15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation with Dave Snowden.

In this conversation Bronwyn Williams and Tumelo Mojapelo talk to Dave Snowden

about the Cynefin (pronounced kuh-nev-in) Framework and how it supports decisions we make in the face of different systems. 

Bronwyn Williams: Hi, I’m Bronwyn Williams, we’re back with our 15-minute Flux Foreplay™ Conversations, where we’re talking to leading thinkers in the futures and foresight space. And today our guest is Dave Snowden. And we wanted to ask you, Dave, tell us a little bit about who you are and about your kind of framework, not model. 

Dave Snowden: Okay, Dave Snowden. I set up a company 20 years ago now, called the Cynefin. We’re an action research group, so we take natural science and we apply it to social systems as what’s called an enabling constraint. So we look at what science says about how people make decisions and then we build methods and tools consistently with that. And the Cynefin framework itself has had a 25-year history, evolving from initial set of reflections on Vassar’s ice-based framework into something which finally stabilised about two years ago. 

Bronwyn Williams: Excellent. So can you tell us a little bit about what the framework does? What is its purpose and how does it work? Explain it to someone who has no idea about what this is. 

Dave Snowden: It’s a decision support framework. So it basically says that there are three fundamentally different types of systems. This again comes from science. There are ordered systems, complex systems and chaotic systems. So ordered systems are highly constrained, they’re totally predictable. Chaotic systems are completely random, they’re absolutely unpredictable, but they never survive for long, human beings like to create order. And then the most interesting one is complex systems which are deeply entangled, everything is connected with everything else. So there’s no linear relationship between cause and effect, so there are no root causes. And there’s actually another framework which really focuses on that, which is called the estuarine framework, which says in foresight, it’s more important to understand where you are than to have predictions about where you think you might go. 

So basically that’s what Cynefin is. It’s got a central domain which is known as the operatic domain. That’s a Greek word. It means a question that you can’t answer without thinking differently about the problem. And then in more sophisticated versions, we break order into two, clear and complicated. And then in the final version, we add liminal domains between it, but that takes more explanation time than I’ve got. 

Bronwyn Williams: Absolutely. Let me hand over to Tumi who’s got a few more questions about how to actually apply this framework in our thinking in day-to-day work. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I just wanted to ask you, thank you so much for your time by the way and welcome. I just wanted to ask you about the chaotic framework, the chaotic part of the framework. And if you’re a leader and you find yourself in a chaotic space, because I think that’s the area that really piques my interest. What would they need to do in a very simplistic way to be able to face whatever the chaos is in that space? 

Dave Snowden: Okay, so two things. First of all, you need to realise chaos is actually quite rare in human systems. Normally there are some patterns. It’s normally an extreme form of complex. So people say that traffic in Mumbai is chaotic. It isn’t,  it’s complex. If I walk in a straight line across the street in a predictable way, I’m fair safe. So first of all, understanding whether it is complex or whether it is chaotic is really important. If it is, this is where the European Union Field Guide, which if you haven’t seen, we produced with the European Union a few years ago, you have to impose sufficient order. 

In Cynefin terms, you move it into the operatic domain. It’s called the operatic term. So enough order that you’ve got some space to manoeuvre and decide what’s ordered, what’s complex, where you don’t know what the hypotheses are, and then operate accordingly. 

So one of the things we try and train leaders on is how to effectively make decisions which keep the options open. You can’t resolve the chaotic environment because you don’t know what patterns are possible yet. So your role as a leader is to create sufficient order that people have options to discover solutions, not to find the solution yourself. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Okay, so how would they do it then because this is very fascinating. I like the this. So you say this is more of a …corresponds to a complex environment basically, and you’d have to find a way to establish some semblance of order in that environment. So how would they go about doing that? 

Dave Snowden: If it’s truly chaotic, all right, and this is important if it’s complex, you have to be collaborative, you have to find multiple hypotheses, you have to test those. You have to do that in short order if it’s truly chaotic. Then you have to be draconian. You make very decisive questions very, very quickly. So if you look at what happened in Covid, the New Zealand Prime Minister just locked the country down. She broke the law to do that, but she broke … she locked the country down completely. There’s an iron state, she can do that. That gave them far more options than happened in say Sweden or the UK or Germany. So understanding that distinction of when you are in one and when you are in the other is really important. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: And so how do you decipher that this, how do you just distinguish between the two, chaos versus complexity?

Dave Snowden: Um, I think there’s a test for complexity, all right, which says you have multiple coherent hypotheses about what we should do from divergent sources, and you can’t resolve which is right within the time frame for decision making. So what you do then is you actually, everybody with a coherent hypothesis and it has to be coherent. That’s a really important test. It’s not any hypothesis. Get a small amount of funding to do a safe to fail experiment and that might take a day, two days, three months. It doesn’t matter. That’s related to decision making. Then you look for patterns. 

If it’s truly chaotic, what you’re likely to do, and this is something we’ve developed, is to present the problem to the entire workforce and get a response back within 10 minutes. So you can see the patterns of interpretation of the situation and that tells you where stabilities are possible. And then you can start to impose yourself on that. The most risky strategy is to try and do all the decisions yourself without any sort of analysis. So again, one of the things that EU Field Guide suggests and this is something sense maker does, is you need to create a network of response within your organisation and ideally with customers and key suppliers as well. Which you create networks for ordinary purpose. You can consult in real time for extraordinary need. You can’t just set things up when the crisis happens. You have to do that in advance. So again, that ability to map the space in real time and see the emergent possibilities. This is what you know if you want a simple way. 

This is what we call the frozen to strategy, which is a reference to the Disney movie. So in the middle of that, you know, the real heroine of the frozen series was the young sister without the magic, lost in despair, says, “all I can do is do the next right thing”. 

Now in complexity theory that’s called the adjacent possible. And you won’t know what the adjacent possibles are unless you can get feedback from the system as a whole, which is why you set that up in advance. If you try and impose order you probably move to an adjacent impossible or what’s called a counterfactual in physics. You’re trying to move into a space where actually isn’t sustainable and you’ll make things worse rather than better. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I’m… I, like, the point that you mentioned about how this one you need to actually set up like a network to assist you right in this decision making process. How would you go about that? How do you select the important elements of this network or individuals? 

Dave Snowden: Everybody.

Tumelo Mojapelo: Everybody just bring everybody into the mix?

Dave Snowden: Yeah, so what we did the first time we ever did this with the US Army in Afghanistan, so we replace patrol reports with continuous narrative capture from company commanders in the field. Now that meant we got better data in real time but also removed a burden from people, so we’re not new with organisations. And it’s interesting if you’ve got compliance issues one of the things that AI is good at is producing compliance reports because they’re generally meaningless documents anyway. So we’re now working this in engineering environments, engineers keeping continuous narrative records on the job. They don’t have to write reports at the end of the day. So we shift into an operational mode. Yeah, and that means we can ping that network in real time because they’re already set up, given the feed. 

Yeah, the key element and we developed this under DARPA funding in the US for counterterrorism over a best part of a decade is you need human beings to interpret their own environment, you, can’t rely on AI to do that or experts. So we developed what’s called high abstraction metadata which is very fast, highly graphical ways in which you can indicate meaning in what you’re saying without knowing what the right answer is. That also has a benefit by the way that you’ll spot projects going wrong early. I mean no project manager worth their salt reports something is wrong until it’s tried to do everything to solve it. You know we can find two of those micro reports, yeah? And we’re doing the same by the way example misogyny and racism. You want micro reports, yeah? Have actual weak signal detection. So you can see patterns of abuse rather than waiting for actual abuse to have to be investigated. 

So what you do is you basically take… you make people’s lives easier by putting them into a sensor network. You have customised them to capture and data in the form you want, and also to feedback on that. Then when something happens you can present the situation to the whole of your workforce. 10 minutes later we can draw you what’s called a fitness landscape, which isn’t a causal map, it’s a map of the patterns of belief which exist in the organisation. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Amazing…

Dave Snowden: So you can see where the dominant ones are, where the minority ones and critically the outliers, the people who’ve seen something which everybody else is ignoring. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: That’s amazing. Thank you so much for your time and your insight. This is a very… I mean for me it’s really interesting actually and I think for leaders who are facing uncertainty and want to be prepared for any kind of uncertainty. I think this framework is really, really brilliant, especially to make decisions. I like the point that you mentioned about being prepared in advance about setting up a network where you are looking at instances that come up across a time period of patterns like you said that pick up certain instances instead of it becoming something that’s a compounded issue at the end, and then you now have to deal with it when it’s there, and it’s big and it seems like a huge problem but you could have picked it up if you actually started making sense of the data that you collected across the board. Thank you so much, Dave, for your time. 

Dave Snowden: My pleasure.

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you. And for those who are watching please watch our other videos and subscribe and follow and share with other people so they can also make better decisions under uncertainty. Thank you so much.

By Flux Trends 

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