Cynefin® is Welsh for a “Place of Your Multiple Belongings,”

n the 1960s computers represented enormous change as the jobs for which many of them had been trained were being automated. This threat to livelihoods was to them harmful and a state of disorder with union protests and strikes. The older unskilled workers who thought they had a secure position were faced the chaos of having to start again.

Two commonly used change strategies are clearly not effective: developing and testing “best practice” curricular materials and then making these materials available to other faculty and “top‐down” policy‐making meant to influence instructional practices.

a resilient system has to be designed in terms of what we don’t want to happen (a negative motivation but a strong one) and a direction of travel that minimises the risk of catastrophic failure,

Scaffolding is a key part of any design process as it creates what should be a temporary structure to allow something more resilient to emerge. I’ll post on that later. But we also have to understand on a much wider basis just what we to play with in terms of change, the cadance of the feedback loops to understand the emergence properties of change and our ability to correct and recover.

Leaders who don’t recognize that a complex domain requires a more experimental mode of management may become impatient when they don’t seem to be achieving the results they were aiming for.

Indeed, those with years of experience also have deep insight into how the work should be done. Leaders should create a communication channel—an anonymous one, if necessary—that allows dissenters to provide early warnings about complacency.

In the complex environment of the current business world, leaders often will be called upon to act against their instincts. They will need to know when to share power and when to wield it alone, when to look to the wisdom of the group and when to take their own counsel.

Good leadership requires openness to change on an individual level. Truly adept leaders will know not only how to identify the context they’re working in at any given time but also how to change their behavior and their decisions to match that context. They also prepare their organization to understand the different contexts and the conditions for transition between them.

but those who set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, and determine which ones are desirable will succeed. (See the sidebar “Tools for Managing in a Complex Context.”) They will discern many opportunities for innovation, creativity, and new business models.

Most situations and decisions in organizations are complex because some major change—a bad quarter, a shift in management, a merger or acquisition—introduces unpredictability and flux. In this domain, we can understand why things happen only in retrospect.

In a complicated context, at least one right answer exists. In a complex context, however, right answers can’t be ferreted out. It’s like the difference between, say, a Ferrari and the Brazilian rainforest. Ferraris are complicated machines, but an expert mechanic can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The car is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, on the other hand, is in constant flux—a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source—and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This is the realm of “unknown unknowns,” and it is the domain to which much of contemporary business has shifted.

To get around this issue, a leader must listen to the experts while simultaneously welcoming novel thoughts and solutions from others. Executives at one shoe manufacturer did this by opening up the brainstorming process for new shoe styles to the entire company. As a result, a security guard submitted a design for a shoe that became one of their best sellers.

Since the complex domain is much more prevalent in the business world than most leaders realize—and requires different, often counterintuitive, responses—we concentrate particularly on that context

George Siemens suggests that the Cynefin framework may be the "best guidance . . . on how to function in our current context."

The approach we used was Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker®, which allowed us to deeply scan for changes in attitudes and beliefs beyond mere observation of changed behaviours.

In complex systems, patterns emerge due to multiple interactions between agents and by accident. Although they may appear coherent in retrospect, but are not in advance. “Best practice” style management approaches thus do not take into account the context-bound interactions in new and complex environments (Snowden, 2003).

System A and System B. System B is all about efficiency and hierarchy. It is about power and control and productivity. All of which is well and good within its proper context. I want the centralized control systems built into the flying and landing and taking off of airplanes. I don’t want it nearly so much in the ‘ergonomic’ fascism of bathroom design or of learning management systems.