Cynefin, Collapse, and Adaptive Change

VERY interesting interpretation of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework from Noah Raford, adding a temporal, cyclical dimension to it by blending it with Gunderson and Holling’s cycle of adaptive change. What interests me most is the notion of collapse from simple to chaotic, and then into complex as we re-learn. I think there are all sorts of interesting implications for how we work within infrastructure to the point that large sections of the infrastructure becomes unsustainable, triggering mini or major collapses. The cycle as presented is still too purely sequential, though in the final minute Raford hints at the fractal nature of the changes – in fact we encounter aspects of simplicity, complicatedness, complexity (less commonly chaos) in most situations we face – we therefore need a better account of the simultaneity of activity in all four Cynefin domains. I am beginning to think of the Cynefin domains as a stack of interacting layers, with little (or large) explosions of activity in different parts of the system triggering cascades – but I think I either need a lot more time or a bigger brain to think this idea through to something practical.

Thanks to John Bordeaux via the actKM listserve for flagging this.

Posted by Patrick Lambe on 15/12/09 at 12: 13 PM | Categories: Change Management, Ignorance Management, Learning, Risk & Uncertainty, Video | Permalink

2 Comments so far

Noah Raford

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your comments. 

I love how you said this:

“...we therefore need a better account of the simultaneity of activity in all four Cynefin domains. I am beginning to think of the Cynefin domains as a stack of interacting layers, with little (or large) explosions of activity in different parts of the system triggering cascades.. “

This is one of the things which drove me to think about the links between Panarchy and Cynefin.  The Panarchy work is important because it explicitly links nested scales, changing at different rates and at different magnitudes, with complexity and change.

The implication is that big shifts occur when multiple scales synchronise transitions.  This is self-organized criticality, when the smallest change at a critical time can produce long lasting system-wide impacts.

I do hint about this relationship between scales at the end of the video (and it’s relationship to different KM paradigms).  But it should also be drawn out and explored more. 

There is another snippet of that talk online, linked below, which explains Panarchy in more detail and gets at this notion as well.  But more thinking in this area would be appreciated!  It’s fertile territory.

Explaining the Cycle of Adaptive Change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN5a6DoNUYg

All the best,
Noah

Posted on December 17, 2009 at 06:52 AM | Comment permalink

Patrick Lambe

Thanks for this Noah, I like the way you spell out how the cycle works in relation to the US car industry. Are you familiar with Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress? He paints a powerful picture of what you could call the sequestration of risk into a system that is propped up through ingenuity, willpower and design (and civilisation according to Wright has been about increasingly complex sequestrations). I’m interested in how we build and use infrastructure to both defend against but also sequester risk. Your explanations (and your blog) have some very interesting insights that bear on this. Stay in touch!

Posted on December 17, 2009 at 04:32 PM | Comment permalink

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