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A tour around the latest Cynefin iteration

March 23, 2020 By Complexity, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Unschooling 12 Comments

Every year, to celebrate St’ David’s Day, Dave Snowden has shared a series of posts on the evolution of the Cynefin framework. This year he introduced the newest version. The framework changes, because as we use it, it has an evolutionary journey towards “better” and more coherent. Not every branch in its evolution has had helpful components, but I find the current iteration to be very useful because it is both simple to use, easy to introduce, and yet has quite a bit of depth.

During the pandemic, I’ve been using this version of it to help people think about what to do and this is how I propose to tour you around it as well.

First, it’s helpful to orient people to the framework. To begin with, it has five domains: the one in the middle, plus four others. It’s helpful to think of the domains as a slope, starting high in the bottom right and tapering counterclockwise around to the bottom left. The domain in the middle is the most important for me, and the most underappreciated. It is the domain of Confusion (it used to be called Disorder). The domains on the right side are “ordered” meaning that stuff there is largely knowable and predictable, and problems are solveable. These Clear or Complicated domains are, distinguished by the number of interactions going on – the more parts in the system, the more Complicated it is – and the level of expertise required to know what the answer to a problem should be.

The domains on the left side are “unordered” meaning that situations are unknowable and unpredictable. This is the world of Complexity and Chaos. These are distinguished by the way the system changes, self-organizes, and creates emergent phenomena. Complex systems exhibit emergence and self-organization, and Chaos exhibits the lack of any meaningful constraints a sense of randomness and crises.

The further you go counterclockwise, the more unordered and unstable the system is. If you go clockwise, you introduce stability and order to the system. Stability lies clockwise of where you are now and instability lies counterclockwise. It is important to note that this is true until you get to the boundary between Clear and Chaos. That is like a cliff. One falls off of the Clear domain into chaos and it is difficult – if not impossible – to recover and clamber back up to the well-ordered world with Clear answers.

Most helpful for understanding strategy and the use of the framework is understanding how constraints work. From Clear to Chaos, one can move through the framework using constraints: Clear systems have fixed constraints that can break catastrophically and can be repaired easily f you know what you are doing. Think of a water leak. If you know how to repair it, it is a simple matter to do so. If you don’t, you fall off that cliff into Chaos quite quickly, and it takes a lot of time to get back to normal.

Complicated systems allow for a little more latitude in practice and so have governing constraints, such as laws and procedures. Break them at your peril, but also discuss them to make sure they govern activity in the system well.

Complex systems are characterized by enabling constraints which give rise to all manner of creativity, emergence and self-organization, but which can also be immutable. Think of the laws of physics or principles of evolutionary biology that seem to generate a huge variety of systems and living beings. But we don’t have a creature that can breathe by oxidizing neon, because neon doesn’t oxidize.

Constraints in complexity can be quite tight and still contribute to emergence and creative action. Think of the way the rules of the haiku form don’t tell you what to write, but instead offer guidance on the number of syllables and lines to use: three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. These simple constraints give rise to tremendous creativity and inspiration as you work to create beauty within a distilled form.

In Chaos the absence of constraints means that nothing makes much sense, and all you can do is choose a place to act, apply constraints and quickly sense what comes next. This is what first responders do. They stabilize the situation and then figure out whether a technical expert is needed (to operate the jaws of life) or whether the situation needs to be studied a bit more (so we know how a pandemic actually occurs and the different ways a new virus operates in the human body).

That’s the basic orientation to the framework. There are additional features above that are helpful to note, including the green zones of liminality and the division of the Confusion domain into A and C, standing for Aporetic and Confused. Aporetic means “at a loss” and indicates an unresolved confusion, or a paradox, which is just fine. Sometimes things need to remain a little murky for a while. “Confused” refers to the state of mind where you just aren’t getting it, and you don’t understand the problem. It’s often the result of a failure to see past one’s own biases, habits, and entrained patterns of solving things.

Contextualizing your problem

One meaning of the Welsh word “Cynefin” is “places or habitats of multiple belonging.” The name of the framework references the fact that in any situation of confusion, you are likely to have all five types of problems or systems at play. So when you are working on trying to understand a situation, start by assuming you are in Confusion. As much as it is tempting to look at all situations related to COVID-19 right now as Chaos, they aren’t. In fact, the desire to do see them that way is actually a key indicator that you are in Confusion. When I am teaching this framework, I sometimes label this domain “WTF?” because that is precisely what is happening here. We don’t know what’s going on, we’re confused, and we’ve never been here before. Any data you collect about a problem should all go into the Confused domain first.

From there you can ask yourself where things belong. This is called a Cynefin contextualization and is a core Cognitive Edge method for working with Cynefin. It works like this: you literally put as many aspects of your situation on individual post-it notes as you can, put them in the middle of a table and sort data into basic categories according to these criteria:

  • If the aspect is clear and obvious and things are tightly connected and there is a best practice, place it bottom right.
  • If the aspect has a knowable answer or a solution, has an endpoint, but requires an expert to solve it for you, put it top right.
  • If the aspect has many different possible approaches, and you can’t be sure what is going to work and no one really has an answer, put it top left.
  • If the aspect is a total crisis, and you are overwhelmed by it, put it bottom left.
  • If you can’t figure out which domain to put the aspect in, leave it in the middle for now. NOT EVERY POST IT NOTE NEEDS TO GO IN THE FOUR OUTER DOMAINS.

Now you have a table with five clusters of post-it notes. You can do lots of things with your data now, but for me, the next step is to have a look at the stuff on the right side. Make a boundary between the stuff you can do right now (Clear) and the stuff you need an expert to help you with (Complicated). You can cluster similar pieces of data together and suddenly you have little projects taking shape.

In the top left corner (Complex), make a distinction between things that are more tightly constrained and things that are less tightly constrained. Think of this domain as a spectrum from closed to open. For example, moving my work online is constrained by needing a laptop and some software, and a place to work and some hours in the day to minimize interruptions. Those are fairly tight constraints, even though I know that I’m not going to get it right the first time around and no expert will solve it for me. I have to make it work for my context. Figuring out how to manage a team of eight people from home is much less constrained, and even comes close to chaotic. So that gives you a sense of the variety possible as you move from the boundary between Complicated and Complex and the boundary between Complex and Chaos. And you can see now why the liminal spaces exist there too. It’s not always clear cut.

Anything else on the left side that is overwhelming is in Chaos, so leave it down at the bottom left. If it is an actual crisis, you probably should take care of it right now and then come back to your framework later!

Stuff that is still confusing stays in the middle and you might want to take a crack at sorting things into Aporetic and Confused. An example of Aporetic might be trying to figure out whether you have the virus or not without being able to get tested. Because you can’t know for sure, you have to hold that knowledge in suspension and let your actions be guided by the idea that you might have it, but you might not too. But you might. You just can’t know right now.

So now you have options:

  • For Clear aspects, just do them. Don’t put them off either, because failing to do so will drop you into chaos. WASH YOUR HANDS OFTEN FOR 20 SECONDS WITH SOAP. That’s an order. Orders work well here.
  • For Complicated aspects make a plan. You might be able to find someone to help you learn the technical aspects of setting up a zoom meeting. You’ll definitely find videos and technical documentation to help you do it. You can learn that skill or find someone who knows it. This is what is meant by Sense-Analyse-Respond. Do a literature search, listen to the experts, and execute.
  • For Complex problems, get a sense of possibilities and then try something and watch what happens. Figuring out how to be at home with your kids is pure complexity: you can get advice from others, talk about with friends and strangers, read blog posts and tweets, but the bottom line is that you need to get to work and learn as you go, engaging in a rapid iterative cycle and see if helpful patterns emerge. As you learn things, document practices and principles that help guide you in making decisions. If rules are too tight, loosen them. If the kids need more structure, apply it. Finding those sweet spots requires adaptive action, and learning as you go. Here we talk about Probe-Sense-Respond. Don’t worry about collecting tons of information before acting: it won’t help you past a certain point. Act on a hunch first and monitor the results as you go.
  • Liminal complexity means that you are choosing to enter into proximity to either Complicated or Chaos. if you apply constraints (like enforcing rules on the kids) you are moving complexity towards the ordered domains. That might work, but too much rigidity will create problems. On the other hand, if your constraints are too rigid you may find yourself unwittingly creating patterns that make it hard to flow with the changing times. And so you release the constraints until you can discover something new and helpful, and then apply constraints again to help you manage in complex times. An example might be adopting the assumption that you are a carrier of the virus and letting that assumption guide your behaviours. That helps you to make choices that will probably benefit you and the people around you. (And here are some heuristics to practice with if you have kids at home during the pandemic)
  • For chaos, you are going to need to apply constraints quickly and maintain them until the situation stabilizes. That might mean self-quarantine if you are infected and sharing a house with others. It might mean relying on emergency services to impose those constraints for you.
  • For confusion, think of this as the top of the fountain and as new data enters your system, add it there until it trickles into the right domain. I like to revisit things that are in this domain from time to time, because as I get to work on stuff, sometimes my confusion about other things disappears, or sometimes I find a true paradox that can never be resolved and those are delightful in themselves.

So, to conclude

In summary:

  • Cynefin is a five (expanding to seven) domain framework. Whatever you are doing probably has aspects of all the domains at play at any given time.
  • If you need to learn something, or discover new things, loosen constraints. If you need to stabilize a situation, tighten constraints.
  • In the Ordered domains, rules, laws, and experts are helpful and should be obeyed. In the unordered domains, principles and heuristics should be adopted that are coherent with goodness, safety, and care, to guide behaviour and learn new things.
  • In chaos, stabilizing the situation is most important. Act now to restrict your actions and once things are stable, make the next move.

Be careful, be aware, be connected, learn and share as you go. None of us have been here before, so offer grace and support. Try to look at what is happening and suspend your judgement. Don’t spread information unless you know it is reliable, and help each other out.

Into the chrysalis

March 20, 2020 By Being, Collaboration, Community, Emergence 7 Comments

My friend Elizabeth Hunt reminded me on twitter of a conversation I had with her in Glasgow a couple of years ago when she attended a complexity workshop I was offering with Bronagh Gallagher. It was a conversation around what is sometimes called the mid-life crisis, and somehow the image that came to mind when Elizabeth told me how she was doing was one of a chrysalis.

This will be a non-scientific post, so if you are an actual entomologist I apologize for appropriating your field here. But chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can crawl into a sac made of its own body and dissolve its form and come out as a butterfly is a cliched image of transformation, but holy crap. Stop for a moment and really think about that. Does the caterpillar know this is going to happen? If it does that shows some tremendous trust. If it doesn’t, then that shows some incredible courage. It just hangs out there, isolating itself from the rest of the world and changing in ways it can never understand.

Does a caterpillar see a butterfly and go “that will be me one day?”

So yes, we are all heading into our chrysalises. Over the past few days, I have been on calls and courses with colleagues all over including in Canada, the USA, the UK, Moldova, Denmark, Colombia, The Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and Brazil. Every single one of us is isolating and practicing social distance. We are all doing the same thing. We have never been more unified in action, and never more physically separated from each other. We have all climbed into our cocoons and are waiting for the imaginal discs to come into play and elongate and grow into our new ways of being. We might be here for a long time. We are going to learn some things.

I am struck by how we are learning to let go of policies and rules that are based on punishment and retribution and choosing to govern social relationships a little more on trust. Relaxing the need for doctors’ notes. Forgiving interest on student loans. Preventing evictions if people are sick or recently laid off and can’t make the rent. We are starting to see things happening that are countercultural to brutal capitalism and a society that is governed by the fear of ordinary people taking advantage of the system. Small things, small changes. Still very gooey. Imaginal discs.

Whatever we are in right now is not the final stage. We are entering an interregnum that will be as big a challenge as any that humanity has faced. It is as big as climate change but more present, so we are actually acting like it is a real emergency, instead of rhetorically calling it an emergency and carrying on as before.

Have some empathy for the caterpillar who creates its chrysalis and becomes a pupa. It may believe that this is now how things are, and meanwhile, at an unconscious level, the imaginal discs are swirling about in its corporeal soup, with a different idea about what it is to become.

Inside the chrysalis, your ideas about yourself dissolve and life itself takes over. Watch for the small signals, watch for what happens at the edges. Amplify the acts of kindness and possibility that you see in your community and your personal life. Document and grow the new practices you discover be they helpfulness, attention, curiosity, or competence. Stifle the urge to seek cortisol hits from triggering events and social media that make you angry, or the outrage merchants that still crave a hold on your consciousness. Instead, cocoon yourself and study your imagination. Those of us that are not of any use in the immediate safety effort must use this time to prepare to lift us all into what comes next. The first responders and caregivers will be tired and we will need to take over for them and govern and lead in a way that is informed by their example and by the things we are all now discovering are possible.

Into the goo, friends.

Slow down: a reminder for facilitators working online

March 19, 2020 By Art of Hosting, Design, Facilitation, Featured 18 Comments

Facilitators are getting inundated with panicky requests to host meetings online. Some of us have the tech know-how to do this, and others don’t. Clients are feeling pressure and urgency to get teams up and running online and folks are hoping the important meeting that they have been working with for months can suddenly go online and get the same kinds of results.

Here is some stuff to help you out.

Slow down. Just because you are not hosting face to face does not mean you are not hosting. Make sure that you do the due diligence in designing and hosting the meeting. You will need to talk to your clients and coach them and give a sense of some of the realities of what is possible and what isn’t, and you are going to need to remind them that this will be clunky and difficult as people learn new ways to work together. Have them invite the group to be patient as everyone learns how to do this.

Work with a tech person and a harvesting person. No matter what platform you are using. hosting online takes a special kind of presence and attention, and it is helpful if you have a small team of people to help you. Notably, if you can have someone managing the tech – including taking participants with technical problems offline – that helps a lot. Also harvesting and documenting as you go is important. As in all processes I run, I try to get folks to co-create the harvest, and when working online you can do that in a Google document where you can set up a template beforehand. If you aren’t able to get everyone to work on the Google document – because people are connecting by phone, for example – then make sure someone is keeping good notes of decisions. At a minimum type these in the chat function, but don’t forget to save the text before exiting the meeting.

Keep it simple. You might be super interested to use all the new tech tools and apps, but bear in mind that your participants are most interested in connecting and getting their work done. Use the easiest mode possible, even if that is a good old fashioned conference call, and taking notes with paper and a pen.

Design together. Let your clients know that it will be helpful to design well. At the very least you should have a conversation with them about the urgent necessity for the meeting and the purpose, the outputs that you are looking for, and the structure and flow of the meeting that will serve that. You can download the Chaordic Stepping Stones tool for a deeper dive into design, or just keep it simple and high level. But let them know that just because you are going online does not mean you can shirk on design time.

Consider the check in. Check ins are really important parts of meetings. It brings people into the meeting space and helps them ground. Invite folks to do these things:

  • Shut down all their other apps and programs and clean up their monitor view. This will help people not get lost navigating between windows and will prevent them from getting distracted, and it also conserves bandwidth and makes connections more stable. My friend and colleague Amanda Fenton today shared that it is a kind of aesthetic practice, to create a clean and beautiful workspace for work.
  • Give a moment of silence. Just invite a breath, There is a lot going on. Bring a bit of calm into the space.
  • Invite people to check in on the google document or in the chatbox. Doing this invites people to immediately participate, by typing and seeing other people working. It helps focus attention on the work at hand and prevents a distraction.

Attend to dynamics:

  • Be aware of grief. Everything is shitty right now. People are not coming into work situations in the best mood and some may be experiencing crippling anxiety or grief. If you have an intense meeting coming up with important content, consider offering the check-in as a special gathering an hour or two in advance, just so people can connect with their colleagues and share their emotions. At the very least, remember that in stressful times, people swing wildly in their responses to things. You may need to intervene more often than usual and offer silence and regrounding.
  • Be aware of the hum of rush. There is a hum running under everything that is making folks feel rushed. It’s as if the meetings I have hosted or participated in have been running at about 500rpm higher than normal. It’s barely noted consciously, but I’ve noticed that it spins people into intensity. Add to that any technical glitches and frustrations, and it’s difficult to keep it together. So between grief and the hum of rush, pay attention to the emotional tone of the meeting. Focus on the important urgent matters with the right urgency.
  • Get ready to let go of your design. That should go without saying in any facilitation, especially if you are facilitating in turbulent and complex situations, but it’s even more true now. Take time to design, but as my friend and colleague Ciaran Camman remarked today, “really be ready to let things go, to find out what the need is again, and respond to that.”
  • And this one from Amanda Fenton: “Everything takes a little bit longer. If you ask a question, wait twice as long as you would when hosting face-to-face. People are working harder to sense cues from each other on who might be ready to speak or be fumbling for their un-mute button. If you use break-out rooms, give a minute of informal reintegration before transitioning. Welcome those little pauses.” Good advice.

And finally, attend to your practice. Remember when we used to facilitate face to face meetings? You are still that person, and you still have that practice. Take some time in the next few days to sit down and remind yourself of that. Just because we are doing things in a different way doesn’t mean that we aren’t needed in the same way.

Please share more tips and practices below, especially as it relates to the role and practice of hosting and facilitation and less about tools and software.

Sense-making in real time

March 18, 2020 By Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured 4 Comments

I put a call out on twitter yesterday, inviting topics for blog posts that could be helpful. I’m happy to take requests! Today my friend Trilby Smith, the brilliant Director of Evaluation at the Vancouver Foundation, replied with this:

Sense making in real time. Like what are the practices we can use to make sense of what is happening to us as it happens? And how can those of us who work in orgs support our colleagues to do this work?— Trilby Smith (@TrilbySmith) March 17, 2020

The last few days have been full of information. It comes streaming through twitter, facebook, texts, emails. And the way the COVID-19 crisis is moving and changing means that we have to look at stuff coming in, sift through it and make some decisions.

This is true in any fast-moving, data-rich situation, but COVID-19 gives us a chance to practice in real-time. So what are some simple tools? Here are a few, rooted in, and derived from, Participatory Narrative Inquiry and Human Systems Dynamics.

Observe the situation. Just watch things for a bit. Whatever the situation, see if you can gather a bunch of data points about it. If this is a meeting, have people bring in a bunch of notes about the situation. These notes should be observations, relatively free of interpretation. Fine-grained data objects, like stories, tweets, news items, reports, stats are all good. Anything that helps describe what you’re all seeing. And having everyone do this ensures that you get a diversity of perspectives. Have everyone come to a meeting with 10 data objects. Or start your meeting by having people sit around and tell some little stories and share observations about the situation, placing each data point on a post-it note. It should only take you less than 20 minutes to generate dozens of data points if you work in pairs. This, by the way, is what we call “situational awareness.”

Look for patterns. In complexity, you’re trying to work with patterns. My go to is to have the group sort through the data and find things that are similar. Cluster these together. These start to look like patterns. From there do a couple of things…

Inquire. I sometimes think that looking at data is a bit like nosing whisky, or appreciating the scent of a wine or a coffee. You begin with overall impressions and then you use specific techniques to get the most out of the experience. Same with data. When you are sifting through data with a group start by recording what people notice in general. Overall first impressions are useful. Keep it open.

After that you can drill down with a little more discipline and rigour, Royce Holliday offers these questions, from her piece on pattern spotting:

  • Generalizations: “In general, I notice…
  • Exceptions: “In general I notice…but…
  • Contradictions: “On the one hand I notice…but on the other hand…”
  • Surprises: “I am really surprised that…”
  • Curiosity: “I wonder if…”

These questions help you to find differences in the patterns and differences are what give you the potential to act.

Look at what is keeping these patterns in place. If a problem is complex, you will probably start to notice patterns that are stable and hard to change. Alternatively, you might notice a lot of turbulence and wonder what you can stabilize. Looking at what is keeping patterns in place is fairly straightforward. A system or a set of problems is made of connected agents interacting with a space defined by attractors and boundaries.:

  • Attractors hold things together coherently. Think of these as the things that grab your attention or the rhythms that dictate your work.
  • Boundaries separate things. These can be tight or loose or permeable or hard.
  • Connections in a system describe how agents are connected to one another. Think of a murder mystery where the detective is always trying to figure out how things are related in a meaningful way.
  • Exchanges are what flows over connections including information, power and resources.
  • Identities come into play and can skew a system with power dynamics, expertise or the diminishment of voice and ideas.

Once you can find a few of these constraints that are at play, you can list things that are in your control and make adjustments. In general, to stabilize a system, you tighten constraints. To break up a system, in order to break patterns or learn new things, you have to loosen constraints. The art is in deciding how much and in monitoring and adjusting as you go. Choose constraints that matter that you have some degree of control over, and you will be able to shift things more easily.

I reckon you could do this quickly in 1:45 or so if you had to generate data objects to start with, less time if people are collecting data objects before the meeting. A sample flow might look like this:

  1. Check in and framing (15 minutes)
  2. Break into small groups to generate data objects (20 minutes)
  3. Randomize the data objects and cluster them into themes (15 minutes)
  4. Ask each person to look at the patterns and answer the inquiry questions individually (10 minutes)
  5. Small groups to compare notes and find commonalities and differences (10 minutes)
  6. Finding ABCEI constraints in small groups (use this template) (10 minutes)
  7. In small groups decide on a small action to shift things. (use this template) (5 minutes)
  8. Compare these actions across the group and wrap up (20 minutes)

In the comments, I would be interested to hear if this is helpful and what kinds of specific situations folks are needing to make sense of.

Complexity in the time of COVID-19

March 16, 2020 By Complexity, Featured 10 Comments

So it’s on. Our lives have been instantly upended and five days after cancelling everything, I find myself at home mostly, with days spent in the forest walking and, as of today, avoiding visiting even the cafes and local gathering spots on our island. We live in a small place with many older people. We are connecting and looking out for each other on facebook and just waiting now. Waiting for what? To get sick? For it to be over? For something to happen?

As a person who spends nearly every waking hour thinking about how to act in times of complexity, I can say that at this moment, I am grateful to have those tools for making sense of my actions and plans. I have been keeping a little journal of decisions and moments, as this is a very strange time and documenting things in real-time is helping me to see the kinds of decisions I have been making.

Thinking this through with Cynefin and constraints

Liminal Cynefin framework from Cognitive Edge

This is our old friend the Cynefin framework that helps us to understand and make decisions depending on the nature of the problems we are facing and the ways we are interpreting those problems. This diagram, plus my little collection of constraints has become the way I’m thinking about actions.

One of the most useful ways to use Cynefin is to look at problems through the lens of constraints. Moving counterclockwise from Obvious through Complicated and Complex to Chaos, we find that problems and systems move from tightly constrained and connected to more open to completely unconstrained. Going the other way, from Chaos clockwise to Obvious, constraints are increasingly tightened.

Acting is really about noticing the constraints that are keeping patterns in place and doing what you can to either loosen or tighten those constraints to move in an optimal direction. Constraints for me consist of:

  • Attractors: Things that draw our attention together, like good public health information, or that cause us to do things on a regular rhythm like washing your hands whenever you enter or leave a place), like daily cycles, or “strange attractors” which are things that emerge and get our attention and change the way we orient our action. Panic buying is a kind of strange attractor, where fear induces people to buy more toilet paper than they need.
  • Boundaries: Things that hold, contain or constrain a system. Boundaries can be tightened or loosened, or made more or less permeable. Boundaries are a key feature of COVID-19 response.
  • Connections: the ways in which parts of a system are connected. Viruses challenge this because they can linger on surfaces after we have left, drawing us into connection with one another, even though we aren’t actually touching. Social distancing is a way we are altering connections.
  • Exchanges: what flows between us. This week, of course, that is a virus, but it is also information and encouragement. Watching Italians signing together is a form of exchange across an impermeable boundary. Flattening the curve is about slowing exchanges. Being aware of the quality and source of information is a way that we work with exchanges, paying more attention to public health officials and less attention to facebook speculation for example.
  • Identities: These are important in complex systems. In British Columbia, our public health officer Bonnie Henry has become a powerful person because she shares quality information on a regular basis (becoming an important attractor in a quality exchange every day at noon). Identity is at play in many ways in the response to this pandemic too, and everything we know or think about ourselves is changing.

In this time I find myself watching the constraints in the system and trying to stay ahead of the ever-tightening boundaries. I’m mostly at home now or walking in the local forest far from others. I have found that adopting a set of heuristics is helping to guide my action. In complexity, heuristics help you to make decisions when you don’t have a plan. Some of the heuristics that I am using include:

  • Act as if I am contagious and I have a responsibility not to infect others. Early last week this one was the one that shifted my behaviour from it being al about me to taking a public-minded approach. If I act as if I have it, it helps me to flatten the curve by taking measures that will protect me if I don’t have it. The goal is for all of us to delay getting this virus for as long as possible, and to avoid passing it on.
  • Law of Mobility reimagined to stay away from groups. In Open Space, the law of mobility is “if you find yourself in a place where you are not learning or contributing, find somewhere where you can.” Now if I find myself in a place where there are more than two people, the heuristic is “If you find yourself in a group of two or more people, go somewhere where you aren’t.”
  • Exercise and find some joy. I am at home with my beloved partner and our university student son. We are doing well and at this point preparing for longer isolation given the trajectory of the virus elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean we can’t go about our lives and be relatively normal. I use DAREBEE as the source of exercise programs and bodyweight workouts. The weather is beautiful and going outside is fine.

Heuristics are helpful. Listen to the way public health authorities are using them. They are offering heuristics for social distancing and self-isolation and when people do not follow those heuristics, the authorities properly treat it as a crisis, firmly in the chaotic domain, and apply tight constraints, banning openings, closing borders, forcing quarantines.

In complexity the role of the agents is paramount. IN an interconnected and interrelated system each of us has a responsibility. If you have ever played the systems game with me when learning Cynefin, you will know this. The Washington Post recently published an excellent simulation that shows the way in which constraints and boundaries affect the spread of the virus, and it also shows what happens when agents in the system practice good heuristics.

In a video shared on twitter, you get a sense of what to do when things become chaotic. You must act, and act quickly.

Right now we are mostly in the liminal space between chaos and complexity, and with specific deep dives into chaos. While things are deeply complex and you don’t have a plan, apply heuristics, sense what is happening and adapt. If you learn things you can do – like setting up community support groups and processes for delivering food through your community – do so. Make them complicated – in other words, more ordered – learn from others, replicate good practices tailored to your context, create documented processes, and implement them. When things become chaotic, apply tight constraints or follow the directions of those who are doing so.

Now more than ever, I’m glad for complexity thinking and sense-making. How are you seeing it where you are?