What we often see in a crisis is a lack of sufficient cognitive, political, and experiential diversity in assessing the implications of the crisis, which can undermine our ability to make good decisions. For example, there is often a bias towards well-polished analysis that, by its nature, can only ensue after something has happened. This polished analysis drowns out outliers in the hope of finding significance. On the other hand, this approach can be used to monitor the ebb and flow of data in real-time, outliers are seen as potential signals to explore rather than inconvenient data points to remove, and the raw, unprocessed, and disintermediated data is kept in its original form for as long as possible in order to hold on to its meaning (UNDP’s Regional Innovation Center is diving into capturing exactly this type of data with partners from Governments in Asia Pacific). This framework offers a coherent mechanism to ‘entangle’ stories from different sources (policy makers, citizens) and identify seeds of novel practices and learning as they happen.

Dave Snowden (the Cynefin Centre) and Millie Begovic (UNDP)