Sensemaking - Cynefin

I first became aware of Cynefin in a 2003 IBM Systems Journal article entitled "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world." It is largely associated with Dave Snowden, although Snowden has a co-author in both of the primary articles describing it (the other is in the Nov 2007 Harvard Business Review).

It is one of the few truly new things I've seen, and has become a part of my everyday vocabulary and thinking.

Cynefin is in many ways a deep framework. Although the basics are straightforward, its foundations/origins are fundamental and therefore have a wide range of potential implications and application.

Since it's documented in wikipedia and there are some good videos on YouTube describing it, I'll focus on areas that are perhaps less discussed. I should state that most of what follows is an attempt to honestly summarize what I've read/heard of Snowden's writing/podcasts. I may have not fully grasped some of what was conveyed; any mis-statements are unintended and my own.

• Cynefin seems to have sprung in part from a consideration of how ontology (study of the nature of being) interacts with epistemology (how we know) when it comes to making sense of a situation and translating that sense into action. See, for example, Snowden's 2005 article entitled "Multi-ontology sense making" at cognitive-edge.com
• Cynefin describes the combination of the world and our ways of knowing it via 3 basic categories: Order, Unorder, and Disorder. Disorder is an area of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. Order is an area where cause-effect relationships are stable and knowable. Unorder is an area where cause-effect relationships are unstable and our ability to know them is limited or non-existent. You can quibble about where the line is between ontology and epistemology in Unorder, but I think most folks would agree that our current state of knowledge requires that we acknowledge real epistemological limits in current theory (e.g., it's unclear whether it will ever be possible to describe what goes on "inside the quantum box", Godel's Incompleteness Theorem with regard to formal systems, etc.) and in current practice (e.g., the tangled loops of cause and effect that characterize Complex Adaptive Systems).
• Order consists of two subdomains: Simple and Complicated. This is where the traditional scientific method reigns...observe, hypothesize, experiment, repeat. In these subdomains, a reductionistic approach to understanding and creating systems is adequate.
• Unorder consists of two subdomains: Chaotic and Complex. The Chaotic subdomain is an area where cause and effect are unintelligible. And, the Complex domain is an area where cause and effect are tangled, with only pattern recognition possible.

One way that Snowden summarizes the domains is as follows:

• Order - the system constrains the agents
• Complex - the systems and agents constrain each other
• Chaos - the agents are unconstrained

Although I like that description, as someone who used to teach Statistics, I tend to want to add that the agents in the Ordered and Complex domains are probably much more heterogeneous (at least with regard to the qualities we're interested in) than the agents in a Chaotic domain. Whether Snowden would agree is unclear.

Finally, Snowden seems to enjoy the interplay between theory and practice, which is reflected in an ongoing and evolving synthesis of various concepts from the social, cognitive, and complexity sciences. Some folks find this a bit difficult to parse; personally, I enjoy the journey. See the Resources section of cognitive-edge.com if you're interested in learning more. Until Snowden's long-promised book arrives, you'll have to create your own synthesis of the ideas he's put forth over the past few years.

A caveat: as with any framework that (a) has evolved, (b) is non-trivial, and (c) has become popular in certain circles, some folks will distort it (inadvertently or deliberately)....the more sophisticated of these distortions evoke a response I first had 4-5 years ago when I ran across an astonishingly bad (yet sophisticated) misinterpretation of NCW theory (where the author tried to recast NCW into something he had created a decade earlier): "The best use of this would be as a final exam in a course on the topic, with the only instruction being 'List, explain, and correct the primary misconceptions in the following paper.'"