I’ve had people ask me, how do I make the Cynefin Framework useful? How do I apply it? I am going to walk through one way I use the framework, I’m not going to spend much time explaining technical terms here.
To be clear this is a personal evolving model, it may or may not work for other people in other companies.
As a CTO I am required to manage a volume of problems presented to me. As an executive my time is often too fragmented by non-negotiable commitments. I like to personally lead the efforts to resolve problems, however often times I am unable to . When this occurs I need to be able to delegate the resolution of the problem effectively. This post will show my framework for delegating work.
Order or Un-Order
Let me start by the “triage” level of problem solving. First things first, Ordered or UnOrdered?
Order and Un-Order look to the future in different ways. Order views the world in a traditional mechanistic, cause and effect way, making plans works. Un-Order on the other hand assumes that the future is unpredictable, cause and effect doesn’t hold, and previously observed patterns may not hold. Determining order vs un-order can quickly give me a sense of the potential responses.
Ordered
Heuristic:
- Defined outcome.
- Inspection reveals quality of work.
- Exploitation
Examples:
- Complete an Invoice
- Create HTML for an approved Design
- Determine why a server isn’t running correctly
- Load Test a system
- Implement a intricate financial algorithm
Un-Ordered
Heuristic:
- Definable desirable traits / Multiple possible good results
- Novel domains or concepts
- Inspection reveals “fitness” for use.
- Exploration
Examples
- Create a new product
- Find a new market
- Create a valuable social presence
- Train employees
If I have no more time to investigate the problem further, I’ll treat anything that falls in the Ordered side as Complicated and anything that falls in the un-ordered side as Chaotic.
Delegating and Managing the Problem
Heuristic:
- I know the Answer
- Most people should be able to know the answer
- I can inspect and determine the quality of the work at any point.
Action:
- Delegate resolution to individual or team with appropriate knowledge of process
- Investigate why Simple problem surfaced to Executive level
- Determine if enough individuals are trained in appropriate solution
Heuristic:
- I know someone has a solution
- I may not personally understand how to complete the detailed solution
- I can inspect the results of the work and validate that it meets my needs
- I may not be able to inspect the intermediate results to validate fitness
Action:
- Assemble group of Experts with previous experience solving simular issues.
- Define clear unambiguous resolution state
- Initiate Discussion about possible solutions to resolve problem
- Focus experts on resolution state not details
- Assign an expert to own “goodest”/satisficing suggested solution
- Frequent follow up with expert until problem is resolved
Complex
Heuristic:
- I know a group of people who would be interested in this problem
- I have multiple possible good results in mind
- I can’t define how I would validate the results ahead of time
Action:
- Work with a group of teams to describe problem
- Attempt to inspire a team to self engage the problem
- Delegate to team that creates the most coherent explanation of forward movement
- Frequent follow up to determine response remains coherent
- Ensure appropriate access to new information and resources
- Work with team to begin to explain novel solution to internal resources
Heuristic:
- I know individuals who would be interested in this problem
- I’m unsure how to describe the problem or the solution clearly
- Assemble a heterogeneous group of individuals with divergent skill-sets, view points and responsibilities
- Present problem
- Work to create a network of individuals with a shared vocabulary to minimally describe problem
- Define multiple possible experiments to “find our way”
- Delegate experiments to teams (ideally not from this group of individuals)
- Periodically reform network to evaluate results and new suggestions (ritual dissent)
Dis-Order
You may be thinking, what about the Disordered domain. My disordered heuristic is that I don’t know anyone who would know anything about the problem and I need to gather more information.
The first thing I do when I find myself unable to figure out which domain a problem is in is to seek peer advice. Peers include the other executives and personal contacts that can potentially add enough information to the problem to clarify it for me.
If the problem remains disordered I treat it as chaotic, with an expectation that it will resolve itself into one of the domains quickly. The important difference I think is a heightened awareness of the likelihood of a rapid potentially disruptive transition.
Nice break-down of your thought process. But doesn't answer the question "what use is it?" at all. :(I.e. Having applied that above, where does it get you?- Bob
I find it immediately enlightening and useful.Understanding that there are different approaches to finding solutions and that our context not only changes by particulars but also by design leads to different means to solve problems.I find that many people look immediately to best practices to solve all problems. They try to find set processes that can alleviate pain. This model shows that best practices often are causing the pain we seek to relieve ourselves from. The behavior change to problem solving is powerful.
What it may get me is based on Bounded Applicability. The theory here is the process helps me select the actions that are most likely to create a good economic solution. I also believe that selection of the appropriate actions makes teams better able to engage the problems and their for happier.“Without theory, there are no questions.”-Deming
I like how you describe it as almost "a day in the life" type stories. Also, having both the heuristic and the Action. The action to determine why a Simple issue was raised to execs is particularly good. Without figuring that out the pattern will almost certainly repeat.I think your differentiation between Complex and Chaotic is somewhat more of differing amounts of Complexity. That is, what you describe as Chaos seems closer to the Complex/Chaos border and what you describe as Complex seems closer to the Complex/Complicated border. My guess is that that will be common for many people since true Chaos doesn't happen often in human systems. As you say, in a true emergency the actions will be more immediate.
Interesting Snowden had much the same response on twitter:@snowded: interesting.m the chaotic response looks more complex to me and complex aspects of complicated. Chaos transitionary. But coolI need to think about it a bit.My initial modeling assumed that in chaos what I want to do is create "connections" in order to establish a meaningful viewpoint. Basically I want to create a team with just enough connected language and concepts to communicate about the idea, but not so much that we loose the diversity. Then I bring that team back to look at the problem repeatedly as the teams attempt experiments. I've tried not to get too jargony in the post… but I can explain a bit more here.For a new product that we are developing. I brought a team together from departments and roles across the company. We started with Anecdote Circles, from there we did Archetype exercises. Then, future forward. The individuals used the combination of future forward and Archetypes to create narrative stories. The stories are intended to cement the experience in the individuals minds. Finally we created a set of Actions in the Complex domain and used Ritual Disent. The Actions where then taken on by a Product Owner to consider for implimentation. The intent for the teams is to reconstitute them for Ritual Disent exercises. We have also established a digital space (campfire) for them to dump interesting ideas they find based on their experience. In this way my hope was to essentially "activate" an interest in a problem. While establishing a network of individuals that shared an experience….Now that you both have mentioned it… retrospectively if you will… I am tempted to say the model is designed to move problems from one domain to another 😛
Hi JabeNice post. Please could you give an example of the five types where you have applied this framework. It still feels too abstract to me. A formalisation of what people actually do.Thank youChrisp.s. See you tomorrow.