St David’s 2025: 1/5 Chaos in Hexi form

St David’s Day celebrates the patron saint of Wales.  Of the four/five nations co-located on the British Isles, we are the only one with a native born saint.  St Patrick was captured by Irish raiders in Wales, and with the benefit of hindsight, their ancestors may regret that action.  St George was a Cappadocian Greek in the Pretorian Guard of the Emperor Diocletian, and St Andrew was one of the twelve apostles.  It is also the anniversary of my Mother’s Death, twenty-one years ago (ten days after my father), a month before life in IBM got too tricky. As a result of that, I retired early to set up Cognitive Edge, now the Cynefin Co.   I try to spend the day walking in the mountains to celebrate their lives, and this year was no exception.  I left home at 0430 in the morning to drive five hours to Langdale to continue my second full round of the Wainwrights, more fully described in the notes at the end of this post.

Also, in a tradition dating back to 2019, it is the day on which I provide an update on the various frameworks, acronyms, matrices, and such within the Cynefin pantheon every year.  I’ve summarised these below for those who want to follow them through.

This year, I want to return to the Cynefin framework and, more specifically, to the matrices used to elaborate on the nature of the different domains.  In 2013, this was a significant focus for me, and I moved through various variants of three-by-three matrices, which finally worked when I rotated them by 45º.   That all came together in what I call the coffee cup version of Cynefin, in which four domains wrap around a coffee mug with the top (or bottom or both) being what was then called disorder.    They were refined and stable in training for some time, but have fallen by the wayside in recent years.  I have had a to-do item to update them in the context of the aporetic (sic)  change to Cynefin for some time, and finalising the Cynefin Field guide (currently moving into proofreading and design) provided the trigger.   I won’t have a chance to teach them in a class before we move to publication, so I am offering them here for review,  questions and sanity checks (comment here on social media posts or DM me).   Crossing reading to the originals of the 2013 set would also be appreciated.  There will also be a discussion for premium network members in April, and they will be taught on the upcoming US Masterclass (Denver, 3-4 June 2025).

I didn’t want to keep the three-by-three matrices, and I needed to sort out the upper and lower aspects (into aporetic or confusion), hence the new form. Using the Hexi form allows for method substitution, so this may be another kit at some point.   Each Hexi set has two dimensions running diagonally.  Each overlaps with other domains (shown in grey).  As before, I have used two dimensions for each, but the format allows others to experiment with different perspectives.  Each is also designed for entry-level engagement – they can either elaborate on the overall Cynefin framework or lead to it.  Also, the general principle is that the aporetic domain is on top, and the confused, verging on catastrophic, is on the bottom.  In general, green means OK, red means get worried.   They may apply to an organisation, a company, you, an ecosystem or whatever.

Chaos Domain

My post from December last year on the chaos word is relevant here. 

In this version, I am contrasting the degree to which we can manage the imposition of constraints to gain or maintain control with the level of awareness of the decision-maker regarding the state of affairs.  How we can manage the situation comes from the Uncertainty Matrix and can be known, knowable or unknowable.   Awareness of what is being done (which does not involve authenticity or correctness, just intent) can be deliberate, something that we can prepare for as we foresee it as plausible or (and this is a scary bit) simply beyond our ken, or unimaginable.  I think that includes elephants in the room, such as climate change, where, for far too many people, the assumption is that a solution will be found, and for the moment, it should not be a priority.  These are not categories, by the way; they are more of a spectrum with category-like labels.

The situation is KNOWN.

The three options, all potentially beneficial, are:

• MANAGED INNOVATION is the deliberate relaxation of constraints to allow novelty to emerge, also known as taking a shallow dive into chaos. It should be a regular part of any organisation’s attempts to become more resilient, and the intention is to return the results to parallel safe-to-fail experiments in the complex domain.
• PLANNED RESPONSES are a key aspect of foresight, and techniques such as scenario planning, contingency planning, and the like are appropriate. Here, decision makers know something is plausible and are prepared to invest.
• The complexity of unexpected events, for example, a Black Swan, can, if we sense it early enough and are prepared to SEIZE THE DAY, be a significant opportunity for beneficial change, the shift to aporetic.  The issues here relate to a willingness by decision makers to imagine in advance what is now happening, and that requires some process of self-awareness and space for self-awareness, or descriptive self-awareness to use Cynefin language, rather than just being told by experts that they got it wrong—more on that in a future post.

The situation is KNOWABLE.

If it is knowable, then it is potentially something we can imagine or prepare for, and again, there are three options:

• The constraints are relaxed unintentionally or get out of hand, which requires a response capability to PULL BACK AND RETHINK as danger approaches. Issues here may include the inability of a senior decision maker to realise that their pet innovation programme is running amok, or a consultant overly enamoured with Schumpeterian disruption who is unwilling to realise they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 
• We needed to find a solution fast because we didn’t know what it would be in advance, but it was knowable (and I don’t mean with the benefit of hindsight). We are in the LAST CHANCE SALOON before this becomes a full-blown crisis, and the rapid imposition of constraints is key.   Remembering that imposing constraints here should be more like triggering an orbit than stopping something dead in its tracks.
• If the decision-makers were, or are, exhibiting wilful blindness, we need to urgently MANAGE THE CRISIS through decisive action. The fact that we have ended up here may be difficult. It is not infrequent for decision makers to end up here because they find it impossible to face up to reality, or more frequently, those around them are too afraid to tell them what is happening. By the way, we will be launching a new service around this soon, designed for outlier discovery in real time.

The situation was UNKNOWABLE.

S*** as they say happens, so this diagonal is potentially disastrous, and our three options are set out below, but we really shouldn’t be here, so that the politics will get nasty:

• We deliberately created chaos in the hope that something better would emerge, an act of desperation or plain ignorance in the hope of STUPIDITY REWARDED.  You should not enter chaos without some knowledge of how you could impose constraints to prevent catastrophic failure.  
• If you knew it was plausible but failed to prepare, then all you can do is RIDE THE FLOW and hope for calmer waters. Ironically, decisive action too early may make things worse.
• The worst has happened, unmanageable, inconceivable, and we need an EXIT STRATEGY.  This can be a form of rebirth, there is, as they say, nothing so valuable as a good crisis, or we may hang on too late and it’s death – hence the two yellow arrow options to aporetic and confusion.

Preparing for this is about creating resilience in your organisation, something covered in the EU Field Guide. It is (to trail a future paper) more about forethought than foresight. That includes human-mediated game environment anthro-simulation, one of our more neglected methods, but one of the best ways to prepare for the unimaginable and at scale.

Summary of St David’s Day posts

Please note that the link is to the first post in each series, and you may have to skip posts by other team members and me to read them all. Material from these posts and subsequent work can be found in the wiki.

2024:  Five posts summarising the various frameworks (I am going to update and correct that in the final post of this series), including  an essential post on the principles of intervention in a complex system

2023:  Two posts formalising Estuarine Mapping

2022:  Two posts on Cynein covering scale, focus and being simple but not simplistic

2021: three posts talked about how to build a layered introduction to Cynefin, its social construction and a list of common errors in talking about Cynefin

2020:  Four posts (it says five but I never made it beyond four) covering key changes in Cynefin (simple to clear and disorder to Aporetic/Confused), the aporetic turn and the idea of aporia, what we can manage in a complex system, 

2019: Five posts summarising the then-current state of Cynefin, including dynamics

The banner picture

The picture shows a view after the brief scramble up Pike o’Stickle, looking over to the Scafell range.   It was very cold, and snow was still visible on the tops.   I managed my first Wainwright round in 40 days, finishing it just after my 68th birthday, over 19 months, which isn’t bad.   That was loosely based on Marshall’s book (which looks out of print and I wish I’d had the GPS files available from this site at the time.  I’m pretty sure I could have made it in 37, possibly 38 days, but weather and time hit me.  This time, I am using the brilliant Peak Bagging Wainwrights, completing them all in a more balanced 45 days and hope to complete this year or at least before I hit 72.  After that, there is a 64-day option and the Outlying Fells to complete.  The Lakes are different from Eryri, where I grew up, but close to where I went to University.  The ancient Celtic kingdom of Cumbria is also known as Rheged.  The shepherds still use Welsh to count their sheep, a remnant of the Brythonic language in Wales, Brittany and Cornwall.  The place names are heavily influenced by the Vikings, so as someone whose DNA reveals 50% Welsh, 50% Viking, in origin, it is another home, a cynefin.

Today was route 14 in the Central Fells and seven Wainwrights in all.  Parking in the National Trust Car Park by the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, it was more or less straight up to Loft Crag before Pike o’Stickle, which is an awkward scramble but worth it, then, then boggy tracks to Harrison Stickle before walking the plateau to Pavey Ark, Thunacar Knott, high Raise and Sergent Man.   After that the painful bit – I have no cartilage under either knee cap and while strength and movement classes (an unfortunate abbreviation, and the occassional use of kinsinology tape keep me walking, steep descents take me a lot more time than most and bring back memories of a younger self that that was capable of a mixture of running and leaping to descend at speed.  After the descent, it was a short drive to the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, a real walker’s inn for two nights.  The plan is to complete the other two Langdale Valley routes, which start at the Inn,  before moving south to self-catering accommodation and four more routes.

I have five posts in this series, and I managed to walk on five out of nine days on this trip, so the banner picture will follow those days, dated to match and with the odd story and reflection as I go

By way of full disclosure, this series was written and posted in late April, not early March.