The Cynefin Framework

Thanks to Ruth Harvey, the new leader of the Iona Community, I’ve just discovered Dave Snowden and his work on the Cynefin Framework.

Dave is a former IBM scientist who founded Cognitive Edge. His framework is based on real world analysis of how people respond to complex situations. It’s a fascinating piece of work.

Here’s Dave’s explanation video from his website. Note that he now calls the bottom right quadrant “Clear”.

So it’s a tool for thinking about how and why we deal with situations by approaching decisions in certain ways.

Here’s another one from Youtube which has several (just search on Cynefin Framework).