Cynefin is a framework, developed by Dave Snowden, which he created to describe different kinds of phenomena or situations that we inevitably confront in a complex world.
What I want to discuss here is how the Cynefin framework is relevant to the problem of deciding on the right design method for the job.
It's easy to fall into territorial thinking about design methods (Service Design, Product Design, UXD, IXD, Information Design, Participatory Design), about design's role in creating a great service, product or experience (eg how to integrate design into Lean or Agile practices), or indeed when and where a professional designer is even required.
Hopefully, it isn't that controversial to suggest that all of these approaches have their place. The challenge I think is in knowing which place you’re actually in. And this is where Cynefin can be quite useful.
This is relevant to the challenge of Ethos Design, because we will certainly need a way of incorporating a diversity of design methods, when confronting the problem of enabling greater responsibility. Secondly, I suspect there’s an analogy between the responsibility a designer feels to “do justice” to the complexity of a situation, and a team’s responsibility to “do justice” to the complexity of their moral responsibilities. I don’t have the latter really worked out, so this is about laying the groundwork, so we can talk about that more.
In this first post, I’m going to introduce the Cynefin approach to complexity. I’ll also suggest a medical analogy to help remember the framework that uses an episode of House as an illustration.
Then in the following posts, I’m going to show how the domains within Cynefin map naturally to different ways of construing the role of the designer, which suggest an approach to design management that recognizes the complexity of the environment we are designing for, by being agnostic and flexible in our design approach.
So, Cynefin is not a design method, or indeed a method of any kind. I'm not suggesting it will provide us with a process to follow or specific techniques we can use to solve problems. Instead, I think it can help identify WHERE WE STAND in order to better choose how to respond to design challenges.
In that sense, it is a genuine methodology “a logic for deciding between methods”, and my proposal is that we can and should choose our design methods based on the kind of complexity we’re dealing with, and the kind of sense-making activity we are attempting.
Aside: My history with complexity
The topic of Complexity has itself been a kind of chaotic attractor in my life, and is largely responsible for my very circuitous route into design. I enrolled in an Industrial Design degree, but at the end of my gap year, I made the mistake of reading James Gleick’s book, Chaos, and this led me to ditch Industrial Design in favour of Physics and Philosophy. It took me a good 12yrs to find my way back into design again. Perhaps this is my way of making sense of that long diversion in my own history.
Making sense with Cynefin
Cynefin was developed by knowledge management theorist Dave Snowden back in 1999. Cynefin is actually a Welsh word that translates as "place" or "habitat", and is pronounced kuh-NEH-vin, or as James O’Brien (@sparrk) once helpfully explained to me, it sounds like trying to say “Kevin” while sneezing.
Snowden describes Cynefin as a Sense-Making framework. In particular, Snowden is interested in how we make sense in situations where the "assumption of order" breaks down.
“The assumption of order: that there are underlying relationships between cause and effect in human interactions and markets, which are capable of discovery and empirical verification. In consequence, it is possible to produce prescriptive and predictive models and design interventions that allow us to achieve goals. This implies that an understanding of the causal links in past behavior allows us to define “best practice” for future behavior. It also implies that there must be a right or ideal way of doing things.”
The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world by C. F. Kurtz and D. J. Snowden IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL, VOL 42, NO 3, 2003
Snowden uses the term "un-order" to describe where this assumption breaks down, because he wants to leave room for a kind of order that we recognize in flocking birds, termite nest, snowflakes, kindergartens and corporations - an emergent order that nonetheless resists causal analysis or "best practice". Random chaos isn't the only alternative to the assumption of order. We also have to recognize and deal with *complex* phenomena, which are "un-ordered" in a similar sense to the way Bram Stoker's zombies are "un-dead".
A photographer in Ireland captured stunning footage of a flock of birds that formed into the shape of a giant bird.
It's tempting to be pessimistic about unordered domains, because it's tempting to dismiss the patterns that we see in, for example, a flock of birds, as purely fictional, as projections of order where there is none.
Snowden is not pessimistic, though. Unordered phenomena aren’t ordered in the traditional sense (not even secretly, below the surface), but just because these situations are un-ordered, doesn't mean they are unintelligible. Snowden's point is that we can indeed make sense of complex situations, but the sense-making methods or strategies we use will inevitably be different from those that suit ordered domains.
"Learning to recognize and appreciate the domain of unorder is liberating because we can stop applying methods designed for order and instead focus on legitimate methods that work well in un-ordered situations."
What counts as successful sense-making will also be different in unordered domains. Here's a wonderful example that Snowden borrows from the work of Tom Stewart:
"a group of West Point graduates were asked to manage the playtime of a kindergarten as a final year assignment. The cruel thing is that they were given time to prepare. They planned; they rationally identified objectives; they determined backup and response plans. They then tried to “order” children’s play based on rational design principles, and, in consequence, achieved chaos. They then observed what teachers do. Experienced teachers allow a degree of freedom at the start of the session, then intervene to stabilize desirable patterns and destabilize undesirable ones; and, when they are very clever, they seed the space so that the patterns they want are more likely to emerge."
Snowden's Cynefin is also theory of complexes, in another sense. Snowden recognizes that most situations we find ourselves in will be some combination of order and un-order, and that these phenoman co-exist and interract, just the like planned infrastructure or housing in a city co-exists with its organic styles and features.
So, Cynefin is not about definitively categorising a situation as either ordered or un-ordered, and even less about privileging either ordered or un-ordered situations as "better". Instead, Cynefin is about being deliberate about the kind of sense-making we are engaging in at each moment.
For Snowden, "disorder" isn't a lack of order - true disorder only exists when there is confusion or disagreement about which kind of sense-making strategy is appropriate.
The four domains of Cynefin
In the Cynefin framework, there are four major domains. Snowden's labels for these have changed a few times over the last 20 years (the diagram above is already out of date), but the general sense of each has remained fairly constant.
Snowden divides ordered phenomena into two domains:
Clear (previously called Simple, Obvious or Known)
Complicated (previously called Knowable)
While on the unordered side, we have:
Complex, and
Chaotic
Let's summarize each of them with an example.
Clear, like a game of snooker
In clear domains, we have no trouble articulating the challenge or problem to be solved, and we have high confidence in our interpretation of the situation, because the possible goals and the behaviour driving toward them are clear. In this domain, the sense-making strategy is *sense-categorise-respond*.
Consider a game of snooker. We can target the green ball or the yellow, and we only need to choose between a few different ways of sinking them. Execution of a move may be difficult, and require considerable skill, but there is little challenge in making sense of the situation.
Here:
Cause and effect is clear
Behaviour is predictable
Clear options / standard responses
“Best practice” dominates
Process-based decision-making
"Simple contexts are characterized by stability and clear cause-and-effect relationships that are easily discernible by everyone."
Complicated, like a car, or a game of chess
At some point, things become too complicated to be simply obvious. While it is still ordered and knowable, causes and effects become hard to see. We need specialist knowledge to make sense of what’s going on. Snowden describes this sense-making strategy as *sense-analyse-respond*.
In this domain:
Causes and effects are hard to see
Problems are solvable, but require specialist knowledge
Competing models, heuristics
Look for elegant solutions, not necessarily perfect ones
Decision-making by consensus among experts
"A motorist may know that something is wrong with his car because the engine is knocking, but he has to take it to a mechanic to diagnose the problem."
Snowden doesn't use the example of chess, but I think it's a good one. Chess is the kind of game where the individual moves are straightforward, but the best next move is far from obvious. You can tell you're in a complicated domain, because there are no perfect openings (no "best practice"), heuristics are more effective than repeatable processes, and there are some situations and moves that only an expert can make sense of. If you need to do analytical work to figure out what's going on, you've left the domain of clear phenomena, and entered the domain of the complicated.
Complex, like a rainforest
Some phenomena won't stay still long enough for us to do an effective analysis. Not only would a complete system analysis simply take too long - the system would have evolved by the time we finished (if we ever could finish).
In the complex domain, a different sense-making strategy is required. We tend to make sense by *probing*, watching how the system reacts before responding - ie *probe-sense-respond*. We cannot control outcomes directly, but like the teachers in the kindergarten we can encourage or discourage patterns from emerging.
Complex situations have these characteristics:
Un-ordered, evolving
Cause and effect aren’t clear
Perceive only emerging patterns
Can’t control outcomes directly
Leaders must be adaptable
Experimental mindsets
"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."
Chaotic, like a bushfire
There are some situations where pattern recognition is very weak, patterns are extremely unclear, or we simply don't have time to probe. In these situations, we need to adopt a different sense-making posture.
In Chaotic situations:
No perceivable order
Dangerously unstable
Response time is critical
We're in the realm of
Crisis management, and often
Authoritarian leadership
"In the chaotic domain, a leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to stanch the bleeding."
A Medical Mnemonic: House M.D.
One strategy I use for remembering the difference between these domains and sense-making strategies is to map them onto the diagnostic and therapeutic moments in the narrative of a typical episode of House, starring Hugh Laurie.
Every episode deliberately begins with a vignette of the patient's ordinary life, replete with a sense of normality and order, before an unexpected breakdown of normal functioning. One key moral of the TV show is that, no matter clear and pervasive our sense of order, we are never far from (in this case, medical) chaos.
The episode then procedes to follow the story of the patient through the different sense-making domains.
Chaotic => Emergency Triage
The paramedics arrive, patient is hospitalised, emergency staff manage to stabilise the patient, but this is temporary, and the patient will die without a proper diagnosis and treatment.
Complex => Experimental Diagnostics
Doctors are unable to make sense of the situation through standard diagnostic procedures, House arrives and inevitably conducts risky interventions, which are not intended to cure the patient as much as to see how the patient will respond
Complicated => Standard Diagnostics / Prescription
Once sense has been made of the patients situation, House treats the therapeutic prescription as banal (insufficiently complex to warrant his attention), and delegates this task to his team, who are themselves expert medical practitioners
Clear => Therapeutic Discipline
The episode rarely ends with the patient leaving hospital. Instead, we are "satisfied" that the patients situation is now well-understood, and all that is required is disciplined, orderly application of the prescribed therapies, presumably by nurses and registrars.
A Caveat and Questions
The caveat: the show valorises some behaviours and mindsets that I don't endorse. I don't want to propagate the idea that only certain special people thrive in complex domains, or that activity in other domains is not as worthy as activity in complex domains, both of which are encouraged by the show.
The questions: Nonetheless, I think it's useful as a mnemonic for thinking about the kinds of situations we find ourselves in, allowing us to ask questions like:
At this moment, is it more important that we do triage, rather than diagnosis?
Could an experiment simplify the problem, e.g. by confirming a disconfirming a hypothesis?
When should established discipline and standard analysis give way to a recognition that we are dealing with something unexpected, life-threatening or new?
Or, thinking more about embracing the diversity of situations, rather than categorising the situation we're in right now:
Which of these situations are we prepared for?
Are there norms of behaviour in place for us, if the situation changed from Clear to Chaotic, or from Complicated to Complex?
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Here are some useful references for learning more about Cynefin:
Dave Snowden's own introduction to the Cynefin Framework (YouTube)
The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~brooks/storybiz/kurtz.pdf (C. F. Kurtz and D. J. Snowden, IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL, VOL 42, NO 3, 2003) - this is the original article where Snowden introduced the topic
A Leader's Framework for Decision Making (Harvard Business Review)
The Cynefin Co (formerly Cognitive Edge) - Snowden’s consultancy and blog
Thanks for this engaging, rich and informative meditation and for the shared resources. Wondering if your thoughts will extend to the work of Karl Weick in this series, and his extensive research and writings on the topic of sensemaking, organisation and psychologies of order. Another thought that came to mind is what a bad rap ‘chaos’ gets in our instrumental view of the world. We know from our experiences in art, psychology, dreaming, and everyday reverie that we plunge into and freely swim in chaotic realms. What would our lives be without this? Yet we associate un-order, or imperceivable order, or order where we can't define categories as inherently dangerous. In a bushfire this is true! In living a psychically healthy, engaged and rewarding life, I think not. An unfortunate by-product of the Enlightenment perhaps…Thanks once more for a stimulating read.