Since the time of Galileo, Decartes, and Newton the dominant worldview has been a reductionist perspective. A cause is expected to be knowable, and a solution predictable, stable, isolated and explainable by cause and effect, much like Netwon's natural laws. The dominant metaphors used in society and science ever since have been those of a 'machine'.

More than ever, we are starting to realise that the world is not that 'simple' and predictable, but emergent and ceaselessly creative. In addition, it turns out that the challenges we face are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Most of them are open-ended. Navigating and appreciating this complexity requires an upgrade in our sense making.

Cynefin

A way to help make sense of the world around us that I have found incredibly useful is by means of the Cynefin sense making framework, developed by Dave Snowden.

It offers five decision-making contexts (or "domains": clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder), that help to identify how to perceive situations and make sense of systems and people's behaviour. It's helpful to think of the domains as a slope, starting high in the bottom right and tapering counterclockwise around to the bottom left.

The world as a machine

The domains on the right side are "ordered" meaning that stuff there is largely knowable and predictable, and problems are solvable.

These Clear or Complicated domains are distinguished by the number of interactions going on, the more parts in the system the more Complicated it is and the level of expertise required to know what the answer to a problem should be. This way of looking at the world has dominated society and the sciences since the time of Newton and has brought much progress. However, in ignoring the remaining domains it is also limiting progress.

The world as a natural phenomena

The domains on the left side are "unordered" meaning that situations are uncertain and opaque, though they are recognisable through patterns. This is the world of Complexity and Chaos. These are distinguished by the way the system changes, self-organizes, and creates emergent phenomena. Complex systems, like ecosystems, exhibit emergence and self-organization. Chaos exhibits the lack of any meaningful constraints, a sense of randomness and crises.

Increasingly its evident that the environment, society, and the economy are intricately connected in incomprehensible ways. Seeing the world as more natural phenomenons where cause and effect is often hard to identify is gaining traction in society, sciences and the economy, for example in business such as through 'Teal' governance models, systems thinking, design thinking, and agile methodologies.

The domain in the middle is the most under appreciated. It is the domain of Confusion, not knowing what sort of situation you are in.

From Mechanistic to Natural

The further you go counterclockwise, the more unordered and unstable the system is. If you go clockwise, you introduce stability and order to the system. Stability lies clockwise of where you are now and instability lies counterclockwise. It is important to note that this is true until you get to the boundary between Clear and Chaos. That is like a cliff. One falls off of the Clear domain into chaos and it is difficult - if not impossible - to recover and clamber back up to the well-ordered world with Clear answers.

Next we'll dive a bit deeper into each domain

Santa Fe Institute; Donna Meadows (2008); Cognitive Edge; Enlivening Edge