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The D-day arrives. Your plane has landed. You get to the metro line, but due to construction at the entrance, it has been moved to another location. What to do? You don't speak the language and reading the signs won't help much, it's all in Kanji. You observe people who arrive at the same spot as you, they talk to each other and then leave for another location. You decide to follow some of them. You arrive at a bus stop. Not an option that you've plotted before. You didn't even see in your investigations that you could take a bus. You try asking the bus driver for the destination. But you have no luck, she doesn't understand you. But on the front of the bus, you can see "Tokyo center" written in Latin script. Relief! You jump on the bus and after a short ride, you arrive close to the center. Fortunately, you're able to use your printed map to get to the hotel from there.
Things didn't work according to plan, but you've managed to get to your destination anyway. So what happened? Should you have been even better prepared? Should you have asked your friends who already were in Tokyo for expertise? Maybe. But how do you foresee constructions on a line? How to do you foresee a failure of the bus? How do you foresee that, due to a plane delay, you arrive after the public transportation closes and the taxis are on strike? In these contexts, the solution is not to prepare more detailed plans but to keep your options open and be flexible, like you did to arrive at your destination. The nature of the contexts determines how to act.
Cynefin is a framework that is useful for anyone who has to make decisions in multiple contexts, because multiple contexts are part of life. To familiarize yourself with it, you could start with an introduction or jump right into the complete version if you are already familiar with Cynefin. The Childrens' Party story is an excellent way to get a feeling for the framework.
To get truly acquainted with Cynefin, the best way is to use it. You could grab a training data-set and follow the method's explanations to reflect around the items in relation to the domains. But you may also want to consider training. In that case, you'll get more information here.
To get a little further within the theory around the Cynefin framework, you could check the school of sense-making it falls within, which uses natural science as a constraint to sense-making praxis, and the field of anthro-complexity it belongs to, which frames human interaction in our daily activities and landscape, drawing on natural science, philosophy (including, but not limited to, complex adaptive systems theory).- Discovery which you are on
- Contibuting if you would like to be an editor
- Field guide to managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis along with the support material
You may also find the Glossary of interest as this provides another way to navigate the current content and is kept up todate
We will be adding more paths as we expand and deepen the material on the wiki