Standing up for the value of our work

How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping […]

Causal Layered Analysis, SCCC, and Cynefin

Why is it that some mornings start off with such a flood of ideas and connections that there’s no way to get it all down and done in the day? Hmm… [One urgent point first: this is not about Cynefin. I’m not going there: don’t worry. It’s in the title only because I thought that if you’re […]

Coping with ‘the toad in the road’

Every discipline is blighted by their own versions of an all-too-common problem: “For every difficult, complex, challenging question, there’s at least one clear, simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer”. In Australian parlance, that type of magnificently-misleading ‘wrong answer’ is known as ‘the toad in the road’. Every ‘trade’ has its toads, in some form or another. In […]

SCCC: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic

Folks, we have an important issue on terminology that we need to address. In two comments to my previous post, Dave Snowden has made it clear that he objects to any reference to the term ‘Cynefin‘ that does not conform exactly to his specification for that term. This includes any usage of the term ‘Cynefin-categorization’, […]

‘Ba’, Cynefin, place and architecture

Just been reading (via Tweet by Bill Ives) a post by Anne Marie McEwan on ‘Loosening the Taylorist Stranglehold on the Workplace‘. Within a much larger context in a very good article, this one brief section caught my attention:
The Japanese concept of ‘ba’ came up in one of the face-to-face conversations. … Nonaka et al say that […]

Cynefin as place: a respectful enquiry

[A slightly risky post, this, given the unfortunate history between myself and Dave Snowden: but I want to emphasise that it is in good faith, as a genuine enquiry that I believe would be of real value to those of working in enterprise-architectures and to the broader Cynefin community.]
I’ve been delighted to see a useful […]