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

1. Making Sense of Complexity with Cynefin
Laz Allen

2. Answers and Questions
• What is it?
• Why should you care?
• How it can be applied to Engineering and Product Ownership

5. iceberg

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

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

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.

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…

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

47. Any Questions?
• @lazallen on twitter
• I’ll upload the slides later