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

Prioritization, so much fun

“We really need to do this!” “This is super important!” “Why haven't this been completed yet?” The life of a team in an organization is not always a walk in the park. In a complex world several things need to be solved at the same time and the value is often not possible to predict beforehand. The person with the immediate need will of course know, but from his/her perspective only and that will not help the team.

So, what to do?

You need intensive communication between team and stakeholders in order to get a shared view, acceptance and understanding on priority.

Easy right?

Well, maybe not so easy. Communication is central in agile but even if you put your full energy into this it will still only work up to a point, sometimes even the best communication turns into a too high cost for the team. If you spend all time discussing prioritization and doing refinement in order to understand the cost of multiple competing needs the team will have too little time to realize the value and then this is waste. At this point the team will probably start to talk about kanban. They feel that everything is in a stand stil and want to get things done, let’s get a flow going. This could be a good enough, you will start to get things flowing through and yes a lot of the things will be the "loudest”-requirements but some of the actual value deliveries will slip through.

But if you really want to fix the problem you must deal with something much harder, dependencies.. If the team is not able to realize value more or less by themselves and instead has high dependencies to other teams, managers or architects, processes you name it you will start to build a prioritization chaos.

Dependencies - be humble

In any type of development, or any form of complex systems, you will always have dependencies to others. Dependencies will be in the whole range, from the obvious to those that you only know when they hit you in the face. This is also the case for others that might have dependencies to you, so be humble and helpful when a dependency has been identified and try your best to help.