Guide · Cynefin
Getting started with Cynefin
How do you start with Cynefin? Not with a diagram, but with your own material. Here is how you can go about it yourself, and where it usually goes wrong.
The honest version
You can start without an outside facilitator. It isn’t easy. The exercise depends on someone guiding the groups through disagreement and uncertainty without taking sides. That is hard when you are in the middle of the matter yourself, and the Cynefin wiki expects the facilitator to know Cynefin well.
If you want to try it yourself anyway, these three steps help.
Three steps
Gather material
Collect a data set of real situations or short stories from your own environment: decisions, projects, problems, risks, one per card. The wiki gives about 15 to 25 cards as the usual amount.
Collect the material beforehand, not during the workshop. For practice, the wiki also has ready-made sample data sets.
Run a three-points exercise
The wiki calls the exercise 3-Points (Three Points Contextualisation) and describes it in detail. Here is just the basic idea.
Several small groups work separately on the same material. Each group first places three cards as anchors at three points of its space: a situation with a right answer; one whose right answer only shows in hindsight; and one where you must act at once, with no time for analysis. Then the groups place all the other cards in relation to these.
Only then do they draw boundaries. The domains emerge from the material rather than being set in advance. Finally, the groups compare their results: what is the same, what is different, what is surprising?
Start with safe-to-fail experiments
For the situations that land in the complex domain, there is no right answer to work out in advance. Instead, plan several small safe-to-fail experiments in parallel, each designed so that the damage stays small if it fails.
Decide beforehand how you will tell whether an experiment works. Amplify what works; stop what doesn’t.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Arguing about domains instead of placing situations. The question is not what “complex” means, but where this one situation sits in relation to the others.
- Starting with the domains. If you draw the boxes first and then sort into them, you mostly confirm what you already thought. The boundaries come last.
- Only one group. Only comparing several groups shows where you agree and where you don’t. Keep the groups apart so they don’t influence each other.
- The facilitator joins in. Whoever facilitates and also has a view on the matter steers the group, often without noticing.
- Stopping at the picture. The finished map is not a result yet. It only pays off once experiments or decisions follow from it.
Want support?
If you would rather not facilitate the exercise yourself, or already know you need more than a map: with Affordance Mapping we look together at what your organisation actually makes possible, and what of it could be put to new use.
How else we work with Cynefin is on Cynefin in practice.
Cynefin® is a registered trademark of Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd, trading as The Cynefin Company. Exaptation has no partnership, licence or accreditation with The Cynefin Company.