One way to help make sense of the world around us 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.

Understanding constraints

One can move through the framework using constraints, starting with clear, ending with chaos. Each imply a different way to act and approach the situation.

Clear systems have fixed constraints that can break catastrophically and can be repaired easily if you know what you are doing. Think of a water leak. If you know how to repair it, it is a simple matter to do so. If you don't, you fall off that cliff into Chaos quite quickly, and it takes a lot of time to get back to normal.

Complicated systems allow for a little more latitude in practice and so have governing constraints, such as laws and procedures. Break them at your peril, but also discuss them to make sure they govern activity in the system well. It's the domain of experts, for example doing taxes for a large organisation. It can be very complicated but there are clear right and wrong ways of doing it.

Complex systems are characterized by enabling constraints which give rise to all manner of creativity, emergence and self-organization, but which can also be immutable. Think of the laws of physics or principles of evolutionary biology that seem to generate a huge variety of systems and living beings. But we don't have a creature that can breathe by oxidizing neon, because neon doesn't oxidize. Constraints in complexity can be quite tight and still contribute to emergence and creative action.

Think of a flock of birds. Their is not a plan or director they follow in creating their beautiful patterns. Rather, simple rules like flying a set distance from your neighbour offer guidance. These simple constraints give rise to tremendous creativity and beauty within a distilled form.

In Chaos the absence of constraints means that nothing makes much sense, and all you can do is choose a place to act, sense what comes next, and act accordingly.

In chaotic situations one could also add constraints to regain control, this is what first responders do. They stabilize the situation and then figure out whether acting is responsible or whether the situation needs to be studied a bit more (so we know how a pandemic actually occurs and the different ways a new virus operates in the human body). However, this usually involves a tradeoff, for example in a pandemic applying a lock down allows regaining control at the expense of economic progress.

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Misclassifying a situation can have potentially disastrous consequences. For example if when you misread a simple situation, like putting together an Ikea bookshelf, as chaotic. The sequence of act>sense>respond could lead to very wrong outcomes (or at least unpractical in case of 'Billy'). Equally a highly complex situation such as responding to a pandemic misread as a complicated situation can have equally disastrous outcomes. A pandemic is not linear and predictable by any means, and deeply connected.

Some questions that can help. Is the situation:

• Contextual, e.g. if you change the context does the problem also change? (no=ordered; yes=contextual)
• Path dependent, e.g. if you change how you got here does the situation change? no=ordered; yes is non-linear
  • For example putting together Ikea furniture it doe not matter where, how, or why you got it = clear
  • For example taxes, you can change the years, person, or even organisations, theres are still limited right & wrong ways to file your taxes to do it. >> complicated
  • For example your career, the experience you've gathered determine the options you have going forward. This is highly path dependent >> complex
• Open ended, e.g. is there a clear starting point and finish? (yes=ordered; no=
  
• Do you know (or think you know) all the variables? (yes= ordered; no=

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

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• Try (probe)
• Reflect (repsond)
• Notice (sense)