Practical Systems Thinking: The Cynefin Framework

2022-05-10 by cense

The Cynefin Framework is among the most widely used frameworks for understanding how systems are organized. It might be the most practical means of bringing systems thinking to life. A system, after all, is simply an organization of things within some constraint or boundary.

We rely on The Cynefin Framework (pronounced /kəˈnɛvɪn/ kuh-NEV-in) as a central platform in our training and consulting work for strategy, evaluation, and design. The reasons are many, but its utility is the most important of them.

What makes the Framework so useful is that people can relate to the stories we tell about systems using it. Perhaps the best story comes from the Framework’s founder and chief advocate, Dave Snowden in describing how to organize a children’s party using systems thinking*.

This video has been our most widely-referred source for teaching the fundamentals of systems thinking since it was first made.

The Framework has also been an inspiration informing the development of a centre for studying and intervening in complex systems based in Wales. It’s also developed into a burgeoning practice and learning community centred around the model.

The video below adds detail to help explain how the Cynefin Framework functions and where it came from.

We recommend reading Chris Corrigan’s excellent update on the Cynefin Framework. Chris has been one of the leading practitioners contributing to the thinking on the Framework’s use and development.

Using the Framework

Unlike many other Frameworks, Cynefin is useful throughout a project life cycle, not just at a particular stage.

In the beginning, we recommend using it to orient yourself to the situation you’re facing. What kind of problem situation do you find yourself in? What elements of the situation are complicated, complex, or simple? These questions aided by the Framework can help you identify key aspects of the system and complement systems mapping work.

As you move through the project, the Framework can help serve as a wayfinding tool. When you know where you are, it is easier to see where you are going. Social systems are dynamic, so while we may find ourselves in a quadrant at one stage, this can shift during the project or at particular moments.

The Framework can also be used as an evaluation tool by helping frame the questions you ask and the strategies that link your actions to your outcomes. By inquiring about the way your work and activities are organized within systems, we can ask better questions and assess real influence and possible impact.

We recommend starting any evaluation with the Cynefin Framework.

We also recommend using the framework as part of a strategic assessment approach to planning and sensemaking. The framework can help you to determine the role of evidence and practice — when to look for ‘best evidence‘, practice-based evidence, and innovative problem-solving options.

Moving Forward with Cynefin

We recommend using Cynefin Framework to anyone working in applied systems thinking, check it out. There is a global community of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers who are working on advancing, testing, and documenting the use of it in practice. A recent book has been published that provides further examples and can be of use to anyone looking to get into Cynefin.

It’s worth the effort to explore – and we think you’ll agree.

* It is worth noting that our use of the term systems thinking is just that: thinking about systems and how they are organized and function. We recognize there are many different definitions and models of systems thinking including those used by Dave Snowden that may not fully subscribe to ours.

If you want help in applying lessons from the Cynefin Framework or building up your systems thinking capacity for action and strategy, reach out and let’s have a coffee meeting. We can help.

Image credit: Mitchell Luo on Unsplash; Snowded, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Using Decision Canvases

2022-05-04 by cense

You might have noticed that the world seems to be awash in canvases these days. The canvas model owes much of its popularity to the work of Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and their Business Model Canvas.

A canvas is a form of system mapping that visualizes critical aspects of a system and organizes them. A canvas uses visual conventions like boxes and arrows to lay out key assumptions, resources, actors, and value claims.

Three examples of popular canvases include:

Andi Roberts has pulled together a massive list of fifty different types of canvases that cover issues ranging from value chain analysis, ethics, and strategy, to project management and more.

Some popular canvases like the Business Model Canvas are even pre-loaded as templates in visual thinking tools like Miro and Mural.

There is even a tool called Canvasizer that can help you create your own personalized canvas.

But how do we use these in practice?

Canvas Application

Most of these canvases rely on a similar structure. The simple form of using 8-12 boxes organized in an essentially linear format. This is a strength and weakness of the approach. The reason? It reduces complexity and interdependence, favouring a simplified organizational approach.

The simplification makes it attractive to people and relatively easy to use. The difficulty is the risk of oversimplifying the situation and confusing the model with reality.

It is for both of these reasons that we use canvases with caution. Canvases can be helpful in the following circumstances:

When a project team is unsure where to start. A canvas reduces complexity and can help people start getting things on the page. Just getting started can be an enormously powerful reason to use canvases. Too often, organizations pause because they do not know where to begin. This can nudge that process forward.
When the research hasn’t been entirely done or organized while the need to move forward is high in its absence. Sometimes, there are holes in the research (what we know about a situation) and plotting key themes or issues on a canvas can help us to hypothesize more clearly what else we need, know, or ought to consider.
In times when there isn’t a budget to support in-depth research and sense-making. Canvases can help us to anticipate what a situation has present and available. In the absence of data, we can imagine what might be needed. This isn’t faking data and should be used when research is used to guide, not to prove or validate.
When the number of anticipated themes and key variables for consideration is relatively tiny. Massive systems with many variables don’t fit well, but in many situations, we are not dealing with large, massive, complicated systems — they are small and complex. There are a few key categories and for these, canvases can work well.
When there’s coaching time available. Canvases shouldn’t be used for client work without sense-making and coaching. We see many people confuse the map and model with the landscape and reality.. Plotting out data on a canvas is relatively simple and can be done with little time. What takes time is making sense of what it means and how it can inform strategy. Designing a strategy from a canvas takes time, care, and attention. Doing this is where the value of a canvas comes in.

Canvases are useful. Find or create one, and you can focus your team on what’s most important, organize it, and help foster the kind of conversations needed to assess what to do and how we might do it in the future. Canvases are design tools, and if you consider their advantages and limitations, you can become a great organizational designer.

We use canvases and many other tools. If you want some help setting this up, applying it, or learning other tools and methods, let’s have a coffee and talk about your needs and how we can help.

Falling In Love With Your Challenge

2022-04-27 by cense

Humans are strongly motivated by two forces: love and money*.

When pursuing change and seeking to better things we often look at ways to gain more money as the solution, but what about love? What if we fell in love with our challenge?

(*Money can be a proxy for security, safety, and opportunity.)

Love as a Change Strategy

Author, broadcaster, finance and plant-medicine coach Geoff Wilson encourages people to try love as a means to growth and change. He recently spoke to this on Earth Day and encouraged his listeners and followers on social media to try falling in love with the earth. Instead of arguing about the reasons why we should care for the earth, falling in love is something that transcends reason. It breaks us out of the usual patterns of motivation and persuasion.

What if we took the same approach to falling in love with the earth that we do with humans?

Practically, this might mean buying and caring for a plant or more fully using our bodies and senses to embrace our connection to the earth. You might try walking barefoot on the grass to feel the earth, not just see it.

Increasing the sensory and emotional aspects of change reframes things for us. What if we fell in love with our organization or business? What if we cared for our neighbourhood or customers the same way?

If I want to change something why don’t I fall in love or why don’t I leverage love and power together?

This simple strategy has enormous power attached to it. This approach is much like Adam Kahane’s work on connecting Power and Love for social change. Geoff’s approach is also similar to Arthur Zajonc’s work on mindfulness as contemplative inquiry.

Be more mindful and open your heart, eyes, and senses and you might find change looks and feels differently.

Photo by Leon Wu on Unsplash

Practical Attractors

2022-04-21 by cense

Attractor mapping is a method we’ve written about before. It’s a visual means of tracking where we pay attention and where energy is created, sustained and organized.

Energy is represented through attention, action, activity, and interactions. Energy is dissipative and it’s dynamic. This means that we can’t ‘set and forget’ our exploration of attractors. What we learn about where energy is today is likely to change in the near future.

How do we practically use attractors?

Mapping is the key starting point. Mapping, as we’ve described elsewhere, involves paying attention to where patterns of activity are generated. These patterns may be beneficial, problematic, or neutral relative to our goals and needs.

Once the patterns have been identified, it’s important to engage in a sensemaking process to determine what we see and what we imagine might be happening. Sensemaking is a social process that involves looking at data, interrogating it (asking questions about its function, fit, completeness, and patterns), and then devising meaning from it. Ask: what is the significance of what it is that we see? How does what we see fit with what we know and what does it challenge?

Sensemaking is about learning-in-action and making sense of complexity.

Sensemaking, Evaluation and Attractors

With attractors, we are looking at new emergent patterns so it may not be obvious. Consider the example of the early days of the global Pokemon Go game that involved people taking their phones to parks and public squares to play with augmented reality actors. To the untrained eye, this looked bizarre (see the picture above). Yet, when we watch the patterns we see they are shaped by the game, but more importantly, it brings people literally together in the real world. Some of the emergent patterns that came from this were friendships, collaborations (around the game), and a burgeoning community of Pokemon Go players.

The next step is to take the insights we generate from our sensemaking process to align what we learn with what we seek to do. This is connecting strategy and data together. This means clarifying your intent and the desired impactthat your organization seeks.

This is where evaluation comes in. Evaluation can serve as a means to help clarify the strategic intent and take advantage of attractors. Evaluation links intent and action together. This is what the heart of a strategy is all about: aligning the resources, intentions, and actions together to produce an outcome.

Evaluation looks at what is happening through the lenses of strategy and data. It connects the two together.

Putting it into Practice

The lessons for attractors are:

Start with a system. A system is a set of boundaries that contain interactions. These boundaries might be geography, time, markets, populations, contexts or something that helps define the situation you’re looking at. If you look at a system and feel lost, you probably have boundaries that are too broad (try narrowing them, including more constraints). If you constantly are looking outside the system for explanations, you might want to broaden your constraints.
Pay attention. Build observation skills to start looking within a system. What’s happening? Use everything from observation to quantitative data points (e.g., customer numbers, counts, requests, etc..) to stories and more.
Sense make Come together with those who might have different perspectives on your team or beyond to help make meaning from what you see. What patterns did you expect? What surprises you? What’s unknown? What do you need more data on?
Strategize Develop a plan that fits the context. In highly dynamic situations this might mean developing a shorter-term plan. Consider what forces are influencing the attractors and amplifying their effects or whether or not you wish to avoid or dampen those effects if they are not beneficial.
Design Take the steps to design an approach, service, product, policy or overall organization plan to meet these needs. Using the steps in the Design Helix you can gather information and bring all of what you’re seeing together to shape things and create impact.

Repeat these often.

That’s bringing attractors to life in practice.

Do you want or need help in putting this into practice? Would some coaching or strategic advice help you out? If so, reach out and let’s chat over a coffee or tea about how we can help you.

Organizational Energy Priorities (For Humans)

2022-04-05 by cense

Whether it is strategy or wellbeing programming, we all rely on energy to make them work. There is a tendency in organizational behaviour consulting to focus on the cognitive qualities of decisions, change-making, and action. These qualities are things like our thoughts, ideas, and confidence in doing something. Sometimes they are about emotions. What’s often missing is what converts all of this into action: energy.

Yet, it’s our ability to convert our thoughts and manage our emotions that determine our ultimate success with efforts to change. Without energy, we can’t move from intent to action.

Energy Assessment

When we speak of energy we refer to the capacity to convert thoughts, sensations and emotions into intentions, designs, and actions. This is our ability to sense, dream, hope, plan and take action toward a goal.

This is a simple idea. It’s the application that is complicated. The reason for this is that we need to get in touch with what it is that we think, sense, and feel? We encourage people to think of three things in assessing energy:

Thoughts: What are we thinking about? What is holding our attention? Where does our mind, our attention, and focus wander?

Sensations: What are we feeling, hearing, or experiencing in our body? Where are we feeling it? What is capturing our sensations like touch, feel, sound (even taste)? This is as much about our physical energy as it is our body reacting to the world around it.

Emotions: What are our feelings? Where and how do we feel about things?

These questions shape our energy stores – the amount of energy we have available. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations in their quantity and intensity all require energy to attend to. The more we have and the more intense they are, the more we need to manage this in order to convert energy into action.

They are attractors that draw us toward or away from something. These attractors can also help us to clarify our strategic intent and what we’re really interested in. Our efforts at change, wellbeing, and innovation fail when we misalign our intent and desires with our energy. Pay attention to where you pay attention.

Energy matters because it is what converts our interests into actions. A good sense of what gives and draws energy helps us to determine the attractors that pull or push us to and from things.

Energy Stores and Design

Another important concept in energy assessment is recognizing that sometimes we don’t have much energy. It takes time to ‘top-up’ our energy stores after they’ve been depletion. A highly emotionally charged experience can deplete our energy stores. This is even more salient when we have a prolonged intensive experience (e.g., consider the COVID-19 pandemic, a stressful merger etc., a personal injury).

Design is shaping what is to come with intent. When we follow energy our designs are best when they account for what energy we have and what energy we need to make the design a reality. This approach means that we take energy into account as one of the materials of design.

Launching a strategic change initiative requires that we consider building up energy stores as part of our design process. Leading an exhausted, depleted workforce requires specific strategies. It requires flexibility, modelling, work redesign, and compassion (among others). This is before we even create a specific strategy, plan, or prototype.

We argue for doing check-ins on energy stores — looking at people’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations — regularly throughout the process. This can be done in many ways and doesn’t have to be formal or complicated. Simple check-ins will work. Doing this will allow us to determine if we have the energy to fuel the change we want.

Our human energy is a part of our designs and the limiting factor in making our changes real.

We work with organizations to help them change, grow, and heal. If you want help in creating a culture of innovation and wellbeing in your organization, let’s grab a coffee and talk about your needs.

Image Credit: Matthew Henry on Unsplash