THE CYNEFIN FRAMEWORK and the SOLIPSISTS

by Javier Livas

I bought it with one click on Amazon. Boy does that fill good. Easy, practical, simple. Finding and buying a book used to be a hassle some 30 years ago. Now, I started reading CYNEFIN quite easily delivered through Kindle to my i-Pad. Getting a book used to be a high variety problem, and it was solved by Jeff Bezos with a computer and an incipient internet connection. That is a very good way to use computers then and still is now. A devious use is spying on people’s habits and selling the information.

After his conference in Monterrey, in May 1990, Stafford Beer sent a bunch of copies of his books “The Brain of the Firm” and “The Heart of Enterprise” in order to get the word out to some of those that had attended his conference, The Intelligent Organization (Youtube). Still, the world did not take notice of the importance of that conference where at the very start he identified “the Cybernetic Paradigm” as another very different way of acquiring dependable knowledge, in contrast with traditional science’s Newtonian Paradigm. “We are at least 30 years ahead of our time,” Stafford used to say. He could have started the book selling business through the internet easily, since he knew what computers were good at. But he was not interested in making money, but rather improving democracy —as in his Team Syntegrity method— and changing management and governance, by means of the Viable System Model. After all those years, he was still noticeably frustrated about the tragic fate of the Cybersyn Project in Chile, in September 11, 1973.

The book “Cynefin, Weaving Sense-making into the Fabric of our World”, arrives to its readers a little less than 30 years after Monterrey, and about 50 years after Chile. It describes The Cynefin Framework, and was edited by the followers and collaborators of Dave Snowden, a welshman thinker and doer. He pieced it together after 21 years of adjustments and arduous testing. Think of the Windows logo, with four main areas. These house Chaos, Simple, Complicated and Complex systems. It has some other features that I will not mention for now. The point is that Snowden created a sense-making framework. You could call it a special map of the systems that run the world. You have Chaos that might generate order in its border, as preached by the Santa Fe Institute since the mid-nineteen eighties. And then you have the two right side quadrants: with Simple systems on the bottom and Complicated Systems on the top. These two types of systems are embraced, according to Stafford Beer, by the Newtonian Paradigm way of doing science: simple or complicated cause and effect, with the complicated full of man-made rules and recipes. 

I have written about Stafford Beer’s and Russell Ackoff’s amiable rivalry. Russell was a systems man, and a precursor in systems thinking, together with C. West Churchman, both of which I had the honor of meeting. Stafford was a cybernetician, and became a dear friend and tutor of mine. It is not the labels which distinguished Stafford from Russ, but the attitude. “People want recipes,” said Russ, “we do the thinking.” Stafford would not budge. “No”, he said, “a manager’s job is dealing with complexity. It requires a different language, the language of cybernetics”. 

It is pretty clear now, that with the appearance of The Cynefin Framework’s book, Dave Snowden has given ammunition to both Russell Ackoff and to Stafford Beer. There is no denying that most managers like and enjoy being fed the alphabet letter soup in the mouth with a silver spoon. They love of talking with flair about how they invest and buy themselves TQC, TQM, BPM, ERP’s, SAP, Six-Sigma, and BSC (Balanced Score Card.) After all, they say they are paid to make more money, not to think about the consequences of their products, their marketing, or the location of their production facilities. So in a sense, Snowden proves Russel right: managers do not want to think on their own. On the other hand, Snowden proves Stafford correct, too. In spite of the alphabet soup, once prosperous corporations are dying faster and faster. They turn out not to be viable in the long run.

The Cynefin book makes the argument that the Complexity quadrant houses complex systems, such as huge man-made organizations. Think of large corporations, international conglomerates and nation-states. Most of all, the Complexity quadrant houses all living things and systems of systems, such as the world ecology. The important “discovery” however, is the proof beyond any reasonable doubt that complex systems require a very different approach than complicated systems. Large corporations, and nation-states, I might add, cannot be described in full. All the time in the life universe is insufficient to calculate the number of different states of a highly complex system. By the way, this is how Stafford begins his book The Heart of Enterprise, published in 1979. Complexity is the stuff of management, is one of his favorite phrases.

Although in some of his early books Stafford said that human organization were living things, he later changed and chose to call them viable, a more precise and technical term. Corporations are viable systems, capable of an independent existence (in the eyes of the law at least, and us lawyers will attest to that). They are not alive in the sense that they have some mechanical or physical parts, such as cars and factories. But, says Stafford, they are underwritten by the same cybernetic principles and laws as are the living systems. Snowden and his crew seem to agree. The sense-making software they developed would make Stafford proud. And happier still, is the fact that the Cynefin framework works in helping many managers —but perhaps not the totally irredeemable solipsists— to understand that corporations are complex systems and have to be approached as such. You have to run experiments with your own company. Little tests, will do, say the Cynefin adherents. 

Cynefin is not a fad. It is here to stay. Cybernetics won’t go away and cannot be swept away either. Stafford went to the heart of the problem, the manager’s heart to no avail, but he has been proven correct now. The Cynefin Framework is a stone bridge for those that never used the swinging rope that Stafford devised to almost fly himself like Tarzan into the dense jungle of the Cybernetic Paradigm. Nonetheless, with the help of the Cynefin Framework and its sense-making methods, top management will eventually migrate to management cybernetics, which is the inevitable and proper language to deal with complexity. Managers may keep their alphabet soup solutions while they work, but they must be forewarned that complexity is also the land of paradox, vortices, attractors, butterfly effects, chaos, and… surprise.

It is clear that at least some of Snowden’s followers say that the Complex quadrant is populated by Complex Adaptive Systems. Let’s agree to that. Then so, a special case of complex adaptive systems that produce a very different type of system are viable systems, that acquire a distinctive recursive structure, and its parts share an identity which allows them to be autonomous but yet cohesive. There are many examples of success using the Viable System Model to diagnose the many type of pathologies that affect large business corporations. If Stafford’s elevated English in Brain and Heart are hard to decipher, then read the Fractal Organization by Patrick Hoverstadt for a clear enumeration of the pathologies. Or Angela Espinosa and Jon Walker’s book on A Complexity Approach to Sustainability using the VSM. I really think that Snowden’s work of more than two decades will lead to these readings. I have tried to make the VSM simpler to explain and easier to understand, and more familiar to the average manager by translating it to U7 (universal seven systemic functions) Governance and Management. Dozens of Youtube videos explain all these topics in different ways. I even produced my movie “Kubernetes”, to make cybernetics as entertaining as possible. They all sit there in some server memory, waiting.

The latest version of the Cynefin framework mixes, types of systems with the mental state of the managers. Somebody convinced Snowden of switching from “simple” systems to “clear”. Everybody nows what a simple system is, but at least to me “clear” refers to the state of mind of the observer, not a type of system. As you can see, confusion and chaos have a way of creeping in when you least expect them.

As for the solipsists, those are the managers who think that just because they do not know about something they say it does not exist. They cannot think for themselves, so they wait for the very few innovators to popularize a recipe or a method and convert it into one more management fad. The Cynefin Framework is going to make it harder for them to ignore the inevitable. Cybernetics is present now in the form of a ‘scientific’ paradigm where circular causality reigns free. It stands tall on the left side of the Cynefin Framework, where you find all types of complex systems, including self-organizing systems, viable systems, governments, living systems; and chaos is your next door neighbor.

The Cynefin framework is just the beginning of a huge explosion for cybernetic management knowledge. You can do a lot with the sense-making networks devised by Snowden, but I challenge anyone to get to the thick of things about complexity without using Ashby’s requisite variety or without the use of a recursive structure. How can you explain a marketing campaign without the idea of information amplifiers and filters? How can you deal with the world in general without knowing the basic variety equation that is indispensable to design systems without hurting the environment or cancelling important personal freedoms. 

In one of his last papers, Stafford wrote about The Culpabliss Error. Basically a criticism of managers’ blindness to systems and what that leads to. It behoves me to observe how people have reacted to a world wide pandemic without stoping to think that socialism and authoritarianism go hand in hand; and it also explains why the virus was irresponsibly unleashed on the rest of the world. We are full of sick organizations, and it won’t get any better when the fix by socialist leaning politicians is to steal an election and then start retaliating against changes that demand some civic responsibility in order to make elections truly and verifiably transparent.

So, for all the above reasons, let’s welcome the Cynefin book and congratulate Dave Snowden for making such an important contribution to the cybernetics culture. With the world at risk, we needed that urgently.

So, for all the above reasons, let’s welcome the Cynefin book and congratulate Dave Snowden for making such an important contribution to the cybernetics culture. With the world at risk, we needed that urgently.