During the final week of our Cynefin 21 celebrations in October I had the privilege of talking with two long time friends here in Canada, both of whom have extensive experience working in, and consulting to, governments in Canada. When I first met Thomas Townsend he was the Executive Director of the Policy Research Initiative, now Horizons Canada, which is a policy foresight and research agency advising our federal government. At a similar time, or perhaps a year or two earlier, I met Ray MacNeil who at that time worked in Economic Development for the government of Nova Scotia. Both of these initial meetings were over 10 years ago and since that time Cognitive Edge has continued to engage with both Thomas and Ray across a range of initiatives involving training, SenseMaker®, and facilitated workshops.

During our conversation the other week I was struck by something Thomas said that should have been more obvious to me when thinking about the application of Cynefin in government. Thomas said that in Canada the work of the public sector is fundamentally about peace, order, and good government. It involves creating and enforcing constraints. Since we have enjoyed a long period of peace, our focus has been for many decades on creating order. Because of this, it is difficult for a system designed to create order to contemplate and accept complexity. It should not surprise then that the dominant approach by government is to define an end-state, understand the present state and develop a plan to move with certainty forward. Everyone then focuses on planning the work and then working on the plan. So moving beyond the ordered domains – Clear and Complicated – when applying the Cynefin Framework, is fundamentally difficult in the public sector.

As the conversation with Thomas and Ray continued we agreed that when things are radically disrupted or things are in really bad shape, you finally have an opportunity to look at alternative ways of making sense and to do things differently. As 2020 continues, with no near-term end in sight with the disruptions being caused by COVID-19, governments in Canada, and abroad, are being forced to think very differently and are seeking frameworks such as Cynefin to help navigate these uncertain and complex times.

Have a listen to this conversation on Cynefin and Government: a Canadian Perspective. You might just find a few key salient points about applying the Framework in public sectors in your local context.

More Cynefin21 Interviews and Webinar Recordings available in the Resources Section.

Photo credit for banner image: Michael Cheveldave

This week CE hosted an open webinar on the topic of Cynefin & Theory of Constraints.  This webinar featured CE practitioners and TOC experts, Steve Holt, Jabe Bloom, Greg Brougham, and Hilbert Robinson.  Steve Holt was the lead host and the others served as the panel of experts, some with more Cynefin experience while others with TOC experience and many with both!

We are sharing this webinar openly with all who would like to watch.  To watch the webinar recording we ask for your email address and we kindly request you give our mailing list a try!  You can always opt out 🙂

Here’s a link to the webinar recording.

If you enjoy this webinar be sure to sign up for the full 2-day Masterclass on Cynefin & TOC with Steve Holt and Dave Snowden July 11-12, 2019 in Chicago!  Here’s a link to the Masterclass.

Most large companies are prepared to invest in “incremental innovation” but very few are willing to grant decision authority to management teams at a level necessary for disruptive innovation. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing or a criticism of large companies often lack of ability to stimulate disruptive innovation.  However I do believe that management teams who are genuinely interested in unlocking greater potential in their employees and research and development efforts do need to have a serious look at the constraints they apply to non-budgeted capital expenditures.  We often admire the innovation successes of other companies in retrospect however rarely do we compare the context details of those companies before they achieved success to our own contexts.

Let’s take for example the impressive market dominance Apple achieved before they became a powerful and dominant player in the mobile telecoms market.  My kids are too young to remember the different types of MP3 players that existed on the market before Apple launched the iPod.  Very few people I know use iPods anymore even though many have multiple models in their drawers and tech “graveyard” closets!  It’s all consolidated now in our mobile phones.  What even fewer people know about is a key moment that happened in Japan when Steve Jobs approved a $10 million dollar expenditure that secured a key piece to their disruptive innovation at that time… the iPod 1.

This 2013 article from Time relays the story about a key moment when I believe Apple secured its dominance in the MP3 market.  I recall reading this story in the official Steve Jobs biography and at that time I thought — “what other company would have the ability to approve such a large expenditure at a moment’s notice?”  I often highlight this story when discussing innovation desires of companies with attendees of CE training courses.  The reality is most companies cannot move nearly this fast and hence need to accept that their disruptive innovation potential and first mover abilities will be constrained by their policies and decision processes that are often rigidly in place.

I was prompted to write about this when reading this McKinsey’s article titled “Culture for a digital age”.  The article talks about how fear of taking risks is one of the barriers to company success in the digital age.  This insight was derived from a survey of global executives who were reflecting limitations they see in their organizational cultures.  I could not help but think about how these same global execs were being empowered or constrained in taking bold decisions on a moments notice?  Could any of them authorize a $10 million dollar supply chain investment over a dinner with one of their direct reports?

It’s reasonably well known that retaining more than 5 different things in your memory is difficult. This is known as Millar’s Law. We often explain this with some humour during training referring to why when given directions most people find it difficult to remember past 5 instructions.  The concept here is that the number of objects an average human can hold in their working memory is 7 ± 2.

Now this has a couple implications when you think about signifiers and SenseMaker®. I believe that one reason that triads work well as signifiers is that they work within this cognitive sweet spot very effectively. Take for example below a triad we have used on safety as well as other projects:

Now think about what we are asking the SenseMaker® respondent to hold in their cognitive awareness as they think about their response: 1) their story or micro-narrative, 2) pressure in the context of the specific situation they shared 3) from co-workers, 4) from supervisors or managers, and 5) self-imposed. So the total number of dimensions is within the bounds of short term memory. Dyads hold this as well as they keep to 4 so they are a little easier.  Each response to a stones question can be 4 or 5 depending on the nature of the lead-in or preamble text.

Now as a respondent goes through the process of signifying their entry (experience, observation, hypothetical or micro-scenario) think about what’s happening as they step through each question. Their awareness or cognitive focus moves from signifier to signifier with their natural short-term memory forming a light awareness boundary between signifiers. It’s almost like their awareness is bracketed and moving from question to question.  The images below provide a visual sense of this sliding window as a respondent works through a single SenseMaker® response.

Another way to think about this is that the perspective each signifier frames or orients a respondent to consider stays within the cognitive awareness limit. Hence it works effectively as a single filter. The next signifier a respondent needs to process introduces a new filter. So in this way as each signifier response is added the prior response is more likely not to be considered or influenced.

Abduction and exaptation is therefore aided by making connections to meaning that is arrived at emergently rather than cognitively rationalized in real-time with strong cognitive bias.

Header photo: 

By Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Hayden Huang, Guoping Feng, Joshua R. Sanes, Emery N. Brown, Peter T. So, Elly Nedivi – Dynamic Remodeling of Dendritic Arbors in GABAergic Interneurons of Adult Visual Cortex. Lee WCA, Huang H, Feng G, Sanes JR, Brown EN, et al. PLoS Biology Vol. 4, No. 2, e29. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040029, Figure 6f, slightly altered (plus scalebar, minus letter “f”.), CC BY 2.5

One of the aspects of sense-making we emphasize in all our training programmes is the value of contrast. Since complex systems are inherently unordered, without any underlying repeating structure, their is no absolute baseline or reference. Hence contrasting from differences in the system (I.e. perspective, context, location, etc.) provides an effective means of making sense.

So what does this have to do with the title of this post? Well if you are wondering where Whitehorse is its in northern Canada in the Yukon territory neighbouring Alaska. Although Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon, it is sparsely populated (moose out number people more than 2:1) and very remote. Arguably there is no other urban mega-city than New York which reflects the complete opposite on the scale of cities. Now Whitehorse is larger than a village or small town but the contrast with NYC is immense.

In February Dave will be delivering two Cynefin & Sense-making training courses in North America – New York City (Feb 8-11) and Whitehorse, Yukon (Feb 15-18).  I’ve been given the honour of supporting him in Whitehorse! Both locations have active Cognitive Edge practitioners engaged in applying Cynefin and many using SenseMaker®. The diversity of the projects and people attending our training courses gives great contrast value in learning the application of complexity, Cynefin, and sense-making. The benefit of us instructors delivering in different locations and cultures is it keeps the material fresh with new ideas and refinements to the approaches. Both the NYC and Whitehorse training courses are positioned to offer an excellent curriculum of the most current CE thinking and application with unique backdrops!

So please join us either in NYC or Whitehorse in February. For all our American friends I must say the Whitehorse session has just recently been further discounted due to the currency markets and devaluation of the Canadian dollar. And accommodations and expenses are very reasonable compared with the big apple!

Anyone interested in attending both sessions please send us an email and we would be happy to offer an attractive bundle discount. If we talk with our CE  friends in the Yukon we may even plan a unique outdoor experience but warm clothing will be a must!

Late in April, Gary Wong and I will be delivering our complexity and safety training course in Houston. This session focuses on how complex adaptive systems thinking, the Cynefin framework, and narrative collection can help leadership teams improve their safety cultures and reduce safety risks. Fundamental to the overall approach is deploying a more effective form of networked human judgement and distributed sense-making.

Being a professional engineer with industrial project management experience I can appreciate the challenges many leadership teams face across a range of industrial sectors. Earlier in my tenure at Cognitive Edge I also led transformation projects in healthcare, some of which looked closely at patient safety in hospitals and healthcare regions. A common challenge that I see facing companies today is the proliferation of tools that allow all of us to manage an incredible degree of detail in our day to day work lives. It’s not the tools themselves that present the challenge but our attempt to manage complex and uncertain environments with such tools in an ordered way. This proliferation of tools together with an ordered approach is also impacting safety. There seems to be no end to the number and variety of tool supported safety management systems enabling an incredible degree of coordination across large networks and devices. For those that know me well know of my personal delight in exploring the newest technological tools.  So I’m the first to admit that I like tools and what they can do for us. However there is a consequence in attempting to manage every level of detail in a structured way when faced with uncertain, complex, and dynamic contexts.

What are the implications of having an overwhelming array of tools and processes to help manage an overwhelming volume of tasks / activities? Before we had such an array of tools, I would argue we managed the gaps more effectively with a more loosely coupled network of human judgement. Such human judgement was much more localized and face to face.  Fundamentally it was woven into, and defining of, a corporate culture. A networked form of human judgement expressed through an organization’s culture is far more enabling, adaptive, and resilient in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

Unfortunately an all too common excessive obsession with efficiency, a desire to engineer all processes, and a wish to eliminate all uncertainty and complexity is not only burning out human resources but it’s introducing risks into operating environments. Safety is one of those areas that is unfortunately suffering a negative impact from this overly ordered management approach.

The challenge is not to make the informal formal, or the formal entirely informal, the challenge is to better negotiate and establish a means to manage the boundary between the two. All companies and organizations need constraints and ordered processes, especially when it comes to safety. We are all benefiting to a certain degree with the variety and abundance of tools. The reality is we are overemphasizing the engineering of safety management systems rather than managing the interaction between the necessary ordered structures and the informal cultural norms that have evolved within companies.  It is precisely this area that our upcoming Cynefin and safety training course will be covering and we hope you can join us in Houston in April.

PS – For anyone who posts a comment to this blog, pls note that I will be away from the office enjoying a spring break holiday with my family. I’ll respond to any comments upon my return. 

I was prompted by an email exchange earlier this week about a company seeing customer experience as the make or break for succeeding at a brand transformation or a brand change initiative.  SenseMaker® is being considered but is currently viewed as a technology driven solution which was a concern as this particular company has seen far too many other technology driven solutions fail with little or no adoption.  This bothered me as I have seen many people quickly categorize SenseMaker® as a technology solution which to my mind is a very limited perspective on what it offers. Most if not all of my introductory conversations emphasize that SenseMaker® is a narrative or engagement driven solution that uses technology to aid in scaleability as well as to facilitate wider and deeper scanning.

I often emphasize the process of journalling real-time observations and capturing fragments of natural conversations over the technology and process of recording and representation. As such the focus is on capturing a sufficient sample of a wider flow of experiences moment to moment. What you want to emphasize is that a SenseMaker® initiative should seek at creating a way of tapping into the natural discourse or multiple flows of micro-narratives (experiences, observations, reflections, or “what-ifs” in the form of micro scenarios) in sufficient volume to enable the organization to be far more effective at sensing the current reality including the dynamic shifts in real time.

So thinking about customer experience, if you engage your employees widely in observing and noticing the customer experiences in fragmented moments as they occur on a day to day and week to week basis, and gather the deeper meaning of each of those moments with the signification process embedded in SenseMaker®, you will have very quickly engaged your organization in becoming a sensing network capturing a diversity customer experiences as they occur. Also in this process you are shifting the focus away from “what are we individually, departmentally, or organizationally, doing right or wrong in terms of creating customer experiences” to “what are we individually seeing from experience to experience, observation to observation on how our customers are reacting to our service delivery”.  This is a subtle but a key displacement of attention as it shifts the burden of responsibility from individuals to the department or organization as a whole.  This allows you to get a more authentic sense of reality.

The opening image, shown again below, is a sample of a narrative landscape.  This image is from a real data dataset but with modified axis labels to preserve customer confidentiality.

Below I show the same landscape as a topographical chart.  This narrative landscape shows the contour lines mapping out the areas of both high and low narrative density.  The peaks on this landscape represent high density or probability of occurrences.  Inverted these could be deep wells so you can change the perspective if you’d like.

On the next image (see below) I have highlighted two particular areas.  Area A represents customer experience stories where the focus is on solutions but the experience is quite new.  Area B shows customer experience stories where the respondents said these are very common occurrences and relate to situations where the focus is on process or procedures.  The reason I have highlighted area A of the landscape green and area B red is because of what’s revealed in the pie charts.  Another SenseMaker® question asks the respondent to say whether the experience they have reported was overall positive, strongly positive, neutral, negative, or strongly negative. The customer experiences in area A are overall much more positive than area B hence the colour coding.

The narrative landscape shown with the positive and negative overlay is quite encouraging. It indicates an emerging pattern of customer experiences which are on balance positive and related to new experiences.  So diving into these stories more deeply and understanding which are well oriented for supporting a brand transformation give us a sense of actions that can be taken to amplify this effect.  While the negative stories in Area B or otherwise, indicate danger points or potential barriers to transformation.  Avoidance or actions that dampen the impact of such negative contexts will aid a transformation.

Now to take this even further, if you gather experiences and observations from your customers using the same SenseMaker® framework you can contrast how your employees are seeing customer experiences with how the customers are seeing their own experiences.  This contrast will allow you adapt and evolve your customer experience strategy in real time with much more authentic feedback.  And once you quickly build your customer experience knowledge base to thousands or even tens of thousands of recorded micro-narratives you will have established a comprehensive current customer experience narrative landscape.  With continuous gathering established (i.e. employees making daily or weekly customer experience observations and customers sharing their experiences and observations) you can now monitor for shifts as you try stimulate your brand change in a desired direction from where your current brand is positioned across the customer experience landscape.

his blog is being posted on behalf of Thomas Townsend.  Thomas will be teaching our newest course – Cynefin & Policywith Tony Quinlan in Ottawa on Oct 2-3.

Some 10 years ago now when I first became interested in how complexity science might be used in public administration there was a body of thinking but relatively few practical examples of applications. That has changed. Governments pushed by declining budgets and demands by citizens for greater involvement have been looking for new ways to work. This has brought attention to approaches informed by complexity science for working with intractable problems as well as a way to square the circle of making localization workable and relevant. Interest by public administrations has given rise to a new Cognitive Edge Coursededicated to the application of proven methods in the analysis, implementation and ongoing learning in the field of public policy.

So what is applying complexity thinking to public policy really all about?
It is often easier to see things through the discussion of a specific example.
One such example is the growing interest in “labs”. Called by various sources as change labs, policy labs, social labs, social innovation labs or living labs. I will refer to them here as labs.

Labs are not new but are increasingly being used by government organizations. They have their groundings in design thinking, group dynamics, and complexity theory. Some of the important features of good lab work involve looking at the problem in its context and using the complex adaptive system as the lens through which work will be undertaken. Additional concepts from complexity theory that are inherent in good lab process involve working with finely grained information, looking for patterns, using experiments, recognizing and even stimulating self organizing properties in the system and adopting an iterative approach. Many of these concepts and approaches will be familiar to the practitioner network and it is not difficult to identify specific CognitiveEdge methods that can be used in a lab approach. Examples of labs in specific policy areas are evident in many communities and I will leave readers to search for those closest and most relevant to them.

While particular labs are for the most part run at local levels policy design labs at national or at regional (province/state/territory) level are in early phases of development. Labs are being pursued as an additional avenue for exploratory policy work by a number of departments at the federal level here in Canada. Labs in this context are being viewed as a possible “Agile” styled approach to policy.

Labs are not, however panaceas and can become their own source of problems.  A recent forum hosted by Kennisland in the Netherlands identified four potential types of issues emerging from the improper use of labs. I want to highlight two here as they relate to cautions that Dave has raised over the years. The first is solutionism (Dave would call this putting new wine in old wine skins). If organizers and participants of the lab have not shifted their paradigm to a complexity informed outlook they may see the lab as a structure for solving problems rather than a space to promote experimentation within a complex adaptive system. The second is the dictatorship of scale. Scaling often assumes that we can find a best approach then apply that approach broadly. While this may be possible it is not always the case (in particular if we are working on policy issues in the complex domain) so Lab outputs need to be looked at as a unique fit to their context and generalizations treated with caution and subjected to testing in a safe to fail way.

Thomas Townsend has over 35 years of developing and implementing strategy in complex policy environments. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Public Management and Policy, University of Ottawa and lecturer at the Global MBA Programme, Turku, Finland.

Immediately preceding his retirement from the Public Service Mr. Townsend was the Executive Head (Assistant Deputy Minister) of the Policy Research Initiative (PRI) now called Horizons Canada. Horizons Canada is the organization that supports the Federal Government with forward scanning, medium term analysis and research on emerging issues. Mr. Townsend has also worked with the Canadian Mission to the European Union. His key responsibilities in that position were exchanging policy advice with the European Commission and EU member states in areas related to health, labour market, social affairs and education. In previous roles he was responsible for federal programs related to learning which included literacy, student financial assistance, learning technology, and academic mobility. He was the first CEO of CORCAN, a Special Operating Agency responsible for providing work skills inside Canada’s Federal Penitentiaries.

Creating and Leading a Resilient Safety Culture is our new training course that brings together resilience thinking with complexity and Cynefin to offer a unique and practical approach to shifting safety cultures in organizations. 

Cognitive Edge is hosting three sessions of this new course in June and July.  June 26-27 and June 30-July 1 are two back-to-back sessions in Auckland, NZ. The second course is SOLD OUT with a single company procuring the entire session. Seats for the earlier dates are still available!  In July 15-16 the course moves back to North America with a session in Washington, DC. Book soon to get your spot on one of the two available dates and locations. For course details have a look at the Auckland and DC course brochures.

Our Auckland sessions are being offered in partnership with Cornwall Strategic. We're looking forward to hosting two sessions together with Steve McCrone of Cornwall Strategic in June.

In Washington, DC, July 15-16 we will have a third guest instructor, Liviu Nedelescu.  Liviu is a complexity practitioner working in the area next generation air transportation systems. Also joining us at the DC training session will be safety expert, Dick Knowles. The learning in session and during side conversations at the DC course are primed to be highly illuminating.

We're looking forward to seeing those who can join us in Auckland or Washington, DC in June and July!