── ── Cognitive bias

Cynefin

Cynefin (pronounced "kuh-NEV-in"; Welsh for "habitat") is a sense-making framework by Dave Snowden (IBM, 1999). Its claim: the right decision approach depends on which of five domains the situation falls into — Clear (obvious cause-effect, use SOP), Complicated (knowable with expertise, use analysis), Complex (emergent, probe first), Chaotic (absent cause-effect, act first), Confused (unknown domain, decompose first). The most common…

How it works

Step 1 — Describe: Decision/situation: · Current approach: · What worked/not: · Stakeholders:

When to use it

• 'our best practices keep failing', 'experts disagree on the right answer', 'the old playbook isn't working', 'we're in crisis and don't know what to do first', 'best practice doesn't apply here', 'we need a different approach'

Worked example

Snowden at IBM (1999) and the HBR Synthesis (2007)

Dave Snowden developed the Cynefin framework while leading the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity at IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management (1999-2004). The framework emerged from Snowden's work on knowledge management in complex organizations and his observation that classical management techniques — strategy frameworks, planning methodologies, KPI systems — kept failing when applied to certain kinds of problems. Snowden's diagnosis: those techniques were designed for Complicated problems (knowable cause-effect, expert analysis) and were being misapplied to Complex problems (emergent cause-effect, requires probing).