Making Sense of Complexity with CynefinLaz Allen

Answers and Questions

• What is it?

• Why should you care?

• How it can be applied to Engineering and Product Ownership

iceberg

Dave Snowden• IBM director of Institute for Knowledge

Management up to 2004

• Founded the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity

• Founded Cognitive Edge 2004

• Associate professor extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch Business School

• Honorary professor in the school of psychology at Bangor University and their Cynefin Centre for organisational complexity

• Bio Cognative Edge

• Dave Snowden on Wikipedia

Use

• Inception 1999 at IBM

• Singapore Government 2004 onwards

• Published in HBR 2007

• Been taught in US Military Officer Training

• Cognitive Edge has a large (but private) client list including healthcare, military, counter terrorism, other public and private sector. Oh and Software Development.

• Recommended by Gartner 2012

Cynefin (the word)

• It’s Welsh, with no direct English translation • As a noun it is translated as habitat, as an adjective familiar, but dictionary

definitions fail to do it justice

• Poetic definition: It describes that relationship: the place of your birth and of your upbringing, the environment in which you live and to which you are naturally acclimatised.

• It links a community into its shared history – or histories – in a way that paradoxically both limits the perception of that community while enabling an instinctive and intuitive ability to adapt to conditions of profound uncertainty.

Key Takeaways

• We need to know where our work lies from both an engineering and product perspective

• We need to adapt teams’ ways of working to align to the product and engineering domains

• We need to be constantly vigilant for these positions changing and anticipating the required change in approach

• And be aware of heading in the wrong direction in either

• There is much more to complexity theory and Cynefin for us to benefit from; leadership, scaling, operations…

Resources• Snowden, David Humans are neither ants nor data processors (1:09

video) LASCot ’16

• Snowden, David J. and Mary E. Boone, A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, Harvard Business Review, November 2007

• Keogh ,Liz Capability Red: Requirements at Scale (:34 video) LAScot ‘14

• Neis, Pierre How Cynefin Model Improves Lean Implementation, Slideshare Oct 21, 2012

• Gapanov, Maksim Cynefin sensemaking framework and usage examples, Slideshare Feb 9, 2016

Resources• Snowden, David Introduction to the Cynefin Framwork (:08 video) Cognitive

Edge Website, Oct 29, 2011• Snowden, David It's Not Good Enough to be Right (1:02 video) LKCE12• Snowden, David Keynote of XP 2012 (Part 1 (:38), Part 2 (:40)) May 2012• Snowden, David Practice without sound theory will not scale (1:08 video

presentation) • Kurtz, C.F., and D. J. Snowden, The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in

a Complex and Complicated World, IBM Systems Journal, Vol 42, No 3., 2003• Cognitive Edge Blog on Cynefin• Ballestrin, Kim. Applying Cynefin and Agile LAST Conference, July 27, 2012

(Deck and Video)• Haight, Cameron. Leverage the Cynefin Framework to Improve IT Operations

and Decision Making, Gartner: 2012• Perline, Joseph. On Understanding Software Agility— A Social Complexity Point

Of View, E:CO Issue Vol. 13 Nos. 1-2 2011

Any Questions?

• @lazallen on twitter

• I’ll upload the slides later