Yet because the core-diagram is used here in a manner that is different to Cynefin-proper, this is not Cynefin.

There are many other frameworks that use a similar layout, typically describing domains as disciplines, and the concomitant inter-discipline dynamics. For example, the book Disciplines of Dowsing highlights an adaptation of the classic Jungian frame, cross-mapped to the SCCC-categorisation, in a format that, with some ‘translation’, is directly reusable in enterprise-architecture. That frame includes a summary of inter-discipline (inter-’mode’) context and dynamics, such as:

• Role of mode is…
• This mode manages…
• This mode responds to the context through… (i.e. prioritises, for sensemaking)
• Mode has a typical decision-sequence of…
• Use this mode when…
• We are in this mode when…
• ‘Rules’ in this mode include…
• Warning-signs of dubious discipline in this mode include…
• To bridge to [other mode], focus on…

Note, though, that although this and similar frameworks may use Cynefin-related concepts such as the SCCC-categorisation, and may even use the same terms, they are not the same as the Cynefin framework. In other words, this is not Cynefin.

Cynefin-proper is very tightly constrained, and has only a narrow range of potential uses in enterprise-architecture.

‘Cynefin-like’ or ‘Cynefin-related’ ideas and frameworks, as summarised above, are not so tightly constrained, and have a very wide range of potential uses in enterprise-architecture. For example, in practice, most so-called ‘Cynefin’ in enterprise-architecture – such as in Nigel Green’s ‘A thinking framework for Business/IT ‘Systems’ behaviour based on Cynefin‘ - is actually some form of context-space mapping under a somewhat different guise. It’s unfortunate that the term ‘Cynefin’ is used for this, not least because it gives the impression that Cynefin-proper is used far more often in enterprise-architecture than it actually is.

But perhaps the most important point there is that, in the vast majority of usages of ‘Cynefin’ in enterprise-architecture, this is not Cynefin.

And if it’s not Cynefin, we shouldn’t label it as such. Simple, really.

Over to you?

So let’s put these questions into practice.

Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping [CSM]. Recently, though, I’ve also ‘enjoyed’ yet another attack from Dave Snowden, in which he made two key assertions:

• that the cross-map process used in CSM is not a ‘mash-up’ but a “hash-up”
• that the entirety of CSM and, by inference, all of the other sensemaking tools and techniques that I’ve developed for enterprise-architecture and related fields are “invalid … in certain essential aspects”

He gave no evidence or reason as to why the cross-map process is supposedly so invalid as to be a “hash-up”, or any details as to what any of those purported “certain essential aspects” might be: so in essence, all we have from him is a circular ‘proof’, that it must be ‘true’ because he asserts that it’s ‘true’. This is a classic form of unprincipled-attack, one which most of us will face at some time or other in enterprise-architecture and the like.

His assertion is that CSM has no value; yet since that assertion itself has no rational basis, there’s likewise little point in trying to use any kind of rational defence. Probably the only meaningful response is ‘proof-of-the-pudding’, to demonstrate in practice that it does have value. And if it does have value – in other words, that it presents insights that had not previously been available, and might not have been available by any other technique – then, in turn, that should demonstrate that the attack does not have merit. We probably wouldn’t expect the attacker to understand this point: but it may help in our relations with others, in a more professional context.

So perhaps I ought to thank Snowden here, because he’s indicated the obvious candidate for this practical demonstration: what I’ll do here is apply context-space mapping to Snowden’s Cynefin framework.

And let you be the judge as to whether this cross-map technique has any practical value.

(This will, again, be long – my apologies…)

[Important point: for reasons that have been documented all too often on this website, I have had to invoke Bob Sutton's No Asshole Rule: Snowden is welcome to reply in his own website, but will not be allowed to reply here.]

The Cynefin framework

I won’t describe the Cynefin framework in detail here: it’s summarised on its Wikipedia page, but for the full details you’ll need to go to Snowden’s Cognitive Edge website.

(What follows is based on my own background and experience as a ‘registered Cynefin Practitioner’. I did the training-course, delivered by Dave in person, way back in 2003, when Cynefin was still part of IBM – in fact I was told that my colleague and I were the first non-IBMers to do that course. I still have all of the training-material from the course, and not much seems to have changed since then: a few key elements have been dropped – such as the ‘connection-pyramids’ devised by Cynthia Kurtz – but the only significant new element seems to be the ‘Sensemaker‘ software, a simplified adaptation of a public-domain US Government project.)

Cynefin is ‘sold’ as a sensemaking framework. The key idea is that, given an unknown context (the domain of ‘Disorder’), there are four distinct ‘ways of knowing’ that we can apply to that context, and hence four distinct types of tactics that we can then use, as summarised in the Cynefin graphic from the Wikipedia page:

Each of these ‘domains’ has obvious implications for enterprise-architectures and the like:

• we want to keep things simple, and apply best-practice wherever it’s appropriate
• many things we deal with are complicated, requiring good practice and depth-analysis to bring it under control
• when things get complex – such as in business-model development, or the inevitable wicked-problems of a social context – we need iteration and the like to explore the emergent context
• almost every business will face novel or unique elements within their context, and may struggle to avoid it becoming chaotic

So yes, it’s clear that Cynefin sensemaking should be of real value in EA.

There are a couple of other key elements to Cynefin: its theoretical base, and the interdomain ‘dynamics’.

The explicit formal base for Cynefin is ‘complexity science‘: Snowden is emphatic on this point. However, within Cynefin’s own terms, there are two important corollaries from this:

• the effective primary focus for Cynefin sensemaking is the Complex domain
• the focus on science (as opposed to a technology-oriented approach) will naturally pull the emphasis and methods of validation into the Complicated (analytic) domain rather than the Complex (emergent) domain

This implies that there’s an inherent methodological mismatch here, right at the heart of Cynefin. It’s a mismatch that, you may note, is made visible here via a recursive use of Cynefin sensemaking on itself – recursion being a true emergent-technique, yet not a ‘scientific’ one.

[I'll admit that I don't know the science behind the assertion that there are always and only these four decision-making domains: I believe it originally comes from Boisot. To be blunt, though, I'm beginning to doubt there is any fundamental science behind that partitioning of the 'Disorder' space: instead, as with most 'non-exact' sciences, it may ultimately come back to a combination of pragmatics and personal opinion. Useful, yes; but not necessarily 'the truth'.]

The interdomain dynamics are less well-known: it’s possible they may only appear in some of the earlier papers and in the training-course material, and may now be strictly proprietary to the Cynefin brand. In essence, they describe the tactics that we would use to move ‘between’ the decisionmaking domains. In some cases, it may seem that the context forces us to use specific tactics – which in effect also forces us ‘into’ a different domain, where other ‘rules’ than those we expect may now apply.

[For a non-proprietary equivalent of these 'interdomain-dynamics', from a significantly different yet comparable context, see the 'disciplines reference-sheet' that accompanies the book Disciplines of Dowsing.]

Because they may now be proprietary, I won’t go into any detail on the ‘official’ Cynefin-dynamics. Yet there are two ‘moves’ that are described in the earlier publicly-available papers that are especially relevant for EA, that relate to how we should ‘act, sense, respond’ in the Chaotic domain:

• take control (aka ‘the dictator’s move’), to force us into the Simple domain
• find a pattern, to move us into the Complex (emergent) domain

Within those research-papers, these are the only moves (i.e. ‘act’ in ‘act, sense, respond’) prescribed for the Chaotic domain: so in essence, the only decision-choices described in Cynefin for the Chaotic domain consist of getting the heck out of there. (The same can be seen in the much more recent HBR paper: the only examples given for the Chaotic domain can be paraphrased as either ‘take control’ [go to Simple] or ‘set up a crisis-team’ [go to Complex].) Which isn’t exactly helpful advice for when we do have to deal with the reality of uniqueness – which happens a lot in business, and just about everywhere else. We need something that can handle uniqueness as it is – which Cynefin explicitly does not give us.

There’s another worrying implication from those two moves. One of the moves – ‘take control’ – takes us back to an overly simplistic rule-based view of the context, which in real-world conditions will inevitably fall back into the Chaotic again. In other words, it’s not going to be viable. So the only ‘permitted’ move that will seem to be viable is to grab hold of something that seems a pattern, and move to the Complex domain of ‘probe / sense / respond’ – which, strangely enough, happens to be the preferred realm and focus for all usage of Cynefin. Yet Cynefin’s internal focus on the ‘science’ aspects of ‘complexity science’ will in turn tend to drag us into the Complicated domain of ‘sense / analyse / respond’, or even the Simple ‘sense / categorise / respond’ – otherwise known in the business context as ‘hard-systems thinking’ and/or Taylorism respectively, which we know are problematic for any real-world enterprise-architecture. Yet Snowden himself affirms that point, if in a somewhat misleading way, in this diagram from his online seminar on sense-making and complexity-theory:

Concept Lifecycles (© Dave Snowden / Cognitive Edge 2010)

Hence in effect Cynefin here may purport to take us to the Complex domain, but in practice seems to offer us only the choice of ‘take control’, which rarely works well; or a slightly more sophisticated form of ‘take control’, which also doesn’t work well. That’s not good… at the very least, it means that we need to be careful as to how we use Cynefin in EA practice, and constrain its natural tendency to force us to where we least need to be.

A final key concern revolves around whether the Cynefin frame can be used as a categorization-framework. Snowden has asserted here and elsewhere that Cynefin should never be used that way - and he frequently rails against anyone who might seem to do so. Yet oddly, that’s exactly how he himself often seems to use it: for example, the much-cited HBR paper ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision-Making‘ [PDF] consists almost entirely of a set of descriptions of what happens ‘within’ each of the domains – in other words, a categorisation of contexts. There’s an inconsistency here of which we need to take note – it is important, as we’ll see later.

Context-space mapping

Context-space mapping is another sensemaking framework (or technique, rather) that, like Cynefin, focusses or relies on emergence. Yet it’s fundamentally different from Cynefin in its nature, approach and theoretical basis – which causes some confusion, perhaps especially for Cynefin practitioners. In terms of the SCCC categories:

• Cynefin is a Complex-domain technique with a fallback to Complicated or even to Simple
• CSM is a Chaotic-domain technique with a fallback to Complex

Cynefin’s explicit fallback is from ‘unorder’ into the ‘order’-domains (‘science’); CSM’s fallback is to the other ‘unorder’ domain (Chaotic to Complex). Unlike Cynefin, CSM always remains in the value-oriented ‘unorder’ domains.

[One corollary from that last point is that because CSM resides in the 'unorder'-domains, attempting to use 'order'-domain methods of validation does not make sense. Validation of the technique must always be in value-based terms: in other words, whether it is useful, not whether or not it is 'true' within the terms of some arbitrarily-selected system of 'order'.]

Even more confusing to Cynefin practitioners is the fact that CSM may legitimately use ideas and images and concepts from Cynefin, or any other source at all, in ways that could or would indeed be described as “illegitimate” if the process made any claim to ‘be’ Cynefin or the like – which it doesn’t.

[Therein lie some significant paradigm-problems, which I'd suggest are the real source for a vast amount of flak hurled in my direction by Snowden over the past few years. Oh well. I'll come back to the paradigm-problem later, anyway.]

First, before the demonstration proper, a few key points about how CSM actually works.

As with all sensemaking, the aim is to make sense of what’s going on in some specific context. (When we start off, the bounds of that context may not be very specific at all: perhaps just some vague idea or focus. Just call it ‘the context’ for now.)

By definition, we always start out on this journey because we don’t know something. This space of inherent-unknownness – prior to any sensemaking – is what Cynefin describes as ‘Disorder’, and what I sometimes prefer to describe as ‘Reality Department’. It’s why we do sensemaking: we want to make sense of something in the context that at present doesn’t ‘make sense’.

Some people might want to split that context straight away into ‘problem-space’ versus ‘solution-space’; but enterprise-architects especially will know well the dangers of jumping into ‘solution-space’ too early. So for now, we’ll leave it unpartitioned, and just call ‘context-space’.

A common response to anything unknown is make a map: pick up any fragments of information that we can, and see what they show us. In Cynefin terms, we could perhaps say that this moves us from Disorder into the Chaotic domain. What we need to be careful about, of course, is the old adage that “the map is not the territory”.

In terms of the Cynefin-dynamics, as above, we have two options in the Chaotic domain: ‘take control’ or ‘find a pattern’. This is a key point of divergence between Cynefin and CSM: Cynefin takes the first option, whilst CSM applies an inverse variant of the second option.

As often practised – and certainly as described in the HBR paper - the core Cynefin Framework is not a Complex-domain technique. (Whatever Snowden may claim to the contrary, the Cynefin-dynamics themselves make that point patently clear.) It is a Simple-domain technique, because it ’takes control’: it overlays its map onto the ‘territory’ of the context, and then declares that the map is the territory – or perhaps ‘the only true map’ of the territory, ‘true’ because it’s ‘based in science’ and the like.

At this surface-only level – again, typified by the HBR paper – this makes Cynefin very easy to use and to explain, and to train people in the relatively-rudimentary sensemaking that’s available through a Simple structure of categories, each of whose sub-descriptions have purported ‘truth’-relationships to each other. Commercially speaking, that simplicity is obviously a very desirable trait: but just how valid or usable the end-results would be is a very different question.

Of course it’s true that most of the deeper techniques used by experienced Cynefin practitioners – ‘butterfly-stamping’, ‘clustering’ and the like – are indeed rooted in the Complex domain: but that’s not what most people see or use. Instead, what most people see is just that Simple predefined set of categories and sub-categories – which leads directly to the over-Simple categories-only mistake about which Snowden rightly bewails.

Context-space mapping takes the opposite approach. We first accept the Chaos for what it is – we accept that we don’t know what’s going on. In keeping with the rules of the Chaotic, we throw something else in at random – and then see what happens. We’re not looking for ‘facts’ so much as insights or ideas, something we can use. We play with that for a while, seeing what ideas and images and patterns seem to emerge in relation to those insights – in other words, we move into what Cynefin calls the Complex domain. And whenever a thread seems to peter out, or ceases to be interesting, or whatever, we deliberately drop back into the randomness again. In that sense, context-space mapping is a Chaotic/Complex-domain technique.

In effect, what we do in context-space mapping is run the usual map-making process backwards. In conventional mapping, we pick on some element in the context that can be fixed in some way, either in absolute terms, or relative to some other point; we then keep repeating that process until we come to some usable description that can be described as ‘true’ in some sense or other. By contrast, in context-space mapping, we pick an arbitrary map, and place it into the Chaos of the context to see what coalesces around around that shape. It’s intentionally anarchic: in most cases, any map will do.

A useful metaphor here is that the context-space map acts as a ‘seed’ for crystallisation, with the ‘unknown’ of the Disorder space providing a kind supersaturated solution from within which new ideas and insights can coalesce. And we don’t necessarily expect that what arises will or must align itself to the map: in fact what we’re looking for most often is whatever doesn’t align. And to help that along, we will often deliberately create mismatch – ‘cognitive dissonance’ – in these throw-away ‘true’-only-for-a given-value-of-’true’ temporary maps that we use for this purpose.

The catch is that this kind of technique is highly dependent on skill and experience. It’s not predefined: everything depends on the choices that are made by the person doing the mapping. It’s not science - it’s technology.

[There's a radical difference there that many people miss. In a science the focus should always be on 'truth', on 'how it really works'; whereas in technology the focus is much more on 'value', on usefulness, on 'how it can be worked' - or perhaps even more on 'how it can be worked better'.]

That’s the bad news. The good news is that that’s exactly the kind of skills and experience that people in enterprise-architecture and suchlike do aim to develop over time – hence context-space mapping is a natural fit to EA, whereas a single-function framework like Cynefin tends to be very limited in its usefulness for our needs.

So let’s develop a real example.

Context-space mapping with Cynefin on Cynefin

What we’re going to do here is develop a context-space map that can explore the role and usefulness of Cynefin in sensemaking for the type of business-contexts that are the typical concern for enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and the like.

In context-space mapping, we typically start with some kind of diagram that we use as a ‘base-map’. In essence, as above, any map will do: there are vast numbers of different diagrams and model-types in use in enterprise-architecture and business-architecture and so on, and we could choose any one that, in the moment, seems to fit with our needs for a ‘throwaway’ context-map. (For example, the Enterprise Canvas model-type initially arose from a cross-map between Business Model Canvas, BPMN, Zachman and Viable System Model.) Since we’re talking here about Cynefin, the obvious choice is the Cynefin diagram itself – hence we’ll use the basic layout and categories of Cynefin as the base-map for this exercise.

We could just stick with that for a while, perhaps using that Cynefin base-map recursively to explore itself – applying Cynefin to Cynefin. That’s a form of context-space mapping in its own right – in fact that’s the means via which I derived many of the insights about Cynefin above.

More usually, though, we would overlay other models on top of that base-map, creating a cross-map that incorporates and contrasts often dissonant ideas. For this exercise we’ll use four distinct overlays.

[Note again that there's no 'science' to this choice - or rather, this is as per science as practised, as opposed to the cleaned-up, seemingly-logical but often somewhat spurious 'science-as-presented-for-public-consumption'. The focus for each choice of base-map and overlay is always on usefulness, driven by an intent to elicit meaningful insights - exactly as per the 'Idea' and 'Hypothesis' stages in the classic 'Idea / Hypothesis / Theory / Law' cycle in scientific discovery.]

The first overlay actually comes from Cynefin itself: the concept of ‘order’ versus ‘unorder’. In Cynefin, ‘order’ is usually described as applying primarily to the Simple and Complicated domains, whereas ‘unorder’ (a very useful term invented by Cynthia Kurtz) applies primarily to the Complex and Chaotic domains. Conceptually, order and unorder also align well with notions of ‘truth’ versus ‘value’ respectively. We’ll apply this as a spectrum horizontally across that Cynefin base-map.

For the second overlay we’ll use something that doesn’t seem to be addressed in Cynefin as such: the timescale in which we have to respond to events. (Cynefin tells as that we should ‘act, sense, respond’, etc, but doesn’t tell us how fast we need to do so.) For reasons that will become clear later, we’ll apply this as a spectrum vertically across that Cynefin base-map, from real-time at the bottom to infinity at the top.

The third overlay is about skill-levels and decision-drivers – see the Sidewise posts ‘10, 100, 1000, 10000‘ and ‘Where have all the good skills gone?‘ for more on this. This gives us the following mapping, cross-mapped to the four Cynefin-making domains:

• trainee (>10hrs): rule-based decisions [Simple]
• apprentice (>100hrs): algorithm and experiment [Complicated]
• journeyman (>1000hrs): guidelines and patterns [Complex]
• master (>10000hrs): principles [Chaotic]

The final overlay, about levels of abstraction, or, conversely, repeatability, will need a bit more explanation. The closest analogy is the four states or ‘phases’ of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma. There’s a spectrum of variability, of constraints, yet with explicit ‘phase-boundaries’ between them: entities in a solid are fully bounded, in liquid can move around within distinct bounds, in a gas are essentially unbounded, and in a plasma the boundaries of the entities themselves break down. In terms of how the constraints and boundaries operate, we could map those four ‘phases’ of matter onto the same terms as used for the Cynefin domains: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic.

There’s a spectrum there too, with explicit boundaries: but we can’t do a simple straight-line overlay onto the base-map as we did with the other two spectrum-overlays. Instead, we have to kind of bend it round to make it fit. And yet, when we look the end-result – the cross-map – it does all fit together well:

This gives us a map that we can now use to elicit ideas and suggestions about the context – which in this case is the Cynefin framework itself.

[Before we start that exploration, though, we need to emphasise one essential point: this is not Cynefin. It's not a 'non-standard version of Cynefin', nor a 'new version of Cynefin', nor actually 'an extension of Cynefin', and nor is it 'an illegitimate use of Cynefin', either. It's a context-space map that happens to use some aspects of the standard Cynefin diagram as its base-map - and that's all that it is. And it's laid out in this way because it happens to be useful to lay it out in this way: there's no claim whatsoever that that's somehow 'the truth' - which, by the way, also means that it doesn't make sense to declare that it's 'not the truth', either.

Since some people may still have missed this point, I'll say it again, louder: this is not Cynefin - it's a context-space map. They're not the same thing: don't get confused here.

Okay? Let's move on.]

What comes up for you when you look at that diagram? (“A mess”, some people might say? – fair enough, but bear with me for a moment, if you would?)

What comes up for you when you compare that diagram with the ‘official’ Cynefin diagram, earlier above?

The first and most obvious point is that they’re not the same. Good: that means there’s the potential for cognitive-dissonance there. That’s the whole point: that’s what we want – because it’s from that dissonance that ideas and images and cross-comparisons are most likely to arise.

I don’t know what comes up for you when you compare and explore those two diagrams: that’s up to you, that’s your sensemaking, not mine. We’re dealing with subjective ‘truth’ here, not a purported ‘objective’ ‘the truth’: what makes sense for you is what makes sense for you – and it may not make sense in that way to anyone else at all. In a quite literal sense, it’s none of my business.

But here are some of the things that I see when I do that cross-comparison. I’ll describe them in relation to each of those overlays, though not in quite the same order as above.

[Note again that this is merely what I happen to see - what 'makes sense to me', and so on. None of it purports to be 'the truth': it's only about insights that arise, nothing more than that. The difference here is, unlike with Snowden's unsupported assertion that this technique has no value, here you can see all of the steps via which I arrive at each insight. What we then might do in response to each insight is a different matter, of course.]

The order versus disorder overlay would probably be the least controversial for Cynefin aficionados: it’s in the original description, even if it’s rarely shown on the diagram as such. The mapping with ‘truth’ versus ‘value’ is useful, because it suggests that IT-systems and other processes that depend on a simple ‘true/false’ logic are inherently going to have trouble in the Complex and Chaotic domains – which is exactly what we see in real-world practice.

There’s also another way to interpret the Cynefin description of context-space (which doesn’t contradict the ‘official’ version, by the way). This is that if the ‘Disorder’ domain is, in effect, the whole of a context before we make any decisions about it, then the other four ‘decision-making’ domains can also be seen as the valid way to act on that aspect of the whole: every context will include some proportion for which we can use the Simple tactics ‘sense, categorise, respond’, another proportion where we’d have to use the Complicated tactics, and so on. Every context will contain some Simple, some Complicated, some Complex, and some Chaotic. In which case, any attempt to use, for the whole of a context, a system that can only work on ‘order’, on simple true/false logic, by definition it’s going to fail in Complex and Chaotic ways. Which again is exactly what we see in practice with disaster-areas such as IT-based ‘business-process reengineering’ and many of the ‘business-rules engines’ and the like. The visual simplicity of standard-Cynefin can be very useful here as a tool to help hammer home this harsh fact to the overly-IT-obsessed.

Note, by the way, that the graphic layout is significant here: we probably wouldn’t have been able to elicit these insights without using that specific layout. One up for the Cynefin domain-layout, then – even though it wasn’t designed to be used this way.

Next, let’s look at the abstraction/repeatability overlay, and cross-compare it with the skills-type/decision-guide overlay. These do map cleanly together: we can use rules in domains of high-repeatability, and we can use ‘trainee’ skill-levels to do that type of work – and so on for the other domains. (Yes, the domains are used here as categories: but that’s exactly how the domains are used and described in the Snowden/Boone HBR article.)

We now cross-compare this with the ‘domain-tactics’ from the original Cynefin diagram: ‘sense, categorize, respond’, and so on. This gives us the following table:

• trainee: rule-based decisions; sense, categorize, respond [Simple]
• apprentice: algorithm and experiment; sense, analyze, respond [Complicated]
• journeyman: guidelines and patterns; probe, sense, respond [Complex]
• master: principles; act, sense, respond [Chaotic]

Which for the most part again does make sense: a trainee would sense what’s going on, make a decision based on predefined categories, and respond in accordance with the respective rule. By contrast, someone with apprentice-level skills should start to be able to analyse what’s going on, and identify and act on the respective factors for the required algorithm. The journeyman skill-level fits well, too; yet for me there’s an odd sense that the master skill-level isn’t quite right. Come back to that later.

But there are a couple of booby-traps that aren’t obvious in standard-Cynefin. In fact one of them isn’t even that obvious here: that people often find rules Complex, and guidelines Simple – the opposite way round to this mapping. (There’s more on that in the post ‘A human view of Simple, Complicated and Complex‘.) So in a sense this mapping is ‘wrong’, and could perhaps lead us to seriously-wrong decisions in real-world practice – if we were working primarily with real-people in that context. If we think more in terms of that ‘truth/value’ spectrum, and therefore assign machines and IT-systems to do the Simple and the Complicated, reserving the Complex and the Chaotic for real-people, then the mapping actually is ‘correct’. Remember, though, that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ really don’t make sense here: the only valid distinction is ‘useful’ versus ‘not-useful’.

The other booby-trap is potentially even more serious in the longer-term, and relates to skills-development in the context. To make sense of it, though, we also need a better grasp of the impact of timescale – hence we’d better turn to that first, and come back to the skills-problem later.

The cross-map with timescale is perhaps the most important of all, because it highlights what is to me a fundamental flaw in standard-Cynefin: its handling of inherent-uniqueness. Or more accurately, its lack of any usable means to handle uniqueness.

Remember that, in essence, Cynefin’s stated method of handling the Chaotic is to ‘get the heck out of there’. Snowden himself has said many times that we’re never in the Chaotic domain as such: instead, he’s said, we should always grab hold of some piece of information and try to make sense of it with some kind of pattern or rule – which would automatically move us into the Complex or Simple domain respectively.

In practice, though, this doesn’t make sense – unless, that is, we happen to use the term ‘Chaotic’ in a circularly-defined way that also doesn’t make sense in terms of real-world practice.

Where does that insight about standard-Cynefin’s paucity in the Chaotic-domain come from? Answer: it’s derived directly from that cross-map between the Cynefin domains and the timescale.

The timescale stretches from real-time (which we’ve placed against the base of the Chaotic and Simple domains) to infinity (which we’ve placed against the top of the Complex and Complicated domains). If we think about it for a moment, that mapping does make sense: one of the classic dangers of decisionmaking in the Complicated domain is ‘analysis-paralysis’ going on to infinity, and much the same happens too with experimentation – ‘probe, sense, respond’ – in the Complex domain. Going the other way, towards real-time, the practical point is that it takes time to do analysis and experimentation: so the closer we get to real-time, the more we’re forced out of the Complex and Complicated, and into the Chaotic and Simple. Yet Cynefin insists that the Chaotic domain doesn’t actually exist, or at least that we can’t do anything there: which means that – according to Cynefin – as time gets more and more compressed, the only possible option is that we go back to the Simple, where everything is strictly rule-based. Which isn’t what happens in the real-world. Oops…

What actually happens in the real-world is that we have analysts (Complicated) and experimenters (Complex) who need time to do their work – which is why we usually find them in the back-room, or somewhere ‘upstairs’, well away from the real-time pressures of the ‘front line’. Down at the front-line, we usually have rule-based systems (Simple), that may be IT, human or machine – it doesn’t matter that much here, that’s just an implementation-detail. And we also have people – usually not machines – with high skill-levels, who deal with the ‘exceptions’ and other uniquenesses and inherent-uncertainties that the rule-based systems can’t handle. That’s the Chaotic domain, as far as anyone in business is concerned. But that’s the domain that Cynefin insists doesn’t exist, or that no-one stays there for anything more the briefest instant: yet the reality is that that Chaotic domain is where anyone with ‘master’-type skills and experience will spend most of their time.

That Cynefin provides no means whatsoever to address this sensemaking-need in the Chaotic-domain, within that domain’s own terms, is problematic enough. Worse, though, Snowden’s required methods for use of Cynefin actively prevent us from addressing that need, because they insist that we shouldn’t be there when, plainly, we not only are there, but need to be there and stay there. We can’t ‘run away’: staying in the Chaotic-domain is what sensemaking in that real-time, often-inherently-unique business-context will demand. Hence I’m sorry, but that aspect of Cynefin is just plain daft.

[There's a real challenge for Cynefin to prove its value here: and, from the above, I don't think it can do so. There's no escaping the fact that, as it stands, Cynefin explicitly makes itself neither useful nor usable for any part of this sensemaking-domain - in fact for the entirety of what is probably the most important domain for business-sensemaking. But that's not my problem, fortunately, so best leave it at that for now.]

Anyway, back to that booby-trap around skills-development and the relationship to timescale. Almost every business will face relentless pressure to shorten turnround times, product-development times, any kind of time-period: in other words, a constant push to compress down towards real-time. The cross-map between timescale and the Cynefin base-map shows us what will happen if – or more likely when – we push that process too far: the Complicated and Complex domains – analysis and experimentation – slowly get squeezed out of the picture, until there’s nothing left. And yes, the business probably can keep going for a while – as long as nothing changes. Even then, the pressures and lack of analytic or emergent backup will cause more and more exceptions, creating more and more overload in the Chaotic, until it finally collapses in a literally-chaotic heap. In other words, that cross-map not only shows us that excessive time-compression is a guaranteed way to kill the business, but also shows us exactly how and why it will happen – and hence the warning-signs to watch for, in case the risk gets too high. That’s a very important point that comes straight out from this cross-map.

If we now add to this picture the cross-map to the skills-development sequence – trainee, apprentice, journeyman, master – we can now highlight the real longer-term booby-trap. Remember that in that time-compression we squeeze out the Complicated and Complex domains. In doing so, we also squeeze out the support for the Apprentice and Journeyman stages of skills-development. The result is that we risk creating a context staffed by people with Master-level skills – doing all the Chaotic-domain work – and people with Trainee-level skills – doing all the Simple work – and no means to develop the trainees’ skills to become the next generations of masters. (There’s more detail on this in the Sidewise post ’Where have all the good skills gone?‘) This is a huge kurtosis-risk for almost any organisation – and yet very few people seem to have acknowledged even its existence, let alone just how serious it really is. So again, this is another very important point that comes straight out of the cross-map.

Finally, there are some disturbing intimations of potential for misuse. These arise from specific points in the cross-maps above:

• Cynefin purports to be a Complex-domain technique, and hence explicitly aims to address true complexity and unorder
• its purported base is in complexity-science, which tends to place it more naturally within the order-domains (particularly the Complicated domain)
• certain key aspects of Cynefin techniques – such as category-selection for filtering in Sensemaker – by definition derive from value-based decision-making (unorder), yet still purport to be ‘scientific’ (order)
• the purported ‘scientific’ base tends to give a spurious sense of ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ (order) in contexts which, by definition, are actually value-based (unorder), subject to arbitrary personal interpretation – a point not acknowledged at all in the basic Cynefin-framework diagram, and barely hinted at in public presentations such as the HBR paper
• most people see only the Cynefin diagram and other base-level categories and cross-maps, which would naturally place it within the Simple domain – yet it purports to be about sensemaking in the Complex domain

Other related concerns not covered in cross-maps above include the way in which the statistical modelling within the SenseMaker tool can give an illusion of working with uniqueness – ‘outliers’ – yet without actually working with the Chaotic-domain in its own terms, as ‘act / sense / respond’ in real-time. In effect, such use of Sensemaker veers dangerously close to ‘Complex masquerading as Chaotic’ – which is not helpful to anyone.

If we put that together with those other points above, which – as we’ve seen earlier – tend towards ‘Complicated masquerading as Complex’, or even ‘Simple masquerading as Complex’, what we’re left with is a framework whose domain-boundaries and discipline-boundaries are almost too blurred and confused to make much sense to anyone, other than perhaps its original creator. And that blurriness of the boundaries also means that many (most?) of the standard checks on safety, professional-discipline, ethics and the like are either unusable, actively blocked or entirely absent – in other words, it’s inherently wide-open for misunderstanding or misuse.

And it’s clear that such misuse could be both unintentional and, unfortunately, intentional. Given Cynefin’s current structure and presentation (as in the HBR paper), it’s all too easy to present something as ‘true’, and then jump around between domains to avoid any challenge. As it stands – to be blunt – the framework is structured in such a way as to make it all but perfect for (mis)use by a consultant who wanted to pander to the fears of worried executives, and provide them with spurious ‘evidence’ that they’re ‘in control’ of something that, by definition, cannot be controlled. To say the least, that’s not good, for anyone: and yet at present that temptation is built right into the very fabric of the framework…

One of the easiest ways in which such misuse can occur is if the framework is presented as a Simple categorisation: hence, I presume, one very good reason why Snowden is so adamant against anyone using the framework in that way – and I do applaud him for that. It’s true that that overall ‘blurriness’ can be helpful, in that it does enable some undoubtedly-useful workarounds in practice; but it also means that usage of the framework needs much more active ‘policing’ than would otherwise need to be the case – and whilst Snowden may be willing to take on that task at present, that inherent fragility means that it will always be an uphill struggle, always somewhat fraught. And behind it all, there still remain those serious ethics-risks – arising from the structure itself – that cannot and must not be ignored.

A difference in paradigm

I suspect that much if not most of the ongoing unpleasantness around Cynefin and context-space mapping has arisen from a clash of paradigms.

Snowden is explicit that he places himself within the scientific tradition, the domain of ‘provable truth’.

I don’t. Almost all of my work is in the technological tradition, the domain of ‘proof by usefulness’. Where the scientific tradition would focus solely on ‘truth’, the primary driver here is effectiveness – which I usually summarise via the keywords efficient, reliable, elegant, appropriate, integrated.

The unorder-domains do have their own ‘truth’ – but it’s a fundamentally-different type of ‘truth’ to that which applies in the order-domains. In fact, each of the SCCC domains has its own distinct form of ‘truth’. And the key point here – too easily missed by too many people, it seems – is that these different types of ‘truth’ don’t mix. For example, I’ll freely admit that some aspects of CSM do have significant similarities with something as ‘unscientific’ as a deck of Tarot cards, because we choose images that are ‘information-rich’, to allow appropriate insights to arise from the ‘chaos’ of intentional cognitive-dissonance. The point is simply this: it works – and the fact that it’s supposedly ‘unscientific’ doesn’t matter in the slightest in this context. (Yes, it might well matter in other contexts, but that’s the point: it’s context-dependent.) We know the conditions under which it works, and which it doesn’t – in other words, it’s a technology. In this particular case, it’s a known, proven technology for working with uniqueness in the Chaotic-domain, where, by definition, no ‘science’-based model is going to work.

But the problem I’ve had, time and time again, from Snowden and other ‘science’-oriented folks, is that they’ve attempted either to apply ‘scientific’ forms of validation – which, by definition, does not and cannot make sense – or else, as in this example, they’ve fallen back to various forms of unprincipled-attack. Neither of these type of tactics are helpful, to anyone. What is needed is solid, rigorous challenge in technological terms – without getting lost in spurious non-’science’.

My real focus here is meta-methodology – the methods and methodologies for developing methods and methodologies. To be blunt, I’m still not sure that Snowden understands the difference: in fact many of his attacks over the years only make sense if in fact he doesn’t understand that point. If one can’t tell the difference between a framework such as Cynefin, versus a metametaframework such as context-space mapping, then clearly nothing much is going to make sense. Either way, the difference in paradigms is enough to cause serious friction in itself: but in practice, all we should need do is take note of that fact, respect that the paradigms are indeed different, and move on.

A practical summary

Okay, I know it’s been long, but I hope it’s been worth it: in any case, thanks for sticking with it this far. All we have to do now is wrap this up, and then we’re done.

The wrap-up is really simple, consisting of just one question: in reading this, did you gain any insights about Cynefin, or about context-space mapping, that you didn’t have before?

If you gained no insights at all – no new information, no new thoughts about how to use either of those two tools or techniques, or anything else – then Snowden has a fair point: context-space mapping is of little value to you.

But if you did gain any insights, of any kind – perhaps not even about either of these two tools – then context-space mapping does have value, for you at least.

Yet you and your experience here are the judge of this: the only judge. The only ‘truth’ here is yours.

Perhaps let me know your results in this?

Thanks again, anyway.

[One urgent point first: this is not about Cynefin. I'm not going there: don't worry. It's in the title only because I thought that if you're a Cynefin practitioner, and you don't already know Inayatullah's 'Causal Layered Analysis', you may well want to add it to your complexity-toolbox. If so, the SCCC categorisation (Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic) may help you to hook that technique into what you already do. That's it: you can ignore everything else here. Just a friendly Public Service Announcement for you, that's all. ]

As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about ‘the wrongs of rights‘, and why I think they’re seriously problematic at every scale of an enterprise-architecture.

On Causal Layered Analysis

What came up this morning was a thought that Causal Layered Analysis [CLA] might be a useful tool for ‘the rights problem’. CLA was originally developed by Sohail Inayatullah around a decade ago, and has since expanded into a sizeable body of theory and practice, especially in the futures-domain. For more detail on the practical technique and the ideas behind it, see Sohail’s original paper on CLA (as published in Futures, October 1998) and the Wikipedia article. Here’s the introduction to the paper:

Causal layered analysis is offered as a new futures research method. Its utility is not in predicting the future but in creating transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures. Causal layered analysis consists of four levels: the litany, social causes, discourse/worldview and myth/metaphor. The challenge is to conduct research that moves up and down these layers of analysis and thus is inclusive of different ways of knowing.

The way that CLA works in practice is indicated by the paper’s subtitle, ’poststructuralism as method’: we apply academic-style ‘deconstruction’ (from linguistic-analysis etc) at each those four layers, or four ‘ways of knowing’, moving up and down the layers to elicit more information and experiences about and views on the overall context.

[Before reading any further here, I'd strongly suggest having a wander through those various materials on CLA - not least because without doing so, much of what follows may not make much sense. ]

The view within ‘the litany’ tends to be a bit simplistic, a very polarised, rule-based and often Other-oriented view of the world – “they should”, “they shouldn’t be allowed to…” and so on - a relentless ‘litany of complaint’. The ‘social causes’ view tends to be a bit more nuanced, more aware of real-world complications; the ‘discourse/worldview’ more complex again; and… Well, you can see where where this is headed, because it obviously suggests a crossmap with the SCCC categorisation of ‘ways of knowing’:

Which is kind of interesting. And which suggests a whole stream of other potentially-useful crossmaps.

[Cynefin practitioners might want to stop reading at this point, because everything onward from here is an exercise in context-space mapping - a different technique. Some of it may look familiar at times, but I should emphasise that it's not 'legitimate Cynefin'. (Probably not 'legitimate CLA' either, but I doubt Sohail would mind as much.)]

Context-space mapping with domains of Causal Layered Analysis

To extend this context-space mapping [CSM], we can identify distinct ‘phase-boundaries’ between the domains in this ‘stack’, such as:

And we can also crossmap those domains with other views – for example, a Jungian-derived set of categories that align well with the CLA set, the set of sensemaking/decisionmaking tactics from the Cynefin framework, and another matching set of decision-drivers:

• ‘the litany’ : Simple : inner-truth (‘Priest’) : “sense, categorise, respond” : rule-based
• ‘social causes’ : Complicated : outer-truth (‘Scientist’) : “sense, analyse, respond” : algorithms
• ‘discourse/worldview’ : Complex : outer-value (Technologist/Magician) : “probe, sense, respond” : experiment, patterns, guidelines
• ‘myth/metaphor’ : Chaotic : inner-value (Artist) : “act, sense, respond” : principles, values

This suggests, for example, that ‘the litany’ would have a strong tendency towards over-certain and over-simplified notions of ‘the Truth’, endless blaming of ‘the Other’ without any form of self-reflection or self-analysis, and knee-jerk responses via over-simple categories, usually predefined by some self-appointed ‘Priest of The Truth’ in an opaque and often literally-unprincipled way. Which might kinda suggest a new verb, ‘to murdoch’, as in ‘to murdoch the truth’? (for which the shorthand might be ‘Fox News’? )

[I'm not saying that's 'the truth', by the way: that would itself be an overly-Simple view. Context-space mapping is more a Chaotic-domain technique, a way to elicit ideas that may be of value in a given context, but they may also not be of value in that context. That's the whole key to understanding CSM: its usefulness, but also its risk, is that it depends on having the skills and experience to determine what is or is not of potential value in a context. Please do take care, because misplaced notions about 'true' or 'not-true' can be disastrously misleading here.]

This crossmap also conflicts quite a bit with the standard Cynefin description of the Chaotic domain that kind-of implies the Chaotic is somewhere we’d usually need to get away from as quickly as possible. The CLA mapping here suggests instead that the Chaotic is a valid and important domain in its own right – somewhere that might well be challenging at a deep personal level, but also where we might want to stay and explore for a while, until the depths get a bit too much and we need to come back elsewhere for air. But notice that in context-space mapping, that kind of apparent-conflict is perfectly okay: both views are ‘true’, the concern is more about which view is useful for a given purpose.

Anyway, at present, this is still a single-axis ‘vertical stack’; yet that last crossmap suggests it’s also a kind of two-axis matrix. To resolve that, we can twist the ‘stack’ into a Cynefin-like layout, with a central ‘the-everything’ domain to remind us that both perspectives are ‘true’:

Which is interesting in itself – for me, at least, because it brings up more ideas about how and where and in what contexts to use CLA, and when to switch between the different types of deconstruction that apply in the respective CLA layers.

Causal Layered Analysis, time-compression and social stress

Previous experience with this type of context-space map also suggests another crossmap-overlay, in this case another vertical axis of timescale, from real-time at the base to infinity at the top:

Which for me is a bit of an eye-opener, with important implications for CLA. The point is that any sensemaking and decisionmaking in the Complex or Complicated domains – ‘discourse/worldview’ or analysis of ‘social causes’ – will take time: a fact that will be painfully obvious to anyone who works in those domains. So as the available time gets squeezed – whether because we’re moving towards real-time anyway, or because of social-panic and similar pressures – we end up being forced more and more into the sensemaking/decisionmaking spaces of the Simple and the Chaotic: otherwise known as CP Snow’s ‘Two Cultures‘, the classic worldviews of the sciences and the arts respectively. (We might also note, using CLA recursively, that the assertions of their respective paradigms become more and more extreme as we move towards real-time.)

What this also suggests is that when a culture is under stress, it will automatically tend towards this kind of ‘Two Cultures’ dichotomy between ‘Truth’ (Simple) versus ‘Value’ (Chaotic) - which, yes, is a dichotomy that itself often becomes over-Simple. The ‘Truth’-meme will tend to dismiss anything ‘not-True’ as ‘anarchic’, but its inherently constrained set of categories will, almost by definition, never be sufficient to deal with inherent-uncertainty: hence the kind of ‘collapse into chaos’ described in the Cynefin model. On the other side, the ‘Value’-meme is – again almost by definition – seemingly unlikely to generate any kind of stable categorisation via which a Simple-domain mode can make sense.

What we see in practice is that as the social stress increases and the links between people fragment, those Simple categories of shared ‘inner-truths’ – “what is True for we” - tend to separate out into self-specific ‘inner-truths’ – “what is True for me‘. This also leads a loss of awareness of the necessary mutuality of responsibilities that underpins all social constructs such as ‘rights’, such that ‘our rights’ becomes reframed solely in terms of ‘my rights’: “we hold these truths to be self-evident” morphs into a self-centred demand to the Other to “hold my truths to be self-evident”, and so on.

And without shared-categories, any social structure based on a Simple ‘sense / categorise / respond’ will by definition start to break down. The usual result is a spiralling descent into an out-of-control litany of complaint, first to ‘What’s in it for me?’, then ‘Me first!’, to a fully self-centred ‘Me-only!’, and eventually a truly chaotic cacophony of ’Me! Me! Me!’ – otherwise known as ‘kiddies’-anarchy’. In a very literal sense, the Simple inherently becomes chaotic. And there doesn’t seem to be any direct ‘truth’-based path back from there, other than via some forceful imposition of rule and rules: either the ‘dictator’s gambit’ or, in rarer cases, the ‘Truth of the Prophet’.

Yet from the opposite side of the ‘truth/value’ dichotomy, what does seem to work is a re-focus on ‘inner-value’, on deep-principles and, especially, deep-myth. It has a surface appearance of the Chaotic, but actually develops its own simplicity: a functional and, often, highly-disciplined form of anarchy, rather than a dysfunctional one. Given that sensemaking/decision-making pattern of ‘act / sense / respond’, the very act of expression often means that whatever arises automatically takes on a social form.

Again, from practical experience, these context-specific images seem to act as ‘seeds’ around which directed action can coalesce – much as would happen in a more usual move into the Complex-domain, except that the time-pressures or social-context pressures mean that it actually remains within the ‘pressure-cooker’ of the Chaotic. The more that the focus can be held in this mode of the Chaotic-domain, te more ideas can be created – and the more the emphasis is held on the decision-making guides of the respective principles and values, the more likely it is that these ideas and images will be experienced as ‘of value’ within that context. The ways in which directed-action can coalesce around these ‘seeds’ can sometimes – perhaps often – lead to enough of a structure to enable a Simple-type ‘sense / categorise / respond’ mode of decisionmaking: in other words, something that is more generally actionable than a highly-personal ‘inner-value’. Which, in turn, can provide enough of an anchor for a more balanced and principles-guided way out of the crisis – a ‘values‘-based way back to ‘truth’.

To summarise this in much shorter form, what this suggests is that the key people in a major social crisis are the artists and the storytellers. The military-commanders and managers and the priests – the ‘truth-holders’ who maintain order – may come to the fore before the collapse, or after the recovery has started: but in the midst of the crisis it is those who normally live close to Chaos to whom the baton must be passed.

A practical summary

Cross-mapping Causal Layered Analysis with the SCCC-categorisation and the ‘now’-to-’infinity’ timescale can deliver some useful insights about how to address high-stress social contexts – such as the kind of ‘mess’ that our entire global economics seems likely to be heading into at present. The main points I see arising from the cross-map include:

• Causal Layered Analysis in likely to be a useful technique in whole-enterprise architecture
• time-compression (reduced time for decisionmaking, often combined with high-contextual stress) is likely to squeeze sensemaking-decisionmaking into a tight dichotomy between Simple and Chaotic SCCC-domains
• Simple delivers consistency under high social-stress, up to a critical collapse-point, and the Chaotic appears to be a potentially-dangerous distraction
• under very high social-stress, Simple tends to collapse into dysfunctional-chaos, whereas Chaotic is usually able to regenerate sufficient basis for rule-structures that restabilise the Simple
• use CLA in the Simple domain (‘the litany’) to identify risk of collapse: the risk increases with increasing social-fragmentation from ‘we’ to ‘me’
• use CLA in the Chaotic-domain (‘myth/metaphor’) to identify and support principles and values that can guide directed action during the peak of the crisis

Some points specific to whole-enterprise architectures:

• identify Chaotic-domain ‘natives’ (people who naturally work at the CLA ‘deep-myth/metaphor’ layer) such as design-thinkers, artists and, especially, story-tellers within the shared-enterprise
• work with these people to identify and express key principles and values within the shared-enterprise that would be viewed as ‘normative’ – i.e. a ‘preferred direction’
  [warning: these principles and values must be allowed to emerge from the collective shared-space, and must be respected as such - they will fail if imposed, or even appear to be imposed, from 'outside']
• ensure that the usual ‘truth-holders’ are aware of and accept that there is a critical point at which they must let go of ‘control’, must allow the Chaotic domain to be what it is, must relinquish authority to the ‘story-tellers’, and must accept and renegotiate with the ‘new order’ that arises out of the ‘guided-chaos’
  [warning: refusal to follow this long-proven success-pattern, or attempts to 'take control' too early in the transit through the Chaotic-domain, will guarantee failure for everyone concerned, including the 'truth-holders']

In effect, this is a method to define a governance-process for use in contexts where a conventional rule-based approach to governance will naturally break down – an interesting architectural recursion!

Anyway, enough for now: over to you for comments/suggestions etc?

In Australian parlance, that type of magnificently-misleading ‘wrong answer’ is known as ‘the toad in the road’.

Every ‘trade’ has its toads, in some form or another. In the case of enterprise-architecture, given our necessarily very broad scope, we do seem to have rather a lot of them. Oh well.

It’s a toad. It sits there, blocking the way. In reality, it’s not actually that big, but it somehow demands our attention, making it difficult to deal with anything else. But we can’t just drive over it, stomp on it, squash it into a literally bloody pulp: I know that some people would do that, but it does have its own right to live, after all. Yet we do need to be careful: some toads are downright toxic. And, it’s well, kinda, yuck… no-one seems very willing to pick it up and put it politely out of the way… Oh joys…

Yeah: that kind of problem.

So how do we deal with ‘the toad in the road’?

It’s different in every case, of course.

Some of the toads in our space are really no problem: they’re just in the wrong place, that’s all. Some of them are positively genial, the kind of toad that, if it had a hat, would doff that hat with a broad smile and an offer to share a slightly-chewed slug. Like all toads, of course, they’re stubborn and they’ll stand their ground, which isn’t exactly helpful when they’re in the middle of the driveway and we need to get moving for the day; but they’re usually quite cooperative as long as we’re respectful about how we shoo them back under the strawberries instead.

Roger Sessions‘ IT-oriented version of ‘complexity’ is one such toad: it’s fine for IT, but for enterprise-architecture it’s an over-extension of ‘order’ into a realm of inherent ‘unorder’, and it really doesn’t work. Likewise John Zachman‘s notion of ‘engineering the enterprise’: it would make sense if an enterprise was an aircraft, which, however, it isn’t. Oops. In both cases, it’s definitely “right idea, wrong place”; and yes, we do all kinda know it. Sure, there will always be arguments about the positioning of that kind of toad: but people like Roger and John are unfailingly courteous and polite, so much so that it’s always a pleasure to disagree with them yet again.  It’s just a kind of game we play from time to time, and we all know it’s a game – sort of how a toad would really like it if the driveway would turn itself into a strawberry-patch because that’s what they know best, and it’s somehow our fault that it isn’t.

There are other kinds of toad that are somewhat similar, but they often seem a bit brainless, so it’s lot harder to negotiate with them. The real problem is that there’s just so many of the darn things: they turn up everywhere, all crawling over each other beneath our carefully-tended bushes and shrubs, digging around for worms and grubs, and generally making a right old mess of everything in the process. Their all-pervasive slime and stench is… well, let’s just say we wouldn’t call it pleasant? – and they don’t really help in any way in the garden.

At present, the dominant toad of that type in our space is IT-centrism, though there are signs that a relatively-new species of business-centrism is beginning to move into our enterprise-architecture garden as well. Perhaps we shouldn’t mind so much, but it’s difficult to get any rest with the constant croaks of “Cloud! Cloud!” and the like… Sigh… Unfortunately, it is hard keep them out of the garden – and if we do somehow succeed in doing so, we’d probably block out all the friendly toads as well, which would be a real loss. Other than the mess that they make, though, these toads are fairly harmless, and there’s probably not much we can do anyway until they get the other side of their current breeding-frenzy (otherwise known as ‘sales-hype’ and ‘certification’). In the meantime, we just need to be careful where we tread, and keep on tidying up the mess as best we can.

There are a few types of toad that we really don’t want in the garden – in fact we need to apply considerable care to keep them out of the entire metaphoric country. These are the cane-toads of a trade – so poisonous that they’ll kill off just about everything in sight, just by their mere presence. Yikes… The real tragedy of the cane-toad, though, is that often it’s initially thought of as some kind of saviour – as was true of Taylorism in our industry’s case, for example. But the reality is that they’re seriously toxic, in almost every possible way – and that toxic nature soon wipes out any possible value they may have had. Not a good idea…

Some disciplines – social-work, in particular – seem beset by cane-toads on every side; by contrast, we don’t seem to have any at present in enterprise-architecture, which makes us fortunate indeed. There’s some risk that IT-centrism and the like could turn into cane-toads, but they don’t seem to have done so as yet – though they’re certainly enough of a problem for us as it is. Taylorism and its more recent sub-species such as BPR and over-hyped ‘business-rule engines’ have been fairly serious cane-toads for us in the past, but each seem now to have faded back into a more natural niche in the overall enterprise-architecture ecosystem. The existence of cane-toads, though, should warn us to be very careful of what we introduce into the enterprise-architecture garden, and to be wary indeed of the ever-present risk of unintended-consequences.

And there a few types of toad that are kind of in the middle – literally in the middle, too, because often it seems that all they really want to do is get in the way. In some cases there may only be one individual of a species in our garden: but like the brainless toad, it somehow manages always to be right in the middle of where need to be – and it won’t budge. At all. Unless it can do so in order to get in our way again… It’s perhaps not as toxic as the cane-toad, but it’s definitely in the wrong place – yet will not respond to any kind of reason, or any request to move on. It just sits there, puffing itself up like a bullfrog, making lots of noise, demanding our attention, and generally acting like it’s the only thing that could matter to anything or anyone in any way. It could perhaps be of use elsewhere in the garden: but since it won’t move there, we never really get much of a chance to find out. What it somehow never manages to accept is that in reality it’s nothing special – it’s just another toad. That’s all. A toad in the road: another darn nuisance that we could really do without…

For enterprise-architecture, IT-centrism has been a bit like that, though it is getting somewhat more amenable these days. All the hype around Cloud is getting to be a bit too much of a toad-in-the-road these days, too. But for me at least, by far the worst toad of this type is Cynefin. It seems we can’t ever talk about complexity without Cynefin insisting on getting in our way. We struggle to talk about even the simple or the complicated without accidentally invoking its unwanted presence. We can’t talk about uniqueness or inherent uncertainty – the business sense of ‘the chaotic‘ – without Cynefin demanding that it alone knows the truth about that space – when in reality it has nothing useful to say other than that we shouldn’t be there. Much like IT-centrism, it has perhaps rather too many characteristics of a cult. And whilst in principle it could be useful in enterprise-architecture, we can’t make much use of it in practice, because its promoter endlessly insists on barging into our space, spitting venom at anything he regards as ‘heresy’ - literally, ‘to think different’ in any way from himself.

We’ve all spent too much time hiding in fear from those attacks: I know way too many people – myself included – who’ve had to invoke Bob Sutton’s ‘No Asshole Rule‘ in that person’s direction, too. The bleak reality is that I’ve spent way too much time and effort pandering to his insatiable demands – much like the pointlessness we supposedly ‘must’ go through in order to get round a toad that endlessly insists on putting itself in our way, and then blaming us for the resultant conflict.

After the last attack, though, I took a more careful look at his snarky putdowns, in which he dismissed my work as valueless, a “hash-up”, “invalid in certain essential aspects” – yet notably failing to give any details as to how or why it should be so regarded. Hmm… time to stand up for myself, for once? So I’ve spent the past few days proving, to myself at least, that my work on context-space mapping is of value, by using it to assess Cynefin itself in terms of its usefulness – or lack of usefulness – for our enterprise-architecture discipline.

The results have been, uh, interesting… (I’ll publish it here if anyone wants, though I’d warn that it’s kinda long even by my standards…) It certainly confirms that, in present form, Cynefin is indeed likely to be useful in the Complex domain; but it’s of questionable value in any other domain, and inherently worse than useless for anything in the Chaotic domain. Another interesting point was that, despite its promoter endlessly railing at anyone who dares to use Cynefin as a categorisation-framework, that’s exactly how he himself uses it in ‘his’ much-publicised HBR paper [PDF]. And that analysis also highlights some nagging suspicions that the base-level Cynefin Framework is actually a Simple-domain technique that’s merely masquerading as a Complex-domain tool – which would be neither helpful nor wise.

Perhaps the most disturbing point, though, is what came up from a more detailed cross-comparison from the context-space map. That’s that the simplified version of Cynefin that’s all that most people see, and the way in which it uses its purported theoretical base in complexity-science, make it an almost perfect tool for (mis)use by any consultant who wants to pander to the fears of worried executives, and provide them with spurious ‘evidence’ that they’re ‘in control’ of something that, by definition, cannot be controlled. That’s not good – doing that would be seriously dishonest, so surely no-one would be so unethical as to do that, would they? And yet that temptation is built right into the very fabric of the framework… worrying indeed…

But the most important point this is this: it’s just another toad. Yes, sure, for our own safety, we might well need a shovel to scoop the wretched thing up: and, despite the strong temptation to use the shovel in another way entirely, we can toss that toad into another discipline’s garden where it might be more at home – and then make darn sure that it doesn’t come back again into ours. That’s probably the best way to deal with that type of toad.

So that’s four types of toad-in-the-road we all have to deal with, perhaps rather more often than we’d like:

• the friendly toad that gets in the way a bit, but is really useful in the right place
• the not-much-use-for-anything toad that gets a bit too much in the way for a while, especially when it’s over-excited
• the darned-dangerous toad that we need to keep out of our space at any cost
• the bloomin’-nuisance toad that we’re best off to toss out of the garden, and keep out as best we can

What’s your experience of ‘the toad in the road’? What are the various types of toad that you have to wrestle with in your own work? And how do you best cope with each?

Comments/experiences/suggestions, anyone?

[Update: A reminder, because a couple of people already seem to have missed this point: in this context, the 'toad' is not a person, it's an idea - "a clear, simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer". For example, the idea of IT-centrism is an example of the second type of 'toad'. This is very important indeed: for example, in no way would I describe either Roger Sessions or John Zachman as 'a toad' (though knowing them both, they might quite like the image above of "doffing a hat with a broad smile and offering to share a slightly-chewed slug"... )]

In two comments to my previous post, Dave Snowden has made it clear that he objects to any reference to the term ‘Cynefin‘ that does not conform exactly to his specification for that term.

This includes any usage of the term ‘Cynefin-categorization’, which I’ve been using in order to distinguish (and advise others to distinguish) the usage of the ‘Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic’ category-set, from Cynefin-proper. Snowden has made it clear that the term ‘Cynefin-categorization’ is not acceptable for this or any other purpose.

We are reminded that Cynefin-proper is a sensemaking-framework, and that in general the term ‘Cynefin’ should not be used in relation to any form of categorisation. If the term is used to describe categories, that usage must include all five Cynefin categories, including the central domain of ‘Disorder’. Under no circumstances may it be used to indicate the four-item category-set of Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic. We are also reminded that the Cynefin framework has a very specific graphic-format, and that the term ‘Cynefin’ should never be used in relation to a simple 2×2 matrix.

The practical problem is that the ‘Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic’ category-set and its variants are in common use throughout the enterprise-architecture discipline and many others, and have been so for many years. Although I seem once again to have taken the brunt of Snowden’s ire on this, the reality is that a lot of people are using that type of category-set and describing it as ‘Cynefin’ – usually as a result of (mis)-reading the Cynefin page on Wikipedia. A lot of people – as in Nigel Green’s example – are using that type of category-set with a 2×2 matrix and describing as ‘Cynefin’, or ‘based on Cynefin’. It’s clear that we cannot and must not do this any more.

Obviously the full category-set ‘Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic’ is too long for routine use, which is why many have used ‘Cynefin’ as a convenient shorthand. Again, we cannot and must not do this any more: hence we need an alternative shorthand term.

The obvious choice is the simple acronym: SCCC for Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic. (It could be shortened to SC3, but I’d prefer not… )

Could we perhaps adopt this from now on?

Or does anyone have a better alternative? Suggestions, please?

— —

On a separate but related matter, Snowden’s comments to that post once again make clear his opinions on the (lack of) quality and value of my work, such as stating that the tools and techniques that I’ve developed for sensemaking and the like are inherently “invalid … in certain essential aspects”, and insinuating that the cross-map techniques for ‘context-space mapping’ described in my book Everyday Enterprise-Architecture and elsewhere should be dismissed as a ‘hash-up’.

Which, I’ll admit, does hurt: critique is important, and I do value genuine critique, but this feels more like wholesale destruction just for the dubious enjoyment of doing so… Oh well.

There’s no question Snowden is entitled to his opinion, of course. And I’d certainly agree that he’s forceful in asserting those opinions. But unlike some others, I do suffer from deep and persistent self-doubt, and I’ll admit that this has thrown me straight back into that space again, seriously doubting whether what I’ve been doing has any value to anyone at all…

So I’m asking for your honest advice in this: is Snowden’s opinion the right one here? Does my work have any value to you, or to any others that you know, in enterprise-architectures and elsewhere? Should I just accept his view that what I’m doing is valueless to everyone, and the implication that I really ought to give up and walk away from it all, to leave you and him and everyone else  in peace? Or if you consider that it does have any value, what can I do to make it better, and perhaps more resilient to the kind of dismissals and denigration that we see here and elsewhere?

Comments/suggestions? Over to you, if would?

Many thanks, anyway.

The Japanese concept of ‘ba’ came up in one of the face-to-face conversations. … Nonaka et al say that ‘ba’ roughly means place”. It is a here-and-now coming together of physical, virtual and mental spaces, which together constitute a shared “context in motion” for tacit knowledge to become explicit.

In other words, a concept of place associated with ‘ways of knowing’.

I then remembered that although Snowden’s concept of Cynefin is, in current practice, primarily viewed as “a model used to describe problems, situations and systems”, the term likewise literally translates as ‘place‘ – and that, like Nonaka’s ba, that concept also arose out of work on utilising and sharing tacit knowledge.

One problem with both of those translations is that they’re very ‘thin’: the rather bald English word ‘place’ does not really convey the richness or layered nuance of either of the original terms. (Snowden himself has made this point several times, and I strongly agree with him in this.) To gain some sense of the deeper complexity and meaning there, one of my favourite resources is the work of the small English charity Common Ground, and in particular their Rules for Local Distinctiveness, such as:

– Let the CHARACTER of the people and place express itself. Kill corporate identity before it kills our high streets. Give local shops precedence.

– Defend DETAIL. Respond to the local and the vernacular. No new building or development need be bland, boring or brash.

– Local DIALECT should be spoken, heard and seen.

The other thread that comes up here is the notion of buildings and other places as anchors for both explicit and tacit knowledge – physical structures interweaving with conceptual structures, as described by Frances Yates in her classic The Art of Memory, and typified by the post-Renaissance ‘memory theatres’ of Guilio Camillo and his contemporaries. This in turn links back to a much older concept of ‘the art of memory‘, “a loosely associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and ‘invention’ of ideas” – a concept that can probably be found in some form or other in just about every culture.

Hence, to architecture, and to enterprise-architecture. If these represent the humanness of our interactions with physical, conceptual or relational space, what does that say about our present buildings and information-systems – almost all of which seem to conform to that description of “boring, bland or brash”?

Seems to me that there’s a lot that we might need to rediscover in our architectures, about the relationships between ‘place’ and collective knowing, collective remembering…?

Out on the fringes of enterprise-architectures and the like, we’re seeing some of this starting happen more now in the social-media and ‘social-business’ contexts, with much more emphasis on serendipity, tagging, cross-linking and cross-collaboration. As Dr McEwan indicates in her article, there’s more awareness of the human implications of the ‘Taylorist stranglehold’, its failures in the fundamentally-flawed concepts behind so much ‘business-process re-engineering’ and the like, and what we can learn as we rethink the entire idea of ‘the workplace’. And we’re seeing it, too, in the upsurge of interest in ideas and methods such as design-thinking and human-oriented systems-thinking, in holism, in panarchitecture and the like.

But perhaps one more useful place to start would be with concepts such as ba, cynefin and ‘local distinctiveness’, to re-remember what ‘place’ actually means in our working lives – and how we use the richness of place to anchor our shared memory.

Yet how do we do this in practice? How can we reclaim and rebuild ‘the art of memory’ into our places and workspaces, our information-systems and our collaborative relationships? Comments/suggestions, anyone?

I’ve been delighted to see a useful and clarifying discussion between Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz on the origins of the well-known Cynefin framework. It’s been important to me because in my work I use some parts of that framework, and not others: the question of origin and authorship of the various parts of the Cynefin milieu (so to speak) has, until now, been decidedly blurred, and it’s been very difficult to know who to acknowledge without insulting one party or another. There does seem to be a lot more clarity now, which helps a lot.

Most people know Cynefin only from the simple visual frame and its four main ‘repeatability categories’: Simple [Known], Complicated [Knowable], Complex and Chaotic. Yet, as Dave has explained on various occasions, the term cynefin is actually a Welsh word, rather inadequately translated into English as ‘place’ (much like how another key Welsh word, hiraedd, is thinly translated as ‘homesickness’, when it’s more like ‘homesickness to the tenth degree’ for a ‘home’ that may exist only in the heart and soul…). And during that discussion on Cynthia Kurtz’s blog, Dave Snowden cited an early paper on his ideas:

Snowden, D. (2000) “Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: an Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities” conference proceedings of KMAC at the University of Aston, July 2000)

I’ll admit straight off that I haven’t seen that paper: but it seems it might be an important one to refer to, because of that explicit inclusion of place. What’s frustrating, though, is that it seems to be both the first and last point at which ‘time and place’ are explicitly linked to the (later) ‘Cynefin’ approach to sensemaking (the categories, the dynamics and so on, and, later, the Cognitive Edge ‘Sensemaker’ software). And I’d love to see more.

To me ‘time and place’ is a very important theme in sensemaking, because the relationship between people and place is extremely complex: there’s an interaction between people and place, and in some ways it seems that the place itself has choices too. We see this interaction described explicitly in the Australian-aboriginal concept of the Dreaming, or (as Cynthia Kurtz describes) in the native-American notion of the Medicine Wheel (though in both cases it’s almost more an experience than a mere concept). It would seem to be in other cultures too, if perhaps less explicitly: for example, as Dave indicates, and as can be seen in other references to the Welsh cynefin, much the same would seem to apply in Welsh culture. And the same would seem to be true of people’s relationship to time – or times, rather – at any given place.

There are a fair few groups working in this space: for example, the English charity Common Ground, whose work on ‘local distinctiveness‘ I would very strongly recommend, along with their projects on parish maps and the book From place to PLACE, and the essay “Losing your place“. (Enterprise-architects especially should be able to see the direct application of those to the enterprise context, with the enterprise as metaphoric ‘place’ that people inhabit.)

And there are also a handful of more academic-oriented disciplines, such as psychogeography (popularised by the London writer will self, but with its origins more in 1950s France), and archaeography or ‘deep mapping‘, a kind of bridge between archaeology, art and culture. I’ve been involved in some aspects of those fields myself over the years, with my 1978 book Needles of Stone (updated 2008 edition here), and more recently in collaboration with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, developing formal disciplines to bridge the objective and subjective aspects of academic-archaeology (as in our joint paper in the archaeology journal Time&Mind). To some people the content and context of these various fields may be a bit too weird in places – even in the peer-reviewed ones such as Time&Mind – yet to me they all have real and practical applications in the complex processes of sensemaking for something as large as an entire enterprise.

The point here is that I do believe that the ‘place and time’ aspects of the original Cynefin would be highly relevant now in enterprise-architectures and the like, especially if brought up to date with the other deep work that’s been done on Cynefin over the past decade. The catch, of course, is that I’m definitely not the right person to talk about it: the only right person to present that, of course, would be Dave Snowden. And again, this weblog isn’t the right place: if anything new is to be written on this, it should be in Dave’s Cognitive Edge blog, perhaps, or some other academic paper.

Anyway, that’s the request: for an update on how ‘time and place’ fit into Cynefin sensemaking, and into the overall themes of organisational complexity and the like. Given the other crosslinks I’ve summarised above, I do believe it would be useful now.

Beyond making that request, it’s none of my business, so I’ll stop now. But if Dave or someone else does write on this, perhaps let me know? Many thanks.

For enterprise-architects, it’s well worth a look: quite a good summary of how standard Cynefin concepts – such as Cynthia Kurtz’s distinction between ‘order and ‘unorder’ – can be used in an enterprise-architecture context. I remembered that I’d read it when it first came out, so I scrolled down to see if there were any comments that had been added since then.

There were. The first was a typically astute question by Richard Veryard, asking for practical examples, because “it would be good to have some practical examples of how Cynefin makes a real difference to what architects can achieve” – which is something that we do all need. The second comment was a reply from Andrew, in essence saying ‘yes, we do have examples, please watch this space’. But the third comment, again from Andrew, a couple of weeks later, and with no apparent connection to anything anyone else had said, was this:

My paper is a straightforward application and extension of Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz’s 2004 work, and properly credits that work. Dave has indicated that he is happy with this.

Tom Graves has recently referred to this paper, I believe mainly as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave. Tom has not contacted me in any way, or sought my permission to re-use the diagrams in his article. I do not in any way endorse his views, or have any relationship to this derivative work.

I will admit that I did what just about anyone else would do under these circumstances: I blinked. Followed by a “Wha…? – where the heck did that come from?” – because it frankly makes no sense at all.

Looking back through my weblog, I can’t find a post of mine from that period that references Johnston’s paper. I do remember reTweeting someone’s link to it, though. I haven’t found any reference of mine to that specific diagram – i.e. “as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave” – and Tweets don’t carry graphics, of course. So I really don’t know what this frankly bizarre rant of Johnston’s is all about… I’ve no idea what’s going on there.

I posted a reply-comment, which duly went into the “Your comment is awaiting moderation” state, from which it has never emerged: I’ll have to assume that Andrew deleted it. Which is disappointing, but there ’tis: he’s entitled to do so if he wishes. Yet in the interests of setting the record straight, this is the comment that would have appeared there if he had allowed it.

Andrew: re: “Tom Graves has recently referred to this paper, I believe mainly as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave.”

I referred to this paper because I thought it was good work. The assertion that I referred to this paper “mainly as a source for the Cynefin diagrams without having to seek permission directly from Dave” is both insulting and absurd – not least because the Cynefin diagram is explicitly in the public domain anyway (see Snowden’s licensing notice on the Wikipedia page on Cynefin).

In the past I have done very extensive work on ‘the Cynefin categorisation’, in particular on attempting to integrate the Chaotic domain, which is barely addressed in Snowden’s work (though it is addressed in some depth in Kurtz’s more recent work). The methods and approaches I used in that work are most certainly not ‘derivative’ – a fact which seems to be the main source of Snowden’s very public ire (including an extraordinary out-of-context misuse of two of my diagrams in his ‘History of Cynefin’, seemingly for the sole purpose of mockery, and certainly without any apparent understanding of their proper context or use). It is certainly true that most of my work around ‘the Cynefin categorisation’ has a different practical and theoretical base – for example, Snowden concentrates on complexity-science, whereas my work leverages iterative/recursive techniques from the futures disciplines (such as Causal layered analysis) and enterprise-architectures (such as TOGAF ADM, as also extended beyond IT). At Snowden’s request, I have explicitly and publicly separated my work from his, although you might note that Kurtz does explicitly acknowledge some of my ideas and material in her current work on ‘Confluence’.

Richard Veryard above asks “it would be good to have some practical examples of how Cynefin makes a real difference to what architects can achieve”, to which you replied “Yes, I do have some real, current examples where complexity is forcing me to say to the client ‘you can’t analyse this’: watch out for a follow-on ‘examples’ piece sometime soon”. However, it is now three months later: would you give us a timeline as to when you publish these examples? (In the meantime, if anyone is interested, there are many examples of real-life usages of a ‘Cynefin-like categorisation’ linked to proven enterprise-architecture methodologies available in my books – see TetradianBooks – and on my weblog.)

I do acknowledge that Snowden and I have disagreed strongly in the past over our significantly different approaches to theory and practice in the ‘unorder’ space, and I appreciate that people may sometimes choose to ‘take sides’ in such cases of ‘conflict of ideas’. However, ‘taking sides’ does not actually further the progress in the field. You might also note that Snowden’s work is not designed to work directly with and in enterprise-architectures, whereas mine is. In that sense, might I request that you at least consider my work properly in its proper context, rather than dismissing it outright on the say-so of someone from a largely unrelated field of enquiry?

If I were of a more paranoid frame of mind, I could almost believe that someone might grant permission to use their material only on condition that specific other people and their work are to be publicly denigrated. There are plenty of examples of that happening throughout the history of science and elsewhere, after all, where jealousy or fear takes precedence over honesty or sense. Fortunately I’m not that paranoid: yet it would be disappointing – to say the least – if that were to turn out to be so in this case, wouldn’t it?

Oh well.