Escaping confusion

There must be some kinda way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief

- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix version)

Over the past couple of evenings I’ve been doing my annual teaching of Cynefin, complexity and strategy at the Physicians Leadership Academy in Columbus, Ohio. My long time friend and colleague Phil Cass, who began the PLA eleven years ago with the Columbus Medical Association, always introduces this module by saying that misunderstanding or ignorance of complexity is biggest achilles heel amongst leaders at every level in the health care system.

On Wednesday I had a chance to teach some PLA alumni something new about complexity and I decided to return to an exploration of the central domain of the Cynefin framework: the domain of Confusion and Aporia. I have long been a champion of this central domain, because confusion (or disorder, as it used to be called) is where everything starts. If you are using Cynefin and you aren’t starting with the central domain, you are missing a critical function of the framework: that is helps you make decisions about what to do when you are at a loss.

For this presentation I returned to a very important post Dave Snowden wrote five years ago about the central domain as part of his 2020 St. David’s Day series. That was the series that integrated the concept of “aporia” to the central domain along with the liminal domains, and it was a significant update. Coming as it did in the beginning weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, these posts on navigating confusion and disorder were essential to the times and I think are well worth reviewing on a regular basis.

From that post comes an important zoom in on the central domain. Let’s start by looking again at the Cynefin framework and if you need this explained, go to this post.

On Wednesday night I wanted to do a few things.

1. Frame the Cynefin framework as a tool to help leaders deal with Confusion. (It is not a complexity framework, it is a framework that helps us take the right kinds of action for the situation)
2. Examine the move from Confusion to Aporia, especially through the use of awareness and mindfulness.
3. Discuss the six escape routes fro the central domain, so that we can see the choices we have.

Naming confusion so you can enter aporia: the subject-object shift

A little background on why I wanted to explore this topic a bit more. A couple of weeks ago my friend Dave Pollard discussed the term “cultural acedia” in relation to the general chaos and confusion that is overtaking the world within the US sphere of influence at the moment. Dave defines the term as

a disillusioned detachment, disengagement or dissociation that stems from an incapacity to cope with the realities of the moment. It may start with personal acedia, manifesting as a restlessness, a sense of hopelessness, anger, fear, anxiety, despair and helplessness, a sense of chronic and growing dis-ease, and then, when it infects whole communities, it morphs into cultural acedia, a collective incessant malaise, a “weariness of the heart”.

Dave’s use of this term sparked an important insight for me. When we are stuck in confusion, we can lose our ability to act if we sink into acedia. But being able to NAME the state “acedia” evokes a subject-object shift that this first act to orienting ourselves to where we are. “Ah! I’m feeling acedia! That’s what this is! I wonder what I can do about it…”

In the domain of Confusion the first and most important action, I believe, is an awareness that you are there. Without awareness you are lost. Any action that you undertake from that place is likely to be based on conditioning without any sensitivity to your context and that can be incredibly dangerous. In fact if you look at Dave’s central domain map you will see that Confusion is adjacent to the Clear, Complicated, and Chaotic domains. The division of the central domain into Confusion and Aporia implies that you cannot get to Complex from Confusion without taking what Dave calls the Aporetic Turn.

So the question becomes, how to come to a place of knowing that we don’t know something, freeing ourselves from the danger of certainty in the space of ignorance which can drive us to dangerous actions based on inattention blindness, or the torpor of acedia that deadens our impulse to act.

This can be very hard to do. We can find ourselves unable to act for a variety of reasons: acedia, fear of making a mistake, fear of appearing incompetent, suffering a trigger that imitates a trauma response or a mental health collapse, boredom, stubbornness and ego. How does one bootstrap oneself from these states into one of resourceful Aporia?

At the Physicians Leadership Academy, and in the work that Caitlin and I do when we are engaged in complexity work with clients, we introduce practices that induce what is known as a “subject-object shift.” This term comes from Robert Kegan’s work, notably in his 1982 book The Evolving Self in which he describes the subject-object shift as the mechanism of psychological development that brings us from one stage to another. We are able to evolve when we can shift our perspective to become aware of ourselves in a way that “separates the self from the institution and creates, thus, the “individual,” that self who can reflect upon, or take as object, the regulations and purposes of a psychic administration which formerly was the subject of one’s attentions.” (p. 103)

This particular move is also central to vipassana or insight meditation and is detailed by the Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutta which is the foundational text for mindfulness.

In our work at Harvest Moon, Caitlin has refined The Work of Byron Katie into a set of practices and approaches to working with limiting beliefs which are we consider key capacities for leadership and working with complexity with organizations and clients.

In other contexts, this practice can be supported through Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy approaches which induce subject-object shifts to address maladaptive patterns of thoughts and behaviours so individuals become more resilient and resourceful in uncertainty and novel situations.

I am increasingly convinced that, while various methods of dialogue, collective sense making and debate can help induce a subject-object shift in another person, an essential capacity for working skillfully in complexity is the ability to do it by oneself. Any of these methods adopted as practices equip people to move from Confusion to Aporia. Without the ability to do these things, that shift becomes extremely difficult. Without being able to access the Aproretic domain, the move into addressing Complexity becomes blocked.

It is not hard to learn these techniques. It is hard to remember to use them.

Escaping confusion

So Cynefin is a framework that helps you make sense of a situation and figure our ways to act. But the first act of using it is to know that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can enter Aporia. From Aproria there are six ways to escape confusion, and these are shown here:

In Dave’s own words these six escape routes are as follows:

1. Shift to the small, liminal aspect of the complicated domain (it has a question mark in the diagram) where you are not totally sure of the value of the expert advice you are currently receiving (the decision-makers sees things as Aporetic but your existing body of experts are still insisting their advice is sound).  Here rapidly setting up a debate between those experts and others from different backgrounds is a type of Aporia that allows to rapidly check and return as necessary
2. Shift to the complex by identifying a series of coherent hypotheses around what will work and will not.  There should be a contradiction between the hypotheses and they need champions.  That means you can conduct a series of safe-to-fail experiments that change the dispositional space so that solutions become clearer. There are a range of methods and tools we can use some of which would be close to the liminal boundary, others closer to chaos.  Some of these are more ad hoc than others.
3. If there is a clear and obvious body of knowledge that you are either ignoring or do not possess which has high relevance, then you move to the complicated.   If you had paid attention then you wouldn’t be in the Aporetic anyway and you would have things under control.  Remember there is a strong tendency to avoid expert advice is the consequences are unacceptable at the time – bring them back, apologise and give them some authority.
4. If the risk of inattentional blindness is high you shift into the chaotic-complex liminal zone and rapidly use MassSense techniques to identify different perspectives and critically minority perspectives that you might otherwise be ignoring.  Outliers are key here as they are far more likely to have a solution that can be tested by shifting to the complex domain than the currently dominant views.  Indeed the value of MassSense is the ability to map those dominances and identify their sources.  But you need to build cognitively diverse networks before the situation if at all possible as that will allow a fast response. If you create one in a crisis keep it live, but best is networks for ordinary purposes that can be activated in times of extraordinary need.
5. Not shown on the diagram but a critical one – you are not in an Anorectic state or if maybe the risk of that assumption is too high   Then you move into the draconian and directive approaches of crisis management…
6. Finally, and I have now shifted my view from the original list; the shift to the Clear (formerly obvious or simple) domain of Cynefin which simply assumes that standard processes and procedures properly applied will solve the problem.  There is an obscure chance that this might be correct, a less obscure chance that it might prove to work accidentally but it is a high-risk strategy.

I quote his blog post at length because these are really good and clear strategies. That St. David’s Day series still stands as one of the more important to me in recent years.

Tl:dr

So the take away here is that mindfulness and awareness are key capacities for working in complexity because they enable one to move from Confusion to Aporia and then into the Cynefin domains so that one can make informed and context-appropriate decisions. Any mindfulness practice you can adopt will equip you to more quickly enter the Aporetic domain.

I don’t think the challenge of our times is dealing with complexity. I think it is escaping confusion.

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”