Chris,
Thank you for bringing in the Cynefin framework! After hearing about
Snowden's framework at an agile software conference, it quickly spread
through the Agile community. Agile is even referenced in the wikipedia
article about Cynefin. I'd recommend that folks take a look at the
article at least for the simple graphic that helps understand the model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin
It's interesting that although Snowden's article was published in 2007
in HBR, a good chunk of the useful ideas had been worked on by Brenda
Zimmerman and others starting in 1998 after being inspired by the study
of chaos theory.
Simple (or obvious) is like baking a cake. (Maybe things don't always go
to plan, but following a simple recipe at sea level with good tools and
ingredients will usually work).
Complicated is like sending a rocket to the moon. Yes, many moving parts
in mission control. Many things can go wrong. But working the plan does
most of the work.
Complex is like parenting a child. What you learn raising a child from
birth to age six does not give the answers for the next six years, let
alone for raising the next one.
Snowden also adds a Chaotic and Disorder domain, and interesting
boundaries and relationships between the five domains. What's also
interesting about Cynefin is that the focus is on our knowledge or
understanding of a system - not really a description of the Universe or
piece thereof.
It's a mistake to dismiss the utility of Cynefin as a lens simply by
stating that the universe is self-organizing. If anything, this model's
utility is mostly in showing how traditional management processes (i.e.
command and control) are mostly inadequate for most issues especially in
today's environment. Cynefin has been used a great deal to help promote
agile practices in organizations, and surely can also be used to promote
OST.
Harold
On 7/22/14 12:57 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I seek simplicity in trying to describe where and how Open Space does
it's magic.
One of the ways I have had excellent success over the years in
describing this work is derived from David Snowden's work on the
Cynefin framework.
The short story is this:
We are faced all the time with problems that are basically knowable,
and problems that aren't. Knowable problems mean that with the right
knowledge and expertise, they can be fixed. A technical team can come
together and analyse the causes, work with what's available and craft
a solution. Then they can get an implementation plan in place and go
ahead and do it. These kinds of problems have a start line and a
finish line. When you are done, you are done. Building a bridge is
one of those kinds of problems. You build it and there is no
tolerance for failure. It needs to be failsafe.
Open Space doesn't work well for those kinds of problems because the
solution is basically already known, or at least knowable.
Then there are problems for which no know solution exists, and even if
you did get a solution, you can't really "solve" the problem because
the problem is due to a myriad of causes and is itself emergent. For
example, racism. Look around and you will find very few people that
identify themselves as racists, but look at the stats for Canadian
society for example and you see that non-white people are trailing in
every indicator of societal success. Essentially you are seeing the
results of a racist society but no racists anywhere. This is an
emergent problem. Racism itself is a self-organizing phenomenon,
notwithstanding the few people that actively engineer racist
environments. Such a problem didn't really start anywhere and it
can't really end either. What is needed is a way of addressing it,
moving the system away from the negative indicators and towards
something else.
In other words, this is a complex problem.
The way to solve complex problems is to create many "strange
attractors" around which the system can organize itself differently.
Open Space nis the best method I know of for creating such strange
attractors, as they are born from the passion and responsibility of
those that want to create change, and they are amplified by people
coming together to work on these things.
It's "post and host" rather than "command and control."
And because you can't be sure if things are going to work out, you
have to adopt a particular mindset to your initiative: one that is
"safe to fail." In other words, if it doesn't work, you stop doing
it. If it does work, you do more of it. And all the way along you
build in learning, so that the system can see how change is made and
be drawn towards those initiatives that are currently making a
difference. Certainly this kind of problem solving is not useful for
building a bridge, as you cannot afford a failure there. But for
problems with no known solutions, it is brilliant.
Harrison has spent decades outlining this simplicity in even less
words than I have now and his writing and thinking is, and continues
to be far ahead of it's time and maybe a little under appreciated
because it is delivered in simple terms like "don't work so hard."
But ultimately this is the best and most important advice for working
in complex systems.
Open Space. Do it. Learn. Do it again. Don't work so hard.
More than that really starts to build in the delusion that people can
possibly know what to do. From that place solutions will be deluded.
That they may work is pure luck. Open Space offers us a disciplined
approach to addressing complexity in an ongoing way. Don't be fooled
by its simplicity.
Chris
--
Harold Shinsato
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://shinsato.com
twitter: @hajush <http://twitter.com/hajush>
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