New Cynefin book - proud to be part of it

Yesterday a new book "Cynefin - weaving sense making into the fabric of our world" was released and I’m proud to say that my, Christopher Bramley’s and Rob England’s effort in trying to illustrate the Cynefin is part of the book. Personally I’m extra proud that my Vige trolls are part of the book, I hope that I have managed to illustrate the different “feelings and behavior’s" in the different domains and liminal and aporetic using the expressions in these little guys. We hope you liked the illustration Dave Snowden.

More info on the book..

Onboarding with a surprise

Most people in the agile community agrees that a fundamental concept is team autonomy*. But where is that degree of autonomy in regards of adding people to the team? This is a traditional HR responsibility and the recruitment process is often both time consuming and complex. To me the key word here is “complex”, thing that is complex needs more brains rather than pure specialist, or in other words multiple perspectives is better than one. Does that mean that everything should be done by the team then? No I don’t think so, this is a collaborative process, the knowledge from a person in HR gives a feeling of safety to the team, they provide important knowledge and experience to the process. It is the combination of perspectives and knowledges that gives the edge needed to navigate the recruitment. In the picture “Recruiting in VUCA in a nutshell” put together by Nils Hallén, Thomas Eklöf, Mia Kolmodin, Björn Sandberg, and Frida Mangen, and recently presented in the Swedish podcast Agile HR podden, you can find the statement “from specialist doing all recruiting to facilitator of the process.” and I think that gives a good input on how I view this, HR and Scrum Master/Agile coach can collaboratively, with their knowledge, facilitate the recruitment together with the team.

* LeSS about autonomous teams “The Team …. is “self-organizing” (self-managing), with a very high degree of autonomy and accountability.” - https://less.works/less/scrum/roles.html

* SAFe about autonomous teams “Provide Autonomy with Purpose, Mission, and Minimum Possible Constraints - Pink asserts that knowledge workers have a need for autonomy—the ability to self-direct and to manage their own lives. Providing autonomy, while harnessing it to the larger aim of the enterprise, is an important leadership responsibility [1]” - https://www.scaledagileframework.com/unlock-the-intrinsic-motivation-of-knowledge-workers/

Cynefin - Vige in high resolution

I have been overwhelmed with positive feedback for the illustration of #Cynefin in Vige context that I released last week. Several also asked if they could use the picture in their education and for other means and yes please do, anything that might help to spread the knowledge and understanding of Cynefin Im glad to help. So in order to give you some better material I have created a high resolution image of the picture. You can find it on this page - Free material

Cynefin - can Vige make sense in different domain?

Update 2021-11-13

Since I published this illustration more than one year ago I have had the pleasure of creating a new version of the illustration. This new version and the old one is available in high resolution for your use. You can find it in the free material.

Original text

I have been fascinated by the work of Dave Snowden and the Cynefin sense making framework for a long time and a few days ago I got the idea that it would be fun to illustrate the Cynefin framework using the Vige surrounding. In the picture I wanted to capture some of the more important behaviors in each domain and also the fact that the “burden” of structure/constraints that you put on while you move between the different domains increases. I got to work, after some trial and errors I remembered that I had seen a 3D version of Cynefin and with some research I found it. This version was very helpful in succeeding with my goal, as Rob England (the creator of the original 3D version) himself writes.

The vertical axis is “negentropy”: energy, order. It takes energy to make a system chaotic, it settles into complex. Dave Snowden himself made this improvement to the picture. He approved of this 3D view of Cynefin.

So, with the help from my colleagues at Squeed I got this my first version of the picture done. Thanks everyone!

By the way, if you have any suggestions on improving the illustration? Some thoughts that I have myself is to change the cliff to something man made (in this case I guess it is goblin/troll made) to better represent that it is built in some way and can be easily broken if not maintained.

Here you can find the blog post from Dave Snowden when he comments on the original 3D version from Rob England Cognitive Edge