As you may know, Cynefin is a "sense making" approach to understanding complexity in systems and managing them, created by Dave Snowden and some of his colleagues. Cynefin categorizes systems and the environments they operate in into five kinds: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, disorderly.
Bill Dettmer published a paper recently talking about Cynefin and Continuous Improvement, which you download here: (through Jack Vinson's blog)
The big insight of Cynefin for systems thinkers and continuous improvement specialists, is that a certain approach or action taken in one kind of system, may not work fo another kind of system. In other words: the tools under your tool set may only work on certain kinds of systems. Additionally, a system and its environment are continuously under change, so a simple system may become a complex system, a complicated system may become chaotic, and so forth.
In Theory of Constraints (TOC) circles, Cynefin has been considered by many as a major insight into how to improve systems using the TOC solutions, where the Logical Thinking Tools can work, and when, definitely, they won't work and a different approach is needed. The concepts were introduced in a recent TOC ICO conference, by Steve Holt of Boeing.
I personally had the privilege to ask Dr. Eli Goldratt directly about the relationship between Cynefin and TOC, and he responded that it was an interesting proposition, but he didn't expand further on the value of it.
What is true is that the Cynefin framework will continue under development, and gives important insights on how to manage and improve systems.
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