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Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place:
an Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in
Formal and Informal Communities
David Snowden
Director, Europe Middle East and Africa, Institute for Knowledge Management, Visiting
Fellow in Knowledge Management, European Management School, University of Surrey.
This paper outlines one of several sense making models developed by the author based on fieldwork
across a range of organizations. These models are designed to pass the ‘paper napkin’ test: they can
be drawn from memory on the back of a paper napkin and used to make sense of a situation in normal
conversation. All such models are designed to force communities of practitioners to recognize the
need to introduce requisite levels of variety into their thinking, and avoid single models of practice and
strategy. The Cynefin model focuses on the location of knowledge in an organization using cultural
and sense making aspects of four different forms of community, both formal and informal. Three of
these communities are a part of the day-to-day life of any large organization, the forth is domain of
innovation and strategies for forcing innovation are discussed. Allowing self-organization of
knowledge within an organization, utilizing but not being used by the informal or shadow organization
is seen as key to effective knowledge management. The paper distinguished between mechanical,
Newtonian models of management science and the emerging organic approach, which draws on
concepts from complexity theory. This paper is a much-abbreviated version of a chapter in the
forthcoming book Knowledge Horizons: The present and promise of Knowledge Management edited
by Charles Despres & Daniele Chauvel due for publication in September 2000.
Cynefin (pronounced cun-ev-in) is a Welsh word with no direct equivalent in English. As a
noun it is translated as habitat, as an adjective acquainted or familiar, but dictionary
definitions fail to do it justice. A better, and more poetic, definition comes from the
introduction to a collection of paintings by Kyffin Williams, an artist whose use of oils creates
a new awareness of the mountains of his native land and their relationship to the spirituality of
its people: “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.” (Sinclair 1998).
It differs from the Japanese concept of Ba, which is a “shared space for emerging
relationships” (Nonaka & Konno 1998) in that 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. In
general, if a community is not physically, temporally and spiritually rooted, then it is
alienated from its environment and will focus on survival rather than creativity and
collaboration. In such conditions, knowledge hoarding will predominate and the community
will close itself to the external world. If the alienation becomes extreme, the community may
even turn in on itself, atomising into an incoherent babble of competing self interests.
This is of major importance for the emerging disciplines of knowledge management.
Organisations are increasingly aware of the need to create appropriate virtual and physical
space in which knowledge can be organised and distributed. They are gradually becoming
aware that knowledge cannot be treated as an organisational asset without the active and
voluntary participation of the communities that are its true owners. A shift to thinking of
employees as volunteers requires a radical rethink of reward structures, organisational form
and management attitude. It requires us to think of the organisation as a complex ecology in
which the number of causal factors renders pseudo-rational prescriptive models redundant at
best and poisonous at worst.
We have seen early signs of a shift from hierarchical forms to one in which the organisation is
seen as a network of communities, hopefully united in a common purpose. In the knowledge
management arena this has meant an increasing focus on communities of competence or
practice. Here the place, or Ba, of knowledge exchange and creation are groups of individuals
logically organised by common expertise or interest. These logically constructed groups are
often supported by sophisticated systems designed to enable collaboration and exchange
where the group members are dispersed in space, but not in time. Such logically constructed
groups are not necessarily communities, common interests and educational background are
not enough in their own right to forge a community and most organisations will use meetings
and social space, both physical and virtual to induce a sense of belonging and social
obligation, but again this is limited in its effectiveness.
Culturally based sense making
Any model of community has to recognise the need for diversity, ambiguity and paradox.
Too many of the modern day practitioners of scientific management have overused its
Newtonian base and abused the thinking of its founder, Taylor, by the attempted creation of
universal and overly simplistic models. We
need to recognise that human society is
diverse and multi-dimensional. Volunteers
can and do resist mandated behaviour.
Ambiguity provides scope for individual
interpretation and more rapid adaptation to
change; the neat and tidy structures required
by traditional IT systems design oversimplify
complexity in order to achieve deliverables
and consequently fail to reflect the richness of
human space. Paradox allows humans (but
not computers) to work with apparent
contradiction, and in consequence create new
meaning. .
An early form of the Cynefin model using
different labels for the dimension extremes
and quadrant spaces was developed as a
means of understanding the reality of
intellectual capital management within IBM Global Services (Snowden 1999a). It has been
used subsequently to assist a range of other organisations to understand the ecology of
knowledge and the representation in Figure 1 reflects that experience and thinking. It is
designed to create a holistic understanding of the different types of community and
community interactions within an organisation, rooted in the historic, cultural and situational
context of both that organisation, its changing environment and the network of formal and
informal communities that make it a living entity. As such, it is designed to acclimatise the
informal communities to their responsibilities within in the wider ecology of the organisation,
and to acclimatise the organisation to the reality of its identity that is in part, if not principally,
formed by those communities.
The dimension of culture
In seeking to understand culture we will draw on a distinction from anthropology. Keesing
and Strathern (1998) assert two very different ways in which the term culture is used:
Cynefin model: cultural sense making
Figure 1
Restricted
Open
Learning
Training
Professional
Logical
Expert Language
Informal
Inter-dependent
Symbolic Language
Uncharted
Innovative
Emergent Language
Bureaucratic
Structured
Common Language
CULTURE
SENSE MAKING
1. The socio-cultural system or the pattern of residence and resource exploitation that can be
observed directly, documented and measured in a fairly straightforward manner. The
tools and other artefacts that we use to create communities, the virtual environment we
create and the way we create, distribute and utilise assets within the community. These
are teaching cultures that are aware of the knowledge that needs to be transferred to the
next generation and which create training programmes. They are characterised by their
certainty or explicit know ability
2. Culture as an “…ideational system. Cultures in this sense comprise systems of shared
ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the
ways that humans live. Culture, so defined, refers to what humans learn, not what they do
and make” (Keesing & Strathem 1998). This is also the way in which humans provide
“standards for deciding what is, ... for deciding what can be,.... for deciding how one feels
about it, ... for deciding what to do about it, and ... for deciding how to go about doing it.”
(Goodenough 1961:522). Such cultures are tacit in nature: networked, tribal and fluid.
They are learning cultures because they are deal with ambiguity and uncertainty
originating in the environment, or self generated for innovative purposes.
The cultural dimension encompasses technology (considered as a tool not a totemistic fetish)
and implicitly rejects the false dualism between culture and technology of much current
knowledge management.
The dimension of sense making
The function of knowledge in any organisation is to make sense of things, both to oneself and
to the communities with which one is connected. Knowledge is our sense making capability.
The developing practice of knowledge management has seen two different approaches to
definition. One arises from Information Management and sees knowledge as some higher-
level order of information; often expressed as a triangle progressing from data, through
information and knowledge to the apex of wisdom. Knowledge here is seen as a thing or
entity that can be managed and distributed through advanced use of technology. Much of the
thinking in this group is really not very new: the issues and problems of human interaction
with information systems have been articulated for many years (Dervin 1998). The second
approach sees the problem from a sociological basis. These definitions see knowledge as a
human capability to act. Like the first group, knowledge is still seen in a linear continuum
with data, information and wisdom, although the sequence is sometimes reversed with
wisdom as the base (Saint-Onge 1996).
In effect both groups are correct, knowledge is both a thing and a capability at the same time.
A parallel situation exists in physics where an electron is simultaneously both a particle and
wave; if we seek particles then we see particles, if we seek waves then we see waves. The
same is true of knowledge. One of the problems is that things are superficially easier to
manage, and as a result early knowledge management has focused on knowledge as a thing
that can be captured and codified in databases. More recent thinking is less directive and
more holistic, seeing knowledge as “a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual
information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluation and incorporating
new experiences and information” (Davenport & Prusak, 1998, my italics).
Sense making requires a knowledge user to create meaningful messages that inform other
community members and which allow the community to comprehend complex and
ambiguous situations without either drowning in data, or accepting the restraints of a pseudo-
rational simplification. Language is key. The use of language to include or exclude gives us
the extremes of our sense-making dimension. We see communities sharing a common expert
language that effectively excludes those who do not share that expertise: this is restricted
sense making. The restriction generally results from the need to have invested time to acquire
a skill set and the associated expert language within training cultures, or it can be the private
symbolic language of common experience referenced through stories of learning cultures. At
the other extreme, expertise is either not necessary or is inappropriate: this is open sense
making. In, teaching cultures it is open to anyone who speaks the language of the dominant
culture of the organisation, in learning cultures it is open in the sense that no expert language
has yet developed as the situation is new.
The Cynefin Quadrants
It is important to remember that models such as this are designed to assist in developing self-
awareness and the capacity to describe the ecology in which one works. The borders between
each quadrant are ambiguous in most organisations, although it will be argued later that there
is considerable advantage to be gained by creating and building strong borders between the
quadrants and increasing the ritual elements of transfer between them. Each quadrant
represents a particular coalescence in time and space of a form of community with varying
degrees of temporal continuity.
Bureaucratic/Structured
common language
This is the formal organisation; the realm of company policy, recruitment procedures,
financial controls, internal marketing; the entire panoply of corporate life that has emerged
over the last century. It is a training environment. Its language is known, explicit and open, it
the commonplace day to day language of the dominant linguistic group.
The organisation has high volumes of information and embedded knowledge to communicate
on a regular basis to a diverse population. Some of this needs to be done within the context of
skills training, some via company publications, or increasingly the intra-net and other forms
of virtual collaboration. Increasingly the volume of information communicated by
organisations results in data glut and a failure to create meaningful messages; messages that
do not inform the recipient remain as data. In many organisations corporate communications
are de-facto ignored by field staff who have too many other demands on their time. Filtering
and the shift from push to pull information provision is one solution. Organisations are also
starting to re-discover the value of human filters and human channels through the re-
employment of Librarians, the use of story, video and other communication forms that convey
higher levels of complexity in less time consuming form.
In looking at the other quadrants of the Cynefin model, we always need to remember that the
formal organisation will always attempt to creep into other spaces through measurement and
control, and this partially laudable endeavour needs to be controlled and channelled so that it
does not inhibit the capacity of the organisation as a whole to develop to meet the demands of
its environment.
Professional /Logical
Restricted expert language
The most commonly understood form of expert language is that of the professional: an
individual who, through a defined training programme and associated job function, acquires
an ability to use explicit specialist terminology; generally codified in textbooks and via
references to key concepts or thinkers. The expert language and the time and basic skill it
takes to acquire that expert language are form the barriers to entry and define the nature of the
restriction. Although the opportunity to acquire the skill is known and available to all, in
practice it is further limited by opportunity. Opportunity may be the most important and the
most often forgotten as it frequently depends on patronage or access to decision makers rather
than need. Lack of opportunity may also result from social deprivation prior to
commencement of a career, or during that career. There is logic to the creation of
communities around these visible common affinities. Little or no ambiguity exists over their
nature or the barriers for entry.
Such communities are working at a high level of abstraction. Abstraction is the process by
which we focus on the underlying constructs of data. As Boisot (1998) admirably
demonstrates, the process of abstraction is
focused on concepts, not percepts. Percepts,
“…achieve their economies by maintaining a
certain clarity and distinction between
categories, concepts do so by revealing which
categories are likely to be relevant to the data-
processing task” or information creation.
“Abstraction, in effect, is a form of
reductionism; it works by letting the few stand
for the many”. In practise it is easier to create
a construct for knowledge as a thing; the
atomistic nature of things lends itself to
codification. Knowledge as a capability
presents different problems, mostly
attributable to the constant mutation of such
knowledge as it accommodates itself to
different contexts.
Expert communities are able to convey
complex messages more economically than non-expert communities within their domain.
Figure 2 illustrates the way in which the cost of codification decreases with the operational
level of abstraction of that community. Attempts to share expert knowledge at too low a level
of abstraction mean that the cost of effective codification increases exponentially and the act
of codification becomes a negative act: the real experts dismiss the material as not worth of
their attention, its back where they were in high school. Codify at too high a level and,
although costs are reduced, the level of restricted access can increase to the point of elitism.
In working with expert communities it is vital to understand the appropriate level of
operational abstraction, and to understand the speed of decay in the uniqueness of the
knowledge being shared. Highly complex knowledge with a high decay factor will rarely
justify the cost of codification. As can be seen from Figure 2, the tolerance for ambiguity is
broader for complex knowledge. This is because the populations able to use complex
knowledge are generally smaller and will tend to have more homogeneity of value/beliefs
systems
Informal/Interdependent
Restricted symbolic language
Informal communities are more rigidly restricted than Professional ones. The community, or
individuals within it use criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of members that are unspecified
and rarely articulated, but intuitively understood. Members in the grey zone between
acceptance and rejection may be unaware of the process itself. Membership is always
ambiguous and if lost can result in bad feeling arising from a sense of personal betrayal that
goes beyond the normal cut and thrust of organisational politics in the formal organisation. In
some cases groups are absolutely restricted; they are linked to past unique experiences and in
consequence are not open to new membership. Such groups are also more readily
Operating levels of abstraction
Figure 2
Cost of Codification
Increasing Abstraction
Highly complex
Tolerance of ambiguity
Not complex
identifiable. Membership of an informal community generally transcends other loyalties and
organisational boundaries. Such groups coalesce as a result of some form of stimulus:
common experience, common values or beliefs, common goals or common enemies or
threats. They are used to make things work – phoning an individual with whom one has
worked on a previous project to help fix a problem, draws on previous favours and creates a
future obligation. A relationship between individuals in field in bureaucratic functions and
field operations can result in the processes of the organisation being used to facilitate rather
than obstruct.
An examination of primitive symbolic or pictorial languages reveals some interesting
features. Primary of among these is the ability of symbolic languages to convey a large
amount of knowledge or information in a very succinct way. Each symbol has a different
meaning according the combination of symbols that preceded it. The problem is that such
languages are difficult to comprehend and near impossible to use unless you grow up in the
community of symbol users. In some primitive societies the symbols are stories, often unique
to a particular family who train their children to act as human repositories of complex stories
that contain the wisdom of the tribe. The ability to convey high levels of complexity through
story lies in the highly abstract nature of the symbol associations in the observer’s mind when
s/he hears the story, It triggers ideas, concepts, values and beliefs at an emotional and
intellectual level simultaneously. A critical mass of anecdotal material from a cohesive
community can be used to identify and codify simple rules and values that underlie the reality
of that organisation’s culture (Snowden 1999b). At its simplest manifestation this can be a
coded reference to past experience. “You’re doing a Margi” may be praise or blame – unless
I shared the experience of Margi I will not know, if I shared the experience then a dense set of
experiences is communicated in a simple form.
Organisations need to realise the degree of their dependence on informal networks. The
danger is of chronic self-deception in the formal organisation, partly reinforced by the
camouflage behaviour of individuals in conforming to the pseudo-rational models. A mature
organisation will recognise that such informal networks are a major competitive advantage
and will ensure scalability through automated process and formal constructions while leaving
room for the informal communities to operate.
Uncharted/Innovative
emergent language
So far we have dealt with the two forms of restricted communities in which a specialised
language, explicit or symbolic, is developed to make sense of incoming stimuli. We now
reach a domain in which such language does not exist because the situation is new. It may be
that a completely new market has emerged, or that new competitors have appeared from
nowhere or by lateral movements of brand: for example the entry of Mars into ice cream. The
newness may be technology- induced, creating new possibilities: the growth of the internet is
an obvious example, but we will see increasing levels of uncertainty as the impact of
pervasive commuting starts to bite. This is the ultimate learning environment. We have no
ideas of what it is that we need to train, and the language of our previous expertise may be
inappropriate at best, or appear to be appropriate (even though it is not) at worst.
Faced with something new the organisation has a problem; it will tend to look at the problem
through the filters of the old. The history of business is littered with companies who failed to
realise that the world had changed and who continued to keep the old models and old
language in place. In hindsight such foolishness is easy to identify, but at the time the
dominant language and belief systems of the organisation concerned make it far from
obvious. This is particularly true where the cost of acquisition of acquiring knowledge within
the organisation is high as this tends to knowledge hoarding and secrecy that in turn can blind
the organisation to new and changed circumstances. Other organisations deliberately share
knowledge, depending on speed of exploitation as the means of maintaining competitive
advantage (Boisot 1998).
The requirement in Uncharted space is to make sure that the past does not blind us to the
possibilities of the present and to the opportunities of the future. Assuming that the
organisation realises that the situation is new, there are three models, derived from the other
three Cynefin quadrants, which are used to deal with the uncertainty created:
1. Bureaucratic Quadrant: The organisation sets up a task force or allocates responsibility
to individuals trusted within the organisational hierarchy and established within its
command and control structure, including candidate members for such groups:
management trainees, protégés and the like. The tendency of such formally constituted
groups is to ensure that all interests are represented and functional conflict may result in a
failure to understand the nature of the change.
2. Professional Quadrant: individual competence groups may have a responsibility to
monitor changes and produce organisation response, or the task may be assigned to such a
group by senior management. The danger of sectional interests is more extreme than for
Bureaucracy. The restricted nature of this language, a strength in ensuring rapid and
effective knowledge sharing, becomes a handicap where a significantly new situation is
encountered. Individuals in Bureaucratic communities are concerned with power through
the manipulation of resources and can adapt and change to new circumstances: they don’t
mind what they manage, as long as they are the managers. In Professional communities
the individuals will have invested years in developing a particular skill or expertise and if
they have made the wrong bet on the longevity of that skill set, they will be more
defensive.
3. Informal Quadrant: Solutions emerge without organisational intervention and are either
used or more frequently ignored until it is too late. This can happen when individuals or
groups within the organisation see or perceive that something has changed, and attempt to
make the organisation aware of the issue or keep it private until they feel safe to expose
the idea to corporate scrutiny, by which time it may be too late. A more recent
phenomenon is that the individuals concerned take the idea out of the organisation in a
business start up, often in competition. . Using Professional or Bureaucratic communities
as least has the benefit of visibility: the decision makers are aware that something is going
on and will often have been involved in its formation. With visibility comes
responsibility. Making new sense in an Informal community is a fundamentally flawed
behaviour. Facing a new situation requires awareness at all relevant levels of an
organisation: it cannot be left to chance.
The organisation needs to recognise that in new sense making we ‘see as through a glass
darkly to a greater truth’ to quote St Paul. New sense making takes place at a high level of
abstraction with extensive use of metaphor and paradox. Most corporate decision makers are
unhappy with both metaphor and paradox and it may be necessary to create mediating
communities between the innovation new sense making group and the decision makers, or
they will be listened to, but not heard.
How can we avoid the dangers discussed above? None of our current communities, formal or
informal will make sense of the new without problems, some of which may be fatal. Based on
an idealised representation of elements trialed over a series of engagements we can identify
four elements that should be present for new sense making.
1. Team selection. Most organisations do not really know what they know, and in many
cases the solutions are already known somewhere in the richness of the Informal
community space. In new sense making what matters is to find the individuals who have
access to the knowledge of the organisation together with a natural networking capability
to access external knowledge assets. Psychometric tools such as Belbin analysis are
useful to check that the necessary skills are present. However direct access to knowledge
net-workers can be obtained by use of Network Analysis (Foster & Falkowski, 1999).
This approach requires a series of “who would you ask if you wanted to know about X”
questions, asked, re-asked and developed across appropriate segments of the organisation.
The results of the answers are fed into a software tool borrowed from the Telecom
industry and designed to reveal traffic density and nodal points. The graphical result of
this work reveals the key individuals across a community and the key communities, within
an organisation who even if they do not know themselves, know someone who does.
These key individuals are often sidelined middle managers, secretaries and administrators.
They are often more motivated by connecting people than progression within the
organisation. These individuals, or communities have access to the knowledge assets of
the organisation, and their selection by this indirect disclosure method prevents the
competing self-interests that are likely in the event that the individuals are formally
selected by virtue of their status in the Professional or Bureaucratic quadrants.
2. Language Disruption. The team selection process above may bring together different
expertise and may be enough to disrupt the language norms of the organisation. However
it will normally be necessary to include other knowledge assets. This may include key
customers, particularly those who are troublesome! Breakthrough developments can also
usefully involve Lead-Users (von Hippel et al 1999) or competitors’ customers. It is also
effective to use knowledge assets from parallel environments. To take an example from
the author’s own direct experience: confronting experts from the marketing department of
a major retailer with experts from missile defence systems. The two groups realised that
they faced similar problems; there was very little difference between and incoming
ballistic missile and an outgoing disloyal customer when you look at the problem without
the constraints of previous assumptions. Disruption may also need to be continuous or
directed at key points in the programme.
3. Humour and ritual. The disruption of language can be reinforced by a degree of ritual
around specific negative acts on behaviour. Another direct experience of with a team in a
crisis on a systems delivery issue will illustrate this. The group concerned were over
reliant on process and assumed that key checks were taking place because the process said
that they would be. Increasing pressure of time, client dissatisfaction and the threat of
legal action were increasing this particular fault. A simple ritual involving the use of a
comical hat with elephant ears and an elephant trunk achieved the behavioural change.
Following agreement by the team that assumptions must not be made, the first person
caught making an assumption had the wear the hat until someone else was caught in a
similar mistake. Judicious advance planning meant that the most senior member of group
made the first assumption, which prevented victimisation of junior members until the
ritual was properly established. Over the course of the next three days the hat rotated on a
regular basis until it was no longer necessary: a significant behaviour shift had been
achieved. Humour was critical as it diffused tension and criticism
4. Time, Space and Resource. Innovation and lateral thinking are not always achieved
through resource provision. There is some evidence that starvation of resource, provided
it is not excessive, increases creativity and with it innovation; there are overlaps between
creativity and innovation but they are not the same thing, although often confused in
organisations. Starvation may also force groups into changing the rules of the game with
consequent benefit to changing customer requirements and/ or innovation. In one
experiment two groups of children were asked to compete in building a hut. One group
were given inferior materials and were unable to build as good a hut as their competitors.
The disadvantaged group then attempted to introduce new criteria into the competition by,
amongst other things, building a garden around the hut (Kastersztein & Personnaz, 1978).
There are no simple formulas to apply here, and the environment or direct threat for which
the intervention is planned may constrain the ideal allocation of resource. There are some
principles that can be applied: the time allocated should always be less than is estimated,
this increases pressure and forces the team to use other resources but their own;
conventional tools and approaches that lead to conventional or forecastable solutions
should generally be avoided and consciously removed; part time or full time is always a
question, part time will naturally create more networking into the organisation, full time
ensures focus; a unique physical as well as virtual environment is important, a social space
where things can be pinned on walls, non team members can visit and conversations can
take place.
The Uncharted space is one of the most interesting in the Cynefin model. We have explored
some of its aspects and some techniques for intervention. However there are many other
models and interventions that have been and could be devised. In particular, the above
techniques relate to point rather than continuous intervention to force new sense making.
Good fences make good neighbours
The value of a concept-based model such as Cynefin is in its ability to assist in descriptive
self-awareness within an organisation and to understand the flow of knowledge. By
presenting clear boundaries between different forms of community, the organisation is more
likely to recognise diversity and create alternative approaches to strategy determination and
investment (Snowden 1999b). The nature of the flows can indicate the sort of organisation
that we are dealing with and to some extend its likely future direction. Maintaining
boundaries between communities can be vital in ensuring knowledge exchange. There is a
wonderful poem by Robert Frost entitled Mending Wall that makes this point. It tells the
story of two farmers who go out in spring to “set the wall between us once again”. One
farmer challenges the other as to the point of the task and receives a response which
summarises the importance of boundaries:
“He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’”
The point is a profound one. The current circumstances may not require a wall, but the
presence of the wall means that we are secure in our boundaries. Individuals need to know
that the private learning they share with trusted confidents in Informal space will remain
private. If they believe it may become public then the degree of disclosure will be inhibited.
In a virtual community there are a broad range of interventions that can encourage this. In
IBM Global Services the best part of 50,000 private collaborative workrooms exist de facto in
Informal space, while Professional space is organised into just over 50 competences. The
self-organising capabilities of Informal space allow a vast quantity of knowledge to self
organise, allowing investment to be concentrated into Professional space. What then matters
is the creation of flags and search techniques that allow the Informal communities to
volunteer their knowledge into the Professional and Bureaucratic communities when it is
needed (Snowden, 1999a).
The Cynefin Model was not designed to mandate behaviour but to allow an organisation to
understand, within a holistic framework, the diverse portfolio of communities that constitute
it. It focuses on developing a self-aware descriptive capability from which action can be
determined through collective understanding. Such self-awareness has to be rooted in the
multiple birthplaces of the different communities and their developing history to which their
members are naturally acclimatised.
Cynefin is different from Ba in that it is less concerned about tacit-explicit conversions; partly
because it rejects the mind-body dualism implicit in Nonaka’s SECI model, but in the main
because of its focus on descriptive self-awareness rather than prescriptive organisation
models. Cynefin provides a different and more holistic space for the “cyclical cultivation of
resources” (Nonaka & Konno 1998) than that offered by the heirs of ‘scientific management’.
Those Newtonian models continue to apply, but like the Newtonians are confined to a known
context. In an increasingly uncertain world we need new organic models that embrace
paradox, utilise the ambiguity of metaphor and recognise the dynamic interdependence and
interactivity of human agents and their tools, technology based or otherwise. We too often
forget that Newton himself lived at a time of profound change, and was simultaneously both
an alchemist and a scientist.
Dave Snowden can be contacted via e-mail: snowded@uk.ibm.com
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