[OSList] Management and Organization

Thu Jul 24 03:15:55 PDT 2014

Chris,

Thank you for bringing in the Cynefin framework! After hearing about 
Snowden's framework at an agile software conference, it quickly spread 
through the Agile community. Agile is even referenced in the wikipedia 
article about Cynefin. I'd recommend that folks take a look at the 
article at least for the simple graphic that helps understand the model: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin

It's interesting that although Snowden's article was published in 2007 
in HBR, a good chunk of the useful ideas had been worked on by Brenda 
Zimmerman and others starting in 1998 after being inspired by the study 
of chaos theory.

Simple (or obvious) is like baking a cake. (Maybe things don't always go 
to plan, but following a simple recipe at sea level with good tools and 
ingredients will usually work).

Complicated is like sending a rocket to the moon. Yes, many moving parts 
in mission control. Many things can go wrong. But working the plan does 
most of the work.

Complex is like parenting a child. What you learn raising a child from 
birth to age six does not give the answers for the next six years, let 
alone for raising the next one.

Snowden also adds a Chaotic and Disorder domain, and interesting 
boundaries and relationships between the five domains. What's also 
interesting about Cynefin is that the focus is on our knowledge or 
understanding of a system - not really a description of the Universe or 
piece thereof.

It's a mistake to dismiss the utility of Cynefin as a lens simply by 
stating that the universe is self-organizing. If anything, this model's 
utility is mostly in showing how traditional management processes (i.e. 
command and control) are mostly inadequate for most issues especially in 
today's environment. Cynefin has been used a great deal to help promote 
agile practices in organizations, and surely can also be used to promote 
OST.

     Harold

On 7/22/14 12:57 PM, chris.corrigan at gmail.com wrote:
> I seek simplicity in trying to describe where and how Open Space does 
> it's magic.
>
> One of the ways I have had excellent success over the years in 
> describing this work is derived from David Snowden's work on the 
> Cynefin framework.
>
> The short story is this:
>
> We are faced all the time with problems that are basically knowable, 
> and problems that aren't.  Knowable problems mean that with the right 
> knowledge and expertise, they can be fixed.  A technical team can come 
> together and analyse the causes, work with what's available and craft 
> a solution.  Then they can get an implementation plan in place and go 
> ahead and do it.  These kinds of problems have a start line and a 
> finish line.  When you are done, you are done.  Building a bridge is 
> one of those kinds of problems.  You build it and there is no 
> tolerance for failure.  It needs to be failsafe.
>
> Open Space doesn't work well for those kinds of problems because the 
> solution is basically already known, or at least knowable.
>
> Then there are problems for which no know solution exists, and even if 
> you did get a solution, you can't really "solve" the problem because 
> the problem is due to a myriad of causes and is itself emergent. For 
> example, racism.  Look around and you will find very few people that 
> identify themselves as racists, but look at the stats for Canadian 
> society for example and you see that non-white people are trailing in 
> every indicator of societal success.  Essentially you are seeing the 
> results of a racist society but no racists anywhere.  This is an 
> emergent problem.  Racism itself is a self-organizing phenomenon, 
> notwithstanding the few people that actively engineer racist 
> environments.  Such a problem didn't really start anywhere and it 
> can't really end either.  What is needed is a way of addressing it, 
> moving the system away from the negative indicators and towards 
> something else.
>
> In other words, this is a complex problem.
>
> The way to solve complex problems is to create many "strange 
> attractors" around which the system can organize itself differently. 
>  Open Space nis the best method I know of for creating such strange 
> attractors, as they are born from the passion and responsibility of 
> those that want to create change, and they are amplified by people 
> coming together to work on these things.
>
> It's "post and host" rather than "command and control."
>
> And because you can't be sure if things are going to work out, you 
> have to adopt a particular mindset to your initiative: one that is 
> "safe to fail."  In other words, if it doesn't work, you stop doing 
> it.  If it does work, you do more of it.  And all the way along you 
> build in learning, so that the system can see how change is made and 
> be drawn towards those initiatives that are currently making a 
> difference.  Certainly this kind of problem solving is not useful for 
> building a bridge, as you cannot afford a failure there.  But for 
> problems with no known solutions, it is brilliant.
>
> Harrison has spent decades outlining this simplicity in even less 
> words than I have now and his writing and thinking is, and continues 
> to be far ahead of it's time and maybe a little under appreciated 
> because it is delivered in simple terms like "don't work so hard." 
>  But ultimately this is the best and most important advice for working 
> in complex systems.
>
> Open Space.  Do it.  Learn. Do it again. Don't work so hard.
>
> More than that really starts to build in the delusion that people can 
> possibly know what to do.  From that place solutions will be deluded. 
>  That they may work is pure luck.  Open Space offers us a disciplined 
> approach to addressing complexity in an ongoing way.  Don't be fooled 
> by its simplicity.
>
> Chris
>

-- 
Harold Shinsato
harold at shinsato.com <mailto:harold at shinsato.com>
http://shinsato.com
twitter: @hajush <http://twitter.com/hajush>
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