Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World ED02

The Cynefin® sense-making Framework, brainchild of innovative thinker Dave Snowden, has never been more needed. The Framework empowers leaders across organizations, governments, and local communities, to work with uncertainty – to navigate complexity, create resilience, and thrive. As Snowden says, “The Framework guides us to make sense of the world, so that we can skillfully act in it.” Come with us on the remarkable journey of Cynefin, a framework that enables people from all walks of life to improve – their situation, their work, their business, their relationships, and their environment. Cynefin practitioners share their wisdom, applications, and experiences using the Framework, across healthcare, leadership facilitation, organizational behavior, safety, software development, strategy, and well-being. You’ll discover how to not only ‘ride the rapids of complexity,’ but find in so doing, grace, power, and inexplicable opportunity.The first edition of this book was published in 2020, a year when a tiny microbe took the world hostage. It was a year of change, tragedy, and coming to terms with uncertainty. It was a time when humanity longed for some kind of normalcy and slowly realized that the uncertainty was, in fact, normal. Now, two years later, it is still unclear if it is appropriate to refer to our times as post-pandemic, or if there is yet more to come. What is clear, however, is that COVID-19 is not the last so-called wicked problem that humanity will face. Yes, even in the time it took to create this second edition, we find ourselves in the midst of a war, looming economic recession, food shortages, and this in the context of other existential threats already on the horizon, if not at the door. What is deeply disturbing is that humanity seems to be more divided than ever. Societal fracture lines are deepening, and a deep distrust in science, expertise, and formal authority, along with phenomena like fake news and conspiracy theories, are exacerbating these tensions. What is becoming ever clearer is that the world needs sensemaking skills, and we hope this book will contribute to that need with practical wisdom.As you will see in this book, Cynefin is a meta-framework that can be applied in almost any context. Over time, it has been associated with the field of complexity. However, it is more closely related to the field of sense-making, particularly the naturalization of sense-making. As a Framework for sense-making, it helps us untangle our intractable problems in an actionable way.At its most basic, the Cynefin Framework allows us to distinguish between three different kinds of systems:ordered systems that are governed and constrained in such a way that cause and effect relationships are either clear or discoverable through analysis;complex systems where causal relationships are entangled and dynamic and the only way to understand the system is to interact with it;chaotic systems where there are no effective constraints, turbulence prevails and immediate stabilizing action is required.Cynefin acknowledges that these different systemic contexts exist in parallel, avoiding creating false dichotomies and polarization.Other content contributions by Chris Bolton, Mary E. Boone, Greg Brougham, Chris Corrigan, Jennifer Garvey-Berger, Riva Greenberg & Boudewijn Bertsch, Lou Hayes Jr., Steve Holt, Trent Hone, Liz Keogh, Marion Kiely & Ellie Snowden, Robert Koch, Steve McCrone & Ian Snape, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Vivienne (Viv) Read, John Turner & Nigel Thurlow, Juanita Uribe & Andrés Jiménez, and Gary Wong & Michael Cheveldave. Read more