I’m getting increasingly excited about the work I am doing on constraints. I first posted on this with an initial taxonomy back in September. Since then I have been working the ideas into a series of keynote speeches and more recently workshop exercises. One of the reasons this is important is that we can manage […]
I don’t know how familiar readers are with Dali’s 1943 painting Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man. Dali was living in the US at the time and the symbolism is fairly obvious: the old powers of Europe point their children to the emerging new man emerging from a new world power, Africa […]
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about constraints in the context of complexity in general and cynefin more specifically. I’ve long used a constraint based definition to understand the differences between order, complexity and chaos. I got the original idea from Alicia Juarrero and subsequently developed it into Cynefin itself. […]
Cynefin has always gone through mutations over time, sometimes the changes are visually significant, sometimes linguistically. One of the things which has taxed me over the years is to find ways to describe how things move between domains. For some years we used the tetrahedron models that were one of Cynthia’s contributions when we were […]
One runway was out at Bogota when we flew in late last night so we had to circle for 45 minutes before landing. The captain helpfully told us we had enough fuel which was slightly worrying as I would not have thought it was something on which we would need reassurance! Either way entry was […]
The power went out this morning in Lockeridge and the surrounding areas. The some what cryptic Southern Electric answering service hinted at an explosion in a power line and made no early promise if a resolution. Now we are a small village so my wife went across the road to friends who are both […]
I withdrew from my last remaining listserv this morning. I used to be active in several but generally I found them problematic. They varied between over-curation by their founders or unconstrained free for all. In the former case the founders in effect had a view, or position to which dissent was discouraged to the point […]
Chris Bellavita of the Navy Post Graduate School over in Monterrey has authored a few articles using Cynefin including this useful one on homeland security. He may be maybe better known to readers as the author of the Socrates and the Children's Party which his students converted into a great little video. A couple of […]
At LSSC11 I used the constraint based definition of different system types: Ordered, highly constrained; Chaotic, no constraints; Complex, partial constraints, coevolution of constraint with agent behaviour. In social systems this is generally the easiest way to get people to understand. It also should, but does not always, get people into a position where they […]
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