How to Navigate Complex Situations Using the Cynefin Framework
Honestly, I didn’t used to think much of all the talk about how complex and volatile the world of today is.
I used to think it was just a part of the media’s bad news bias, showing us only the terrible things that are happening in the world, only the things that are going wrong, and none of the amazing things that happen every day. This is a real phonomenon, and a strong argument for detaching yourself from the news cycle, where success is measured in clicks. Remember: rape, murder and war beget clicks, where joy, love and small acts of kindness do not.
And then I started to see things differently.
To see the speed of change in the world, and notice its increasing nature.
To begin to consider how we evolved for simpler times - throughout almost all of human history, the world was immeasurably different to how it is now.
To begin to see how little stability we have now, where we used to have more.
To see how different approaches might be necessary in the face of these facts: that we evolved for simpler times, and that means that many of our natural ways of being catch us out in complexity.
One of the things that really helped me to consider that is Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model (pronounced 'ku-NEV-in’ - it’s a Welsh word meaning habitat, but more than that - meaning how in our habitat there are many things at play about which we are not aware… or something like that - I don’t speak Welsh!). You can see the Cynefin model below below in this fantastic creative commons diagram from Diane Finegood and Sam Bradd, from the amazing SFU Complex Systems Frameworks Collection, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.
Using this model, we can begin to consider how different approaches may be necessary in different situations. And, crucially, we can begin to distinguish between which situations call for way.
One of the first things that the Cynefin model does is distinguish between the predictable, ordered world on the right hand side, and the unpredictable, unordered world on the left.
In the Predictable World, cause and effect can be known or worked out in advance.
In the Unpredictable World, things are a little less straightforward...
We might start in the Simple World, at the bottom right of the diagram. When we operate in Simple domains, cause and effect is obvious to everyone. A causes B. This is the world of recipes - if we make the cake one way once, do it again the same way the next time, it will turn out the same.
If you make a cake and it doesn’t work, as Marie France and I did in cookery class when we were 12, even we could work out the problem (we’d put in the carefully bagged and weighed icing sugar instead of the carefully bagged and weighed flour). In the Simple World, even 12 year olds can work out what is going wrong.
Then we might move to the Complicated World. Here, cause and effect can be known, but most of us don’t know it. Here we might know that A causes B but almost none of us really know how A causes B. This would be, for example, what happens under a car bonnet to make it go. Or, recently, in our house, how a dishwasher works. When ours started leaking, I tried to work out cause and effect - I’m a smart person and I have ChatGPT… in the end I failed. And we called a guy. That is often a great way to solve a Complicated problem: hire someone - a new staff member or a consultant.
Then, we move into the Unpredictable World: first into the Complex domain, where cause and effect can’t be known in advance. And often, stragely, it seems like A and B somehow cause each other. This is all the things that happen in your life to do with people: culture change, influence, motivation. Just because something worked in one way before, doesn’t mean it would work that way now.
Whereas in Simple, we can have Best Practice that everyone agrees on (put in flour, not icing sugar), and in Complicated we can have Good Practice that all points in a similar direction (in the dishwasher, investigate the seal, then the alignment, then something else), in the Complex Domain we have to look for Emergent Practice.
What is someone in our organisation trying? What is our neighbour doing? Then we might run a safe-to-fail experiment to test if that will work here, too, gradually nudging the system in the direction we want.
As Jennifer Garvey Berger jokes in this excellent (and short) Cynefin video, people say parenting isn’t rocket science. But actually rocket science would happen in the Complicated domain, but parenting is definitely Complex. As you’ll know if you’ve ever heard the amazing story of one of your parent friends who has solved all their child’s sleep problems with one book… but then you try that book and it doesn’t work. Or, it works for child one, but not for child two.
Finally, we might move into the Chaotic domain: here cause and effect can never be known, and there are no emergent practices to follow. Instead we need Novel Practices: we have to come up with completely new things.
If we are lucky, as we do this, we may gradually see the system stabilise, and some aspects may move into the Complex domain or even over to Complicated. As Garvey Berger says, that’s the leader’s job in chaos: do what you can to stabilise the system.
The Cynefin Framework has huge potential for us to use in our leadership challenges.
In the face of Complexity (which definitely exists!), we do well to remember, again, that we evolved for simpler times, and that many of the ways we default to behaving may in fact catch us out here in the Complex domain.
We need more experimentation, more shades of grey, and we need to grow our complexity fitness.
If you want help with any of that, let me know.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.