Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains. I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes. Cynefin …
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In a recent email thread between Bob Stilger and a bunch of us friends and colleagues about how to support community rebuilding in Japan, Nancy Margulies shared this story of working in post-Katrina New Orleans with a series of World Cafes: I hosted a number of World Cafés in New Orleans. The participants were a mix of people who had been directly impacted by the flood and those who had less or no material loss. We used the time for people to exchange their stories, share their feelings and listen to one another. This story-telling seemed to be so necessary …
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From an email sent to a friend of mine (a Mohawk, for context!) about the art of harvesting. It includes an uncited hat tip to the Cynefin framework, and focuses on his particular field of education: Harvesting, as you know being from a tribe of long standing agrarian practice, (!) is constituted of all kinds of things. Mostly though, you need an artifact and a feedback loop. What is the tangible piece I can hold in my hand and point to, and how does it fold back into the system to create learning. many systems do well at harvesting the …
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Still playing with the Cynefin framework and thinking about how it helps us to understand the processes for decision making and action in the domains of simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disordered domains. Today talking with clients and friends we were discussing the “spaces inbetween,” especially with respect to cultures. In British Columbia, services are increasingly being separated between indigenous and non-indigenous service providers which isn’t a bad thing on the face of it, but the enterprise is being undertaken from a scarcity mindset. in other words, resources are being moved from one part of the sector to the other …
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Nice post on using the Cynefin framework to design an ideas generation workshop: At a workshop I facilitated last week – the challenge was helping a team to generate new ideas for innovating their business – I used Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework to great effect. This was a smart crowd, who were willing to go along with our approach on helping them see new directions through a process of emergent discovery – but they wanted to understand why we were following this approach. For the many cerebral folks in this crowd, I explained the Cynefin framework – and they got …