I'm working on a history of the Cynefin model. The number if citations and mentions seems to have gone up markedly in the last few months which is pleasing. However with growing use there are some misunderstandings of the history, and odd claim for influence which has surprised me! The sequence goes something like this:
- Warwick University seminar where I first met Max Boisot and started to reflect on his I-Space model (I can't remember when, but it was circa1998-1999)
- Opening chapter of Liberating Knowledge published in 1999 has the model in two-by-two form with the vertical dimension between Expert and Non-expert, the horizontal between tacit and explicit. Focus on knowledge management and communities of practice
- Chapter in Knowledge Horizons by Despres & Chauvel 2000 first use of the name Cynefin, two by two matrix shown below
- Complex Acts of Knowing in 2002 now up to five domains (too many people succumb to the temptation forget the fifth domain) and formally linked to complex adaptive systems theory
- The year 2000 also saw a more advanced form in Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place. A presented paper at an Aston Univeristy conference which was a planned debate with Nonaka.
- Infuriating meeting in IBM research with Stephen Haeckel author of Adaptive Enterprise produces the sense-X-respond and X-sense-respond labels. It was originally designed to try and explain to a linear systems thinker that there was more than one valid approach, but it stuck.
- Work with Cynthia Kurtz in New Dynamics of Strategy, published in 2003, adds the tetrahedrons. I initially opposed that, but I was wrong to do so. Cynthia also created the butterfly stamping exercise around this time.
- Further work with Boisot on a still to be published joint paper introduces a planar version of model (which appeared in a modified form in the HBR article)
- Parallel work removes the confusion of ontology with epistemology (domains labels move from known-knowable-complex-chaotic to simple-complicated-complex-chaotic. Published 2005 in Multi-ontology Sense-Making
- Addition around four years ago of the catastrophic fold between simple and chaotic.
- HBR 2007 article A Leaders Guide to Decision Making brings respectability and an Academy award with the aid of the original contributions of Mary Boone to leadership
- Application to project management in various discussions with AGILE & SCRUM communities, extended use by others in other fields. I particularly like it's use to understand the role of religion in the Bush White House in this article.
So Max in many a conversation had a profound influence (and still does). Cynthia made one key addition to the model and innumerable contributions to the ideas and thinking around it. Along with Sharon Darwent and Warwick Holder she also made significant contributions to the development of workshop methods. More recently Steve Bealing and Michael Cheveldave have further extended that practice, along with our many clients and network members.
Now I may have missed something out, I may have failed to cover some things off properly, someone out there may want to claim a contribution I have not acknowledged above. Any questions or requests please here or by email and I will then write it up more fully.
Comments (1)
“This explains EVERYTHING” is the reaction I get when demonstrating the Cynefin model. While most converts to the new science argue that complexity theory is a better way of looking at virtually anything, what’s unique about the Cynefin model is that it maintains the appropriateness of disparate approaches and insists that problems or situations must first be framed with the appropriate context of simple, complicated, complex or chaotic.
It is a painful and powerful epiphany. Last summer, I watched this happen again when I set up a contextualization exercise for UN Peacekeepers in an ancient square in the Italian town of Otranto. For Peacekeepers, the fallacy of Order from Chaos is built into their Security Council mandates, when in fact every aspect of their missions straddle the boundaries of complex and complicated.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately relates to the original knowledge-training axis in the early drawings. It comes up working with clients to differentiate and merge knowledge management and organizational learning programs. Increasingly, I believe that knowledge and learning are often polar opposites, and the order/unorder sides of the model make this clear. Simple and complicated emphasize what we already know—or at least believe to be true—and further investigations and analysis must either accept or falsify these premises. We assume that our assumptions are correct. On the other hand, learning is largely about what we don’t know. That is, we must assume that our assumptions could be wrong.
In the ordered domains, we live by faith. In the unordered domains, we thrive by doubt.
Meanwhile, Michael Cheveldave has invited me to blog my impressions at the upcoming San Diego course. This will be a reflective exercise since I was at the first iteration, at the Parrot in Forest Green in 2003. I’ll have a lot more riffs on the Cynefin model during those posts.
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February 7, 2010 8:41 PM
Posted on February 7, 2010 20:41