Glossary

The words of complexity work, from affordance to emergence: what we mean when we use them, in plain language.

A

Act – sense – respond Approach: How to act in the chaotic domain: act first to establish some stability, then see where that leaves you and respond to move the situation somewhere manageable.
Affordance Concept: What an environment makes possible for someone — the actions a tool, a room, a rule or a relationship invites or allows, whether anyone designed it to or not.
Agent Concept: Anything in a system that acts and reacts: a person, a team, a department, a piece of software, a rule.
Anthro-complexity Concept: Complexity science applied to human systems, drawing on the natural sciences, anthropology and cognitive science — the field in which Dave Snowden's work, including Cynefin, sits.

B

Best practice Practice: The one right way of doing something, codified and repeated. Only valid in the clear domain, where cause and effect are obvious and stable.

C

Chaotic Cynefin domain: The Cynefin domain in which agents follow no coherent pattern and established patterns have broken down; the first job is to act and stabilise.
Clear Cynefin domain: The Cynefin domain in which cause and effect are obvious to anyone: rules and procedures work, scale and make things predictable.
Coherence Concept: The quality of an explanation or action that makes sense given what we know, even though it cannot be proven in advance.
Complex Cynefin domain: The Cynefin domain in which many agents interact and cause and effect can only be understood in hindsight; the way forward emerges from experiments.
Complex adaptive system Concept: A system of many agents that interact and adapt to each other, so that the system as a whole keeps changing in ways no single agent controls.
Complexity Concept: The property of a system in which many interacting agents produce behaviour that cannot be predicted from the parts, only understood in hindsight.
Complicated Cynefin domain: The Cynefin domain of problems that have a knowable answer, which experts can find through analysis with a predictable effort of time and money.
Confused Cynefin domain: The centre of the Cynefin framework: not knowing which domain you are in, and so defaulting to the methods you know best.
Constraint Concept: Anything that shapes what can happen in a system — rules, habits, physical layout, incentives, relationships. Constraints do not only restrict; they also make things possible.
Constructor Concept: Something that reliably changes how a system behaves without itself being changed by doing so — like a catalyst, a gate, a stage or a ritual.
Cynefin framework Concept: A sense-making framework by Dave Snowden that helps decide how to act by first asking what kind of system you are in: clear, complicated, complex, chaotic or confused.

D

Domain Concept: One of the five kinds of situation the Cynefin framework distinguishes, each with its own relationship between cause and effect and its own way of acting.

E

Emergence Concept: Patterns and properties of a whole that arise from the interactions of its parts and cannot be found in, or predicted from, any part alone.
Emergent practice Practice: Ways of working that arise from experimentation and evolve with the situation rather than being specified in advance. The practice of the complex domain.
Enabling constraint Concept: A loose constraint that allows a system to hold together and develop without fixing what happens — the typical constraint of complex systems.
Exaptation Concept: The repurposing of a trait: something that evolved or was built for one purpose turns out to serve another.

G

Good practice Practice: Several valid ways of solving a problem, chosen between by expertise. The practice of the complicated domain.
Governing constraint Concept: A constraint that sets clear limits within which agents act, like a law, a process or a contract. Typical of ordered systems.

L

Liminality Concept: A temporary, in-between state in which old structures have been loosened on purpose so that new connections and patterns can form.

N

Novel practice Practice: Something new, invented on the spot because nothing established applies. The practice of the chaotic domain.

O

Order Concept: The state of systems in which cause and effect are stable and knowable, either obviously (clear) or through analysis and expertise (complicated).

P

Pattern Concept: A recurring way in which a system behaves — habits, routines, conventions — that agents follow without necessarily being aware of them.
Predictability Concept: How far the future behaviour of a system can be known in advance — high in clear systems, achievable with effort in complicated ones, and only partial and short-term in complex ones.
Probe – sense – respond Approach: How to act in the complex domain: try small safe-to-fail experiments, watch how the system responds, then amplify what works and dampen what does not.

S

Safe-to-fail experiment Practice: A small intervention in a complex system that is designed so that if it fails, the damage is contained — run in parallel with others to learn how the system responds.
Sense – analyse – respond Approach: How to act in the complicated domain: gather the facts, have experts analyse them, then choose one of the good options.
Sense – categorise – respond Approach: How to act in the clear domain: see what is happening, recognise which established category it belongs to, and apply the matching rule.
SenseMaker Practice: A narrative research method and software from The Cynefin Company: people share short stories from their experience and interpret them themselves, so patterns can be seen across hundreds or thousands of them.