The Cynefin frame to work out complex issues
The first of the webinars focused on
Leading through Complexity and
Chaos, giving businesses insight on how to find opportunities and navigating the recession brought on by Covid-19. Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, led the webinar and shed light on the importance of leading through a chaotic situation using a framework that he himself developed in 1999 while he was the director of the Institution for Knowledge Management for
IBM. He calls this The Cynefin framework or a conceptual framework that draws on research into systems, complexity networks and learning theories, which is used to help leaders in decision-making processes. Over the years, the Cynefin Framework has evolved over the years and identifies five main domains or states that make up the situation.
“The first is where the relationship between cause and effect is clear to any reasonable person,” says Snowden. In such a situation, one is able to apply best practices as the constraint structure is rigid and has no ambiguity. The second domain is where there is a repeating relationship between cause and effect, which means that there may be clear or obvious to an expert but not to a decision-maker.
“Here, the situation cannot be simply categorised, instead some analysis or investigation needs to be done to come up with a solution. “So here, we sense, we analyse, respond and we have what are called governing constraints rather than fixed constraints, so we allow a degree of ambiguity,” explains Snowden.
The third domain is the “black elephant” and the Covid-19 pandemic is an example of this The expression means something that could or was expected to happen, yet there was no planning done for the eventuality of this situation. It is derived from the combination of the “black swan” idea — which means a sudden surprise — and “an elephant in the room”, which means something that is expected.
“And at that point the response is to act, sense, respond. You have to act decisively to create some sort of pattern or structure. There are no constraints, everything is open,” continues Snowden. “With Covid-19, there is no constraint [for the government], so the constraints have just disappeared for a period, they’ll come back, but the constraints vanish [for now]. And therefore, there’s nothing so good as a crisis to create novelty, and the one thing we know from crises is that new predators or new dominant players emerge,” he adds.
The fourth domain is complexity. As Snowden elaborates, there are competing hypotheses about what should be done and yet why evidence-based decisions can’t be made within the time frame available. “So, under those circumstances you don’t actually bother,” he says.
Each hypothesis gets a small amount of resources to do a safe-to-fail experiment. It is unlikely any of the experiments will succeed, but the way that they partially succeed or partially fail will create structure in the space to dictate the next move. And it is in the complex domain where exaptation is practiced, where the focus is on radical repurposing. “You haven’t got time to invent from scratch, so you have to find out what you’re good at and find ways to reuse it very quickly,” explains Snowden.
The fifth domain, or central domain at the simplest level, is being confused —the state of not knowing which domain one is in. “At which point you’ll do whatever you feel more comfortable. Now you might be aware of that confusion, at which point there are things you can do, or you might be unaware of it,” says Snowden.
For this last domain, Snowden has created a five-step solution. First, impose a type of constraint to create breathing space, then find out if there are any experts out there who can shed some light on the issue. In step three, create a competitive environment for the experts from different backgrounds and allocate your resources to “the winner”. Next, where there are coherent hypotheses, start the experiments and find the patterns. Finally, nullify to create order in a complex and messy situation. With the knowledge of how to handle different situations at hand, Snowden advises companies to start training for the next crisis when the issue is still fresh in their minds.