NCW Needs Cynefin

In the Summer 2009 issue of "Parameters" (U.S. Army War College quarterly), Gautam Mukunda and William Troy draw some interesting parallels between the recent worldwide financial crisis and Network Centric Warfare ("Caught in the Net: Lessons from the Financial Crisis for a Networked Future").

I blogged about a similar link between the financial crisis and SOA last fall (Distrust 2.0), focusing on the lack of transparency and the difficulty of maintaining trust when entities are built to be combined/linked in unanticipated ways.

Though the authors don't quite put it this way, much of the article seems to highlight the risks of using Analytical (i.e., Complicated/Knowable domain of Cynefin) tools to cope with a Complex domain. However, the authors lack the concepts/language to do more than make some helpful observations. Putting those observations into a Complex-Complicated framework would help highlight why NCW is more about sensemaking and "managing attractors within boundaries" (Snowden) than it is about analysis, model building, and simulation.

To be fair, the proponents of NCW who the authors criticize are the ones who are dangerously confused in not clearly distinguishing the Complex from Complicated. However,the authors' critique would be more rigorous if it was grounded in a framework like Cynefin.