Change Isn't COMPLICATED... It's COMPLEX

Why adaptive methods and resilient approaches work well in complex change environments.

December 07, 2017

Organizations need more than a set of recipes and so called ‘best practices’ to affect change and fundamentally transform their culture. The Cynefin Framework is a transformational concept that uses a situational approach to ensure effective work, decision making, and management in environments with various degrees of uncertainty and strategic foresight. While many change agents readily embrace adaptive approaches, Cynefin explains why adaptive methods and resilient approaches work well in complex, uncertain environments. The Cynefin Framework helps leaders and change agents to effectively tailor methods and practices for different situations. Methods and practices based on complexity theory can help organizations harness change and turn complex situations into a competitive advantage for employees, customers, and the business. 

Outline:

• Why change is complex

• Overview of the Cynefin Framework

• Characterizing change across different Cynefin domains

• Explain why many aspects of change are complex not complicated

• Heuristics for working with complex change (e.g. manage in present, small bets, nudges, simple rules, disintermediation, distributed cognition)

Agile In Context

How to Improve Agile Development Using the Cynefin Framework

November 17, 2017

Have you ever wondered why some Agile or Lean concepts work well in one context and not so well in other contexts? With so many techniques, methods, and practices available… how do you decide which ones fit with the situation at hand? Agile and Lean techniques, methods, and practices are successful primarily because they are effective heuristics. Heuristics are anything that provide a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem. All heuristics work by exploiting the structure of an environment, so heuristics work well in some environments and less well (or not at all) in others. We need to understand why and where our methods and practices work – and where they don’t – in order to adopt, tailor, use, and improve them. Cynefin is a sense-making framework that helps people understand their context or situation in order to take appropriate action. The Cynefin framework can be used to select heuristics appropriate for the environment (e.g. use Scrum here, and Kanban there) rather than defaulting to a single, recipe-based approach for all situations. Understanding Agile and Lean methods in context increases the chances for successful adoptions and highlights areas where new methods need to be developed or re-purposed from other disciplines.