Fresh from Cognitive Edge accreditation workshops Nancy White and me did an Open Space session to share with the participants of KM4Dev workshop some of the things we had learned about the Cynefin framework.

The Cynefin(pronounced /?k?n?v?n/) framework is a model used to describe problems, situations and systems. The model provides a taxonomy that guides what sort of explanations and/or solutions may apply. It was developed by David Snowden and his collaborators. Cynefin is a Welsh word, which is commonly translated into English as ‘habitat’ or ‘place’, although this fails to convey its full meaning.

We didn’t have that much time for the session, so we started from introducing complex systems, the Cynefin framework, safe-fail probes as an approach to deal with complex domains, and then did an exercise, mapping the issues that come from the evaluation of KM4Dev workshop to the framework.

While I really like Dave Snowden‘s style of introducing the concepts, there is something in it that makes it more difficult to explain them in my own way. Probably the engagement of the stories that turns them into a memorable experience difficult to override… I still have to invent my own examples to talk about complex systems, so I took the birthday party story that Dave tells and turned it into a three-years old birthday party story, thinking of Alexander’s last birthday as I talked :)

If you want to dive deeper into what have been discussed you might want to check:

• Wikipedia on Cynefin framework
• Video A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework by Shawn Callahan
• Publications (those two I find particularly useful, but they are not free; for more options see list of articles by Dave Snowden)
  • Snowden, D.J. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007, pp. 69-76. [free .pdf that is probably not supposed to be there]
  • Kurtz, C. F. & Snowden, D. J. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world, IBM Systems Journal, 42 (3), p. 462.

If you are thinking about using the Cynefin framework in a group process it might be useful to start from reading descriptions of two methods – Butterfly Stamping and Cynefin contextualisation: Four tables. The last one also provides a list of forms that help to think of actions to address items in four domains:

• Action form for Simple domain
• Action form for Complicated domain
• Action form for Complex domain (see also Safe Fail Probes and Safe-fail probes and diffusion of innovations)
• Action form for Chaos domain

• KM Europe 2004: highlights
• Should be a good sign…
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers

Two things coming from Sebastian Fiedler mould into my thinking on PhD methodology.

The first post What Is “Good” Education Research? points to an article by Karl Hostetler (.pdf) discussing the ethics and politics of education research (themes that much in my thinking due to all my ethnographic readings).

The second is a quote from Søren Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards.
In the meantime, it has to be lived forwards.

This one connects to retrospective coherence of complex domains (Dave Snowden/Cynefin, see the paper (.pdf)) and my attempts to figure out good methods of studying it.

What keeps bothering me is a misalignment of research methodologies that are perceived as “more scientific” (~easier to defend) and my own research values/interests (especially: complex domains and researcher accountability).

I’ll have to find a way for resolving it – this is the only way for completing a PhD without compromising my values.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/31.html#a1752; comments are here.

• Weblog as knowledge networker instrument
• Making choices
• ‘Those that belong to the Emperor’ (on weblog types)

Just an example: how selecting units and color-coding for visualisation can amplify one perspective. Is the US really a nation polarised as much as it seems?

Compare US election results:

• Red/blue by state vs. purple scale by state
• Red/blue by county vs. purple scale by county

This is a good example of the case where black and white (red and blue ;) lenzes would do more harm than good.

It’s interesting why do we slip into binary thinking so easily?

I’m guilty of binary representations myself. It’s so strange: even given my beliefs in complexity, continuums and multi-dimentional nature of personal knowledge management I often slip into binary mode in my texts, making my own arguments vulnerable and stirring polarisation.

It seems that thinking in binary/linear/tree structures (context) is more natural for our brains than embracing complexity, so we need some conscious effort for getting beyond simplification and polarisation.

Lois Ann Scheidt on this in a context of research:

As human beings it is very common for us to look at new ideas, technology, etc. compare them to their older antecedents and then slot them into a linear continuum between two older examples of similar phenomena. By so doing we position the new idea, technology, etc. as somewhat less then the exemplars that anchor the continuum.

[...]

In my own research while I am forced to background some discussions with linear models so I echo the point of view found in published literature, I quickly try to move to more dimensional modeling that symbolizes the complexity of the ideas without making the ideas I am expressing overly complex and difficult for some of my audience to grasp.

See also:

• similar associations & more examples – Theresa Senft on maps and a follow-up by Helena Kvarnstrom
• even more maps

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/05.html#a1413; comments are here.

• KM Europe: Dorothy Leonard
• Feed your blog to tOKo and see what comes out
• #KM4Dev: Cynefin and dealing with complexity

My thinking about trees vs. webs was a bit implicit till I saw Clay Shirky pointing to A city is not a tree where Christopher Alexander talks about tree vs. semilattice structures. As I don’t have a good mental model of semilattice (and Google doesn’t give many pictures ;), I’ll talk about trees and webs. Or, to be more specific about tree-structures and web-structures.

For me it mainly has to do something with classification. I believe that one of the reasons classifying information is difficult has something to do with the fact that in most cases tree structures are used for classification, so we have to find “unique folder” to put an idea or a document into it. And ideas never belong to “unique folders”, they have multiple relations with other ideas, forming a web structure.

I’m thinking about tree vs. web structures in my own work:

About filers and pilers (longer abstract if you can’t access it full-text) when it comes to sorting out papers.

About saving a file on my hard drive, where I always have to remember specific folder I used, vs. adding a document to Docushare (used as a document management system in my company), which allows “placing” one document into several folders (e.g. if you scroll you’ll find out that this paper is available in four folders).

About using Favourites in IE vs. del.icio.us, which is free of “I have to decide in which folder it should go”.

And finally about using categories vs. liveTopics to organise my thinking in this weblog.

It probably matter of personal preferences or thinking style, but I always have problems with tree structures. For example, I’ve got Typepad Plus account because it offers an easy way to put photos online only to discover that I can hardly use it because it forces me to organise my photographs into albums. And I always want to sort my photos by location, by date, by theme and by many other ways that I’ll invent tomorrow.

Another example is about mind-mapping tools. Those that I tried force me to organise my ideas into tree structure. Of course, visualisation is nice to get an overview of ideas (especially if you use it for others), but forced tree structure makes these maps useless for (my) thinking. I tried to use mind-mapping software to structure my ideas for writing papers, but it didn’t work. It’s fine on paper for drawing a web of relations and thinking about steps of explaining them, but drawing a tree on my screen doesn’t make any sense: I would rather start outlining directly in Word…

Tree-relations may be easier to grasp than more complex structures. They are also easier to unfold into linear structure (think how you were taught to write an essay: introduction – body – conclusion, body consists of X parts, each of them is subdivided…). Trees are easy to draw. Easy to program.

But for me ideas live as webs. Tree structure of a paper is good to help others understand creative mess of ideas in my head, but it pains every time I try to squeeze a web of ideas into a tree structure when writing (I guess that’s why hyperlinks and cross-references were invented ;).

When I think about webs of ideas I associate a lot with Christopher Alexander talking about cities:

When we think in terms of trees we are trading the humanity and richness of the living city for a conceptual simplicity which benefits only designers, planners, administrators and developers. Every time a piece of a city is torn out, and a tree made to replace the semilattice that was there before, the city takes a further step toward dissociation.

In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a Person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide. An ominous example of city-wide dissociation is the separation of retired people from the rest of urban life, caused by the growth of desert cities for the old like Sun City, Arizona. This separation is only possible under the influence of treelike thought.

It not only takes from the young the company of those who have lived long, but worse, it causes the same rift inside each individual life. As you pass into Sun City, and into old age, your ties with your own past will be unacknowledged, lost and therefore broken. Your youth will no longer be alive in your old age – the two will be dissociated; your own life will be cut in two.

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.

Site note: Thinking about writing texts, I think about stories that somehow fit linear format without breaking a web of relations. For me there is a lot to read and to think about to understand how stories emerge from webs and is there “tree” stage in between…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/20.html#a1216; comments are here.

• WBC04: selected
• A bit of reflection on personal information management
• Personal KM: one-person enterprise

I was very happy to listen to Dave Snowden‘s keynote. I tried to follow some of his writings, but listening is much better way to grasp complex ideas. This speech provided a good initial framework to glue pieces together when I’m reading again.

Below are some of my notes. They are quite random and text-only: I’m too lazy to make something of my drawings. If you want some background there is enough articles by Dave Snowden on-line. The one I can link without much searching is The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world (.pdf).

KM is about:

• Content management – managing what can be written
• Narrative management – managing what can be spoken
• Context management – managing the rest (what is the rest?)

Rules vs. heuristics. Rules tolerate no ambiguity, so they are difficult to apply then context changes. Heuristics are more flexible, but there is lack of consistency in applying.

Retrospective coherence – in advance it doesn’t make sense, but looking back it makes a good sense. The final pattern is clear only once it formed and can be explained

Why people are different from ants

1. We never make decision based on rational grounds
2. Human beings have multiple identities
3. Free will

Random quotes

• When people change between groups (re: size) they change identity.
• People are very good in managing serendipity.
• People know that databases are dangerous.
• Human beings are brilliant in gaming explicit systems.
• All innovation processes are work on incremental innovation. True innovation is achieved by seeing the world in a different way.

Categorisation and sense-making

• Categorisation is about fitting ideas into an existing frame. Exploitation. (Good example here: asking people to allocate things into 2×2 matrix with 2/3 things designed to be not fitting –> people squeeze all of them into 2×2).
• Sense making is about pattern recognition and discovering emerging frame from the data. Exploration.

Managing chaos (managing a party of 12 years old as an example)

• gain different perspective
• create, modify, remove boundaries
  • permeable
  • rigid
  • elastic
• create, modify, remove attractors
  • single point attractor
  • multiple points
  • “strange” attractors

With my system dynamics roots I’m used to think about the world in terms of boundaries and attractors, so I’m definitely interested to learn more. Dave said that there are some kinds of training programs for students. Will find out.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/15.html#a835; comments are here.

• Complex domains and researcher accountability
• KM Europe: random quotes and thoughts
• Bicultural leaders, change and synchronicity

New pointers to ideas about change.

1. Mike Lee about Patterns for Introducing New Ideas into Organizations [via James Robertson]:

Over the weekend, while revisiting some citations on patterns, I landed on Mary Lynn Manns‘ and Linda Rising‘s Introducing New Ideas into Organizations, which is a web page of papers and resources on the patterns of practice they and many others used over several years to introduce the concept of patterns for software design in organizations. As you might imagine, any radically new way of thinking is a tough sell, and their collection of patterns (123 page PDF) for introducing patterns is really a comprehensive cookbook of tactics that can be used to sell any new technology-related ideas in an organization.

2. Dave Pollard summarises Places to Intervene in a System by Dana Meadows (in increasing order of power/difficulty):

• Change the Measurements & Formulas
• Change the Inventories and Flow Rates of Resources
• Regulate Negative Impacts and Vicious Cycles
• Sustain Virtous Cycles
• Provide New Information
• Change the Rules, or Who Makes and Enforces Them
• Create a New System That Makes the Old One Obsolete
• Change the Goals
• Change the Mindset
• Be open, yourself, to new ideas and ways of thinking

I liked both the summary and the original article that brought me back to my last year in university – reading Forrester and thinking about world in terms of leverage points. The following two pieces are from the article by Dana Meadows:

Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.

[at the end] I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/31.html#a733; comments are here.

• Complex domains and researcher accountability
• Misleading visualisations, binary thinking and research
• #KM4Dev: Cynefin and dealing with complexity