Member-only story
Problems with Cynefin
The Cynefin framework is a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making. Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains” — obvious or clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and confusion — that help managers identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people’s behaviour. The green areas are a transition between domains. The grey area in the middle is a state of confusion. The clear domain is rigid and can collapse into chaos with sudden change.
Traditional management methods work well in the Obvious domain, works partially in the Complicated domain and fail in the Complex and Chaotic domains. Product and software development is Complex and Complicated, which means that traditional management methods don’t work here. Scrum and Agile are a much better way to build software than traditional methods because they deal much more effectively with uncertainty and change.
But there is a problem with the Cynefin model. Cynefin says that if you are in a chaotic situation, such as an ambulance officer attending a car accident, you should stabilize the patient and work with expert surgeons to understand and solve the underlying problem. But this isn’t an example of a chaotic system. In complexity science, a chaotic system is a rapidly changing system like weather or water flow governed by underlying systems sensitive to initial conditions. The…
