Risk management
WRAS is the latest framework in the Cynefin universe and as such it is still in the process of development. To avoid premature conclusions, the framework has not yet been fully released, and the content on this page is a summary description avoiding in-depth elaboration. It is also subject to change. If you would like to be actively engaged in the process of development, opportunities are open to our premium members.
Risk and balancing risk and strategy
The understanding and management of risk are key dimensions of shaping strategy. Conventional risk assessment assumed a Gaussian distribution of events [1] that could impact a context or organisation - in other words, a bell curve. Management was reserved for items in the centre of the bell curve, while it was assumed that the tails, and the risk contained in them, could be set aside, more or less safely. Increasing understanding of complex systems has brought with it the realisation that the distribution of events is Pareto, rather than Gaussian [2]; in other words, it is a power-law distribution that changes our understanding of probability. This gives the assumed bell curve what is known as “fat tails” – the events at the ends of the curve are actually more likely than they initially appear to be.
The implications for the shaping of strategic agendas are major: risk can no longer be assumed to be measurable, predictable, and avoidable, but it needs to be managed through a switch from detailed planning in all cases to continuous sensing and monitoring, anticipation, early detection of events and possibilities emerging, and reacting quickly to exploit them or recover from them. This type of risk will never be eliminated - it is a feature of the inherent uncertainty of complex systems, especially when human factors are involved [3]. The WRAS is a framework supporting the process of strategic engagement with risk in the context of uncertainty.
The Weaving Risk and Strategy Framework
There are close links between the WRAS and the Estuarine Framework, AIMS and the three As. All of these approaches, framings, and frameworks relate to managing and understanding the strategic substrate within which an organisation (or an individual) operates. Substrate, a key concept in the Estuarine Framework and affordances, refers to the properties of the underlying system, the context, the space on (and in, and through) which the organisation or individual grows.
In the view collectively expressed in the concepts listed above, a strategy’s basic principle is to respond to or manipulate the substrate before taking on the risk of a major intervention. This means starting with how things are rather than an idealistic vision of what we would like them to be. With sufficient monitors (the M in AIMS), you can spot the early emergence of patterns within the system and amplify those that appear beneficial while dampening or destroying less desirable ones. This approach empowers us to be proactive and responsive, rather than reactive, in our strategic planning and risk management.
With these key principles in mind, WRAS defines the following dimensions:
- The vertical axis goes from natural emergence (just let it happen) to stimulated emergence, which means taking action to discover what is possible.
- The horizontal dimension addresses granularity (how small or large-scale something is), which ranges from multiple fine-grained
interventions to coarse-grained, effectively massive resource allocation.
Crossing the two dimensions gives us four domains:
- Directed, where we use conventional research to identify what we should do, combine it with competitive analysis, and then commit our resources to the resulting strategy.
- Opportunist, where we spot an opportunity, then invest significant resources in it.
- Hypothesis-based, where there are multiple hypotheses about what should happen, which we need to resolve.
- Distributed, a key new area.
Each domain has its risk strategy, designed to correspond to the characteristics of the domain and address risks particular to the profile of our portfolio. Throughout, the mapping of interventions on the matrix anticipates the existence of multiple interventions in an organisation that form a portfolio with an overall profile and future development includes the mapping of potential profile types and their strategic associations.
Broadly speaking, the WRAS maps to the top half of the Cynefin framework, largely corresponding to aspects that are managed as part of the Complex, Complicated, and A/C domains. The exact relationship of a context or different aspects of the context to the Cynefin domains is also going to be relevant to the anticipated risk profile and the preferred orientation towards some quadrants over others.
Key tools that can be used in the different domains include:
Distributed decision making (another key area under current development)
The name
The WRAS has been under review since the framework's conceptualisation. WRASSE is the acronym currently gaining traction. Wrasse is also the name of a type of fish, a potentially rich metaphor drawing on the fish's adaptive role in the ecosystem. The meaning assigned to the "SE" component of the acronym is still being explored.
References
Blog posts
Dave Snowden, WRAS – first outing, The Cynefin Co website (June 6, 2024)
Dave Snowden, Power laws & abductive research, The Cynefin Co website (August 8, 2010)
Dave Snowden, Weaving risk and strategy …, The Cynefin Co website (September 23, 2025)
Dave Snowden, Wayshaping for substrate management, The Cynefin Co website (September 28, 2025)
Books and articles referenced
- ↑ Risk and Resilience video by Cognitive Edge
- ↑ Boisot, M., & McKelvey, B. (2010). Integrating modernist and postmodernist perspectives on organizations: A complexity science bridge. The Academy of Management Review, 35(3), 415–433 [1]
- ↑ Scoones, I., & Stirling, A. (Eds.). (2020). The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation (1st ed.). Routledge. [2]