Liminal Cynefin – image release

I decided it would be a good idea to make the image of Cynefin available if only to reduce the change of people drawing it as a two by two and adding a diamond to keep me happy—typical Saxon tendency, reducing Celtic curves to straight lines. I’ve made it available in PowerPoint so that Keynote users can pick it up – it was generated in Keynote. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, but better late than never. I’ll also aim to add more images later, all of them for black and white backgrounds.

I put some effort here into positioning the liminal domain, but I’ll amplify that in a subsequent post where I add in the dynamics along with bullet points for all the shared domain slides. One point I didn’t make in my last post on the subject was the advantage the liminal model gives those who find it challenging to grasp the transient nature of the Chaotic and Disordered domains, even those who don’t see a difference. With the liminal version, we now have the following:

1. There is a main chaotic domain, a crisis, the absence of effective constraint, and a liminal area where managed innovation and sense-making can occur.
2. A liminal area of the complex domain allows me to distinguish between iterative approaches (such as Scrum) and parallel safe-to-fail experiments and emergent catalysts in the complex domain.
3. A final resolution of the authentic and inauthentic aspects of disorder.

So, hopefully, this helps. I’ll wait to see if people pick up and use the images. If they are useful, I will add more over time.

By the way, the top image is a cynefin one, in the sense of being a place of my multiple belongings. It’s the western ridge from Cadair Idris, and yes, it’s me, one of my walks with companions. The next time I’m there will be on the 1st of March 2018, on what should be day 65 of my round and back through Wales walk. The final three days are mountain days, and the date chosen is significant, so I hope that Dylan Thomas’s designation of the mountain will not apply that day.