If you only had a hammer

Most leadership teams I have worked with tend to have one preferred way of responding to a problem when it arrives on their desk. Some have a process they apply to anything that comes through the door; others have a senior expert who diagnoses what is going on before any response is chosen; a third group has an instinct to act first and analyse the situation later, on the assumption that doing something is better than standing still; and a fourth group prefers to gather data and look for patterns before committing to any particular course of action. Each of these approaches is the right move in some situations and the wrong move in others, and the practical challenge that keeps coming up is that we tend to apply our preferred response everywhere, more or less regardless of whether it actually fits the problem in front of us.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework is the cleanest map I have come across over the years of when each kind of response is actually appropriate, and I have used it for some time now alongside the Conscious Collaboration framework that I originally developed during the Sensandu work. The two frameworks complement each other rather neatly: Cynefin tells you what kind of problem you are actually looking at, while Conscious Collaboration tells you how to organise the team that needs to respond to it.

The five zones

Complex (Unknown Unknowns)

Problems with many interacting facets that cannot really be understood by adding more time or further analysis, because more analysis would simply move the problem into the complicated category rather than resolve it. The relationship between cause and effect in this zone can only be seen in hindsight, after the response has already played out. The appropriate response pattern is essentially Probe → Sense → Respond: run small, safe-to-fail experiments, observe what happens, and adjust. This is the home territory of innovation, of strategy under genuine uncertainty, and of most genuinely novel problems that a business is likely to encounter.

Complicated (Known Unknowns)

Problems in which the relationship between cause and effect does require analysis, investigation and the application of expert knowledge, but in which that knowledge can in principle be brought to bear. The appropriate response pattern is Sense → Analyse → Respond, applying one of several known good practices to the situation. The choice between practices is essentially what makes the problem complicated rather than obvious.

Chaotic (Cause and Effect Unclear)

Responses to unexpected events, in which cause and effect are not visible and there is genuinely no time to analyse what is happening. The appropriate response pattern is Act → Sense → Respond: fix the problem first, then look more closely at it afterwards once the immediate pressure has eased. Novel practices often emerge in this zone under pressure and tend to stick around, and the drift back to relative stability is usually rapid if the initial response actually worked.

Obvious (Known Knowns)

Problems in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to anyone in the room. The appropriate response pattern is Sense → Categorise → Respond: a process-based response drawing on known best practice. The risk in this zone is that if a team ends up spending too much of its time here, its ability to operate effectively in any other zone gradually atrophies, and everything starts to look process-shaped. Worse, if a problem in this zone turns out not to be fixable with a known process, teams can fall straight through into the chaotic zone with reliably bad results.

Disorder (the centre)

The state of not yet knowing which of the four other zones a problem actually belongs in. Unless the answer is obviously obvious in advance, every decision in principle starts here. The work of disorder is to analyse which parts of the issue belong to which zone, and then to address each part with the response that is appropriate to it rather than to the situation as a whole.

The clockwise drift between zones

As knowledge about a particular kind of problem increases over time, problems tend to drift clockwise around the framework, moving from chaotic, through complex, through complicated, and eventually into the simple zone where they become routine. A novel response stabilises into expert analysis, which in turn stabilises into known process; the drift itself is healthy and reflects organisational learning. The structural problem is the implicit assumption that all problems will eventually settle in the simple zone, which becomes increasingly dangerous as the rate of external change accelerates around the business.

With the Fourth Industrial Revolution we are, on the whole, spending considerably more of our time in the complex zone than we used to. Connectivity, distributed knowledge and shorter product cycles between them produce genuinely novel problems faster than experts can codify them into known practice, and a business whose default response is still tuned for the simple or complicated zones, processes, expert analysis, best practice, ends up using a hammer on problems that simply do not have any nails.

How Cynefin fits with Conscious Collaboration

Creative and collaborative work sits almost entirely in the complex, complicated and chaotic zones of the framework, which is precisely the operating territory that the Sensandu and Conscious Collaboration work was originally built to address.

The Sensandu process snippets, Scan, Connect, Prioritise and Respond, are themselves designed to be Cynefin-aware, and the most interesting of the four for our purposes here is the Prioritise step. Does this particular threat or opportunity actually matter to the business, and if so, what kind of problem is it really? Those are the questions that Cynefin is best at answering, and once a team knows which zone they are in, they can choose the appropriate mining response, Probe Mine for complex problems, Sense Mine for complicated ones, and Options Mine for situations that are essentially obvious or chaotic in nature.

Real strategic situations are, of course, almost always a mix of these zones rather than a clean fit to any single one. A single threat or opportunity will have a complex part, a complicated part, and possibly an obvious part, all running in parallel. The reason for explicitly starting from disorder rather than from any particular zone is precisely to disaggregate the situation into its component parts before responding, rather than forcing the whole thing into a single bucket and treating it uniformly.

Why this matters for leadership teams

Three things tend to change in noticeable ways when a leadership team adopts Cynefin as a shared working language.

The first is that the team stops arguing about what to do and starts arguing about what kind of problem they are actually looking at. That second argument turns out to be considerably more productive, because it surfaces the assumptions that were hiding underneath the apparent disagreement on action. Two people who agree on a course of action for completely different reasons are, in my experience, an accident waiting to happen, and Cynefin tends to bring that disagreement out into the open early enough to be useful.

The second is that the leader can deliberately route different kinds of problem to different parts of the organisation. Complex problems can go to small autonomous teams with explicit permission to run experiments rather than commit to a single answer. Complicated problems can go to expert groups with the time and budget to do the analysis properly. Obvious problems can go straight into existing process. And chaotic problems are handled at the top of the organisation, fast, with the analysis arriving afterwards once the immediate crisis has passed.

The third is that the leader can spot what is probably the most common organisational pathology I see in technology businesses: the habit of treating genuinely complex problems as if they were merely complicated ones. The instinct in this situation is to commission another study, hire another consultant, or build another model, and in a genuinely complex domain that approach just produces a more elaborate hammer rather than a better answer.

How I personally use it

I tend to use Cynefin as a quiet diagnostic on a more or less weekly basis. Before a strategy session, the question I ask myself is which parts of this are genuinely complex and which parts are merely complicated. Before commissioning a piece of work from someone, the question is whether I am asking for analysis in a situation where I should be funding an experiment instead. When a team appears to be stuck on something, the question is whether they are in the wrong zone, applying the wrong kind of response to the problem in front of them.

It is a relatively small framework, all considered, and a rather useful one. Combined with the structured collaboration disciplines, the process snippets, the shared mindset, the supporting technology, it gives a team a real chance of responding effectively to the world they actually live in, rather than the world they might prefer to live in.

Related: Conscious Collaboration: an action framework for a complex world · all writing

Cynefin™ is Dave Snowden’s framework. This piece is about how I apply it.