a complex cup
I recently had the good fortune to deliver a talk at a great sports performance seminar in Boston about my journey into complexity and used Dave Snowden’s cynefin framework as a way of sharing with people the changes in my thinking over the years in high performance sport and the systems that shaped them. Following the seminar I was contacted by a participant to ask for some clarification so thought I’d share the response more widely as it may be helpful to others.
“Although I presented my journey as moving from simple to complicated to complex, with some occasional chaos thrown in, Snowden’s framework itself is not a linear model or for that matter a categorisation model. He describes his model as a sense-making framework that helps you to perceive what’s happening in a given situation and then act accordingly. For example when I make my morning coffee the following may happen:
- I want a milky coffee so I make the decision to add milk to my brew as it always makes my coffee milky. This decision is self evident and based on SIMPLE sense-making.
- I like a well brewed coffee so I make the decision to brew 14g of coffee in a 2oz shot over about 23s at 94C and 9bar. This decision is informed by analytical reasoning and expert guidance and as such is based on COMPLICATED sense-making.
- I’m a curious kind of guy so I wonder how each bean in my grind might influence the flavour profile of my coffee but I have no means of extracting the grinds of a single bean from the resultant coffee puck so decide it’s okay not to know. This decision is informed by the random nature of the situation and as such is based on CHAOTIC sense-making.
- most of all I like a flavoursome coffee so right now I’ve opted for freshly ground Yirgacheffe beans, harvested by a farmer on the Ethiopian high plains where coffee originated and prepared by an artisanal roaster. This decision is informed by a vast array of temporal and situational factors that dynamically interact to influence the emergence of patterns of behaviour that are inherently uncertain and as such is based on COMPLEX sense-making.
- and so to borrow form the late, great Dr Martin Luther King — before I leave for work in the morning I’m beholden to all forms of sense-making.
A more articulate description of the cynefin framework from Dave Snowden himself can be found here:
Or a more fun version here:
All that said another thing Snowden talks about is the propensity for people to have a default sense-making view. This is what I was referring to in my talk as I believe that lots of people, as I myself did, travel form simple to increasingly complicated sense-making as they journey through their careers but may have the good fortune to come to see the world as complex if the opportunity presents itself.”
At myfastestmile we believe we need a good deal many more such opportunities for a great deal more people so have set our stall out to share widely the benefits of taking a complex view of the process of helping people be their best.
