A few weeks ago I attended a Cynefin certification course in Greenwich. Cynefin draws from the fields of social complexity, narrative, cognition, sense-making, knowledge-management and more to produce a mangagement consultancy framework. Origins Cynefin is the brain-child of Dave Snowden. Cynefin and Dave spun off from IBM in 1994. My strong impression from the course is that the Cynefin and Dave Snowden point of view are the same entity. Philosphy The Western (enlightend) view favoured by most official management and traditional software development is reductionist: that the whole is simply the sum of all its parts. Given enough knowledge and analysis all can be calculated and predicted from first principles. This is a world of cause and effect characterised by Laplace's Demon.

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

There is a post-modern view of nature that interaction of the parts produce something more than their simple sum. In this model, essential information is lost by "divide and conquer" approaches to analysis and management. Cynefin takes a lumpy view of its universe: some things are amenable to reductionism; other things require a more complexity based approach. However while recognising the existence of the former, it concentrates on working with the latter. [Work in progress - I plan to add more on Cynefin Domains and Components later] [I should add this is my take on Cynefin - I may have got some stuff entirely wrong]

Sunday, July 24, 2005 | Permalink | 0 Comments