Cynefin framework
[5] Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or "domains"—clear (also known as simple or obvious), complicated, complex, chaotic, and confusion (or disorder)—that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people's behaviour.
[11] The concept is intended to "help pupils explore, make connections and develop understanding of themselves within a modern, diverse and inclusive society.
[10] Snowden, then of IBM Global Services, began work on a Cynefin model in 1999 to help manage intellectual capital within the company.
[2] Their paper, "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making", won them an "Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in OB" award from the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior division.
[2] According to Thomas A. Stewart, This is the domain of legal structures, standard operating procedures, practices that are proven to work.
Artificial intelligence copes well here: Deep Blue plays chess as if it were a complicated problem, looking at every possible sequence of moves.
"Hard cases ... need human underwriters," Stewart writes, "and the best all do the same thing: Dump the file and spread out the contents."
Stewart identifies battlefields, markets, ecosystems and corporate cultures as complex systems that are "impervious to a reductionist, take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works approach, because your very actions change the situation in unpredictable ways.
In contrast to its everyday English usage, mathematical chaos cannot be conventionally modeled; instead, it must be either simulated or stimulated to understand its properties.
While Snowden acknowledges the value of collective wisdom in generating new ideas and forming well-rounded perspectives, he remains skeptical of this application of chaos.
[27] According to Snowden, resolving accidental chaos requires creating enough structure to categorize issues into either complex or ordered domains, a process he terms the aporetic turn.
"[27] In this context, managers "act–sense–respond": act to establish order; sense where stability lies; respond to turn the chaotic into the complex.
[2] Snowden and Boone write: In the chaotic domain, a leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to staunch the bleeding.
A leader must first act to establish order, then sense where stability is present and from where it is absent, and then respond by working to transform the situation from chaos to complexity, where the identification of emerging patterns can both help prevent future crises and discern new opportunities.
Deputy Police Chief Walt Gasior had to act immediately to stem the early panic (chaotic), while keeping the department running (clear), calling in experts (complicated), and maintaining community confidence in the following weeks (complex).
[2] Stewart offers others: "the firefighter whose gut makes him turn left or the trader who instinctively sells when the news about the stock seems too good to be true."
"Here, multiple perspectives jostle for prominence, factional leaders argue with one another, and cacophony rules", write Snowden and Boone.
Similarly, a "buildup of biases", complacency or lack of maintenance can cause a "catastrophic failure": a clockwise movement from clear to chaotic, represented by the "fold" between those domains.
[4] Later uses include analysing the impact of religion on policymaking within the George W. Bush administration,[29] emergency management,[30] network science and the military,[31] the management of food-chain risks,[32] homeland security in the United States,[33] agile software development,[34] and policing the Occupy Movement in the United States.
[39] Criticism of Cynefin includes that the framework is difficult and confusing, needs a more rigorous foundation, and covers too limited a selection of possible contexts.
[41] Prof Simon French recognizes "the value of the Cynefin framework in categorising decision contexts and identifying how to address many uncertainties in an analysis" and as such believes it builds on seminal works such as Russell L. Ackoff's Scientific Method: optimizing applied research decisions (1962), C. West Churchman's Inquiring Systems (1967), Rittel and Webber's Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (1973), Douglas John White's Decision Methodology (1975), John Tukey's Exploratory data analysis (1977), Mike Pidd's Tools for Thinking: Modelling in Management Science (1996), and Ritchey's General Morphological Analysis (1998).
