At Lean Agile Edinburgh's June meetup Laz gave a quick introduction to Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, covering the domains of the model and how they can be applied and acted on
6. Dave Snowden
• IBM director of Institute for Knowledge
Management up to 2004
• Founded the IBM Cynefin Centre for
Organisational Complexity
• Founded Cognitive Edge 2004
• Associate professor extraordinaire at
the University of Stellenbosch Business
School
• Honorary professor in the school of
psychology at Bangor University and
their Cynefin Centre for organisational
complexity
• Bio Cognative Edge
• Dave Snowden on Wikipedia
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8. Use
• Inception 1999 at IBM
• Singapore Government 2004 onwards
• Published in HBR 2007
• Been taught in US Military Officer Training
• Cognitive Edge has a large (but private) client
list including healthcare, military, counter
terrorism, other public and private sector. Oh
and Software Development.
• Recommended by Gartner 2012
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19. Cynefin (the word)
• It’s Welsh, with no direct English translation
• As a noun it is translated as habitat, as an adjective familiar, but dictionary
definitions fail to do it justice
• Poetic definition: It describes that relationship: the place of your birth and
of your upbringing, the environment in which you live and to which you are
naturally acclimatised.
• It links a community into its shared history – or histories – in a way that
paradoxically both limits the perception of that community while enabling
an instinctive and intuitive ability to adapt to conditions of profound
uncertainty.
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43. Key Takeaways
• We need to know where our work lies from both an engineering and
product perspective
• We need to adapt teams’ ways of working to align to the product
and engineering domains
• We need to be constantly vigilant for these positions changing and
anticipating the required change in approach
• And be aware of heading in the wrong direction in either
• There is much more to complexity theory and Cynefin for us to
benefit from; leadership, scaling, operations…
44.
45. Resources
• Snowden, David Humans are neither ants nor data processors (1:09
video) LASCot ’16
• Snowden, David J. and Mary E. Boone, A Leader’s Framework for
Decision Making, Harvard Business Review, November 2007
• Keogh ,Liz Capability Red: Requirements at Scale (:34 video) LAScot ‘14
• Neis, Pierre How Cynefin Model Improves Lean Implementation,
Slideshare Oct 21, 2012
• Gapanov, Maksim Cynefin sensemaking framework and usage examples,
Slideshare Feb 9, 2016
46. Resources
• Snowden, David Introduction to the Cynefin Framwork (:08 video) Cognitive
Edge Website, Oct 29, 2011
• Snowden, David It's Not Good Enough to be Right (1:02 video) LKCE12
• Snowden, David Keynote of XP 2012 (Part 1 (:38), Part 2 (:40)) May 2012
• Snowden, David Practice without sound theory will not scale (1:08 video
presentation)
• Kurtz, C.F., and D. J. Snowden, The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in
a Complex and Complicated World, IBM Systems Journal, Vol 42, No 3., 2003
• Cognitive Edge Blog on Cynefin
• Ballestrin, Kim. Applying Cynefin and Agile LAST Conference, July 27, 2012
(Deck and Video)
• Haight, Cameron. Leverage the Cynefin Framework to Improve IT Operations
and Decision Making, Gartner: 2012
• Perline, Joseph. On Understanding Software Agility— A Social Complexity Point
Of View, E:CO Issue Vol. 13 Nos. 1-2 2011