Miscellaneous Complexity

I ran across a couple of interesting Cynefin-related items this week:

• 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence (Tom Davenport, HBS) - Tom shows a pyramid that looks a lot like Cynefin's Simple, Complicated, Complex. It's titled "The Relationship Between Decisions and Information: Three Options", and shows them as Automated, Structured Human, and Loosely-Coupled. It's definitely highlighting key issues: the contextual aspect of decision support, the linking of information to decisions, and the emerging pattern of loosely-coupled. Several of the principles seem a bit slanted to the Complicated/Analytical perspective (e.g., loosely-coupled is efficient to provision, but often not effective...that seems a bit simplistic to me), but will definitely catalyze the kinds of conversations about information and decisions that remain all too uncommon.
• Trust and coherent group action ("When Should We Collaborate", Shawn Callahan at Anecdote) - Shawn describes three levels of interaction (Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration) that are characterized by increasing trust, increasing informal interaction, and decreasing formal interaction. He maps these directly to Cynefin's Simple, Complicated, and Complex. I like the Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration taxonomy since these terms tend to get used a bit sloppily, and I really like the linkages to trust levels, formality, and Cynefin. This kind of thinking helps clarify some of the issues associated with group movement among the three types of activities (I remain optimistic, perhaps naively, that relatively small assemblages (~5 distinctive chunks at all levels above the individual) can move with some agility among all three domains...though the identity-shifting may turn out to be just too difficult for a multi-layer assemblage (i.e., more than 5 people)).