Thanks Dave Snowden for the wonderful sessions at KM India 2009 & Master Class. You have explained us everything in a practical and scientific way. My thought on the Chef metaphor is that while the recipe written by the chef may not produce the same result using the same written down process and resources, some chaos can happen and a new variant may come out. Will encouraging the use of recipe lead to innovation?

Sorry if this takes it a little off subject...

One question i've thought about this is how the chef and the recipe cooker are different yes but also how they are much the same...

Both have an equal position to symbolic systems (the cooking realm / language / etc.) and each other (as individuals).

Each also has the same position in regards their ability to employ as well as not escape their own "expertise"... which is simply what thoughts, decisions, and actions they find comfort in, in regards to the shared stimuli and symbolic systems.

So in my mind, each is constrained by the expertise (expertism best practice) they simply choose to be constrained by... but I would agree that the expertise each choses to assume certainty in is different.

Much like an employer is really an employee to a client... same relationships, but on different chains...?

So one difference I see is that a chef and a cook have different positions of assumed certainties (simple / complicated) and accepted uncertainties (complexity / chaos) in regards to the symbolic systems being employed.

We are all constrained by our assumed certainties and accepted certainties. How I relate that back to the Cynefin framework would be that chaos is complete acceptance, whereas simple is complete assumption, and complexity and complicated are some mixture... with disorder maybe being in a complete Buddha state seeing no difference in anything.

Up to this point I see Westernment philosophy focusing on what to assume and what to accept, whereas Eastern philosophy focusing on the acceptance of everything. So not really saying everything is chaotic, but simply saying reality is what it is, and by trying to assign anything other meaning or value simply reveals which dogma you choose to revere.

So I see both the chef and the cook indulging themselves in dogma but different dogma on different levels.

Which brings me to the question:

Should we be focusing on the fact that people indulge themselves in dogma, why and how do they do this, and how can we expose their dogma, and make them reflectively aware of it? (still westernized, but less western, assuming we simply can't escape dogma)

Or should we be focusing on negating dogma. (a more eastern focus, assuming dogma is the source of waste and suffering)

Like it. Is one just the immature stage of the other - speaking as a real and metaphorical recipe book user, it takes a while before I get the confidence to go off-book.

Although that depends on the learning style, I guess - there are those encouraged to experiment from the start.

Similar reflections this week about London taxi drivers - learn the Knowledge (fixed Knowable routes) initially before progressing to the more complex chef-like routes that actually get us where we want to go. (Prompted by DC taxi drivers asking me where my destination was. Suddenly I appreciate London cabbies that much more.)

And in between? I love to improvise in the kitchen. It certainly helps to have been trained at a leading school, but the better training is real life and a few carbonized mistakes.

And then there are guys like me-- I get out the cookbook to get an idea of proportions, mainly, but improvise and substitute either where the ingredient isn't avaiable, or doesn't make sense, or I would like to try something differnt. I am not trained by any great school, but I know what tastes good, and so I work with that. I probably fail more than "chefs" or "users", but my wife and son (and many of his friends) think I make the best of many things -- so I am hugely successful within my own environment, which is what really matters (not the cookbook you buy, or the name of your professor at the Sorbonne).

What I contend here is that neither "theory-informed" nor "repetetive" practice is best... what matters is success withing the "cynefin".

Lon -- I really like that phrase: "success within the cynefin."

The difference is that your cook book user is at the shu level of learning, whereas the chef is at the ri level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari

Nice analogy.

Makes me think of patterns and pattern languages.

Sometime mistaken for best practice guidelines for web interfaces, rooted in good design architecture principles and then adopted by permaculture; now being explored very interestingly in the tasteful spot between (1) community purpose patterns, (2) functionality usage patterns and the resultant (3) community systems (collaboration patterns).