{ "generated": "2026-09-07T18:24:50.891430", "source": "thecynefin.co/our-thinking", "date_range": { "start": "2025-09-03", "end": "2026-09-06" }, "frameworks": { "Sense-Making & Decision Making": { "description": "Strategies for making sense of complex situations and improving decision quality", "strategies_count": 2, "deliverables_count": 6, "strategies": [ { "name": "Use the Cynefin Framework for Context Assessment", "goal": "Correctly identify the nature of your situation before acting", "deliverables": [ "Situation assessment matrix (Simple/Complicated/Complex/Chaotic)", "Decision protocol for each domain", "Team workshop materials for domain classification" ], "actions": [ "Map current challenges to Cynefin domains", "Match leadership style to domain", "Create 'safe-to-fail' experiments for complex situations" ] }, { "name": "Implement Narrative-Based Sense-Making", "goal": "Gather and analyze stories to understand organizational patterns", "deliverables": [ "Story collection framework", "Narrative analysis template", "Pattern identification report" ], "actions": [ "Collect micro-narratives from stakeholders", "Identify emergent patterns", "Use SenseMaker\u00ae for quantitative narrative analysis" ] } ] }, "AI & Cognitive Technology": { "description": "Strategies for integrating AI while preserving human cognitive capabilities", "strategies_count": 2, "deliverables_count": 6, "strategies": [ { "name": "Cognitive Augmentation, Not Replacement", "goal": "Use AI to enhance human capabilities without creating dependency", "deliverables": [ "AI integration policy", "Cognitive skills preservation plan", "Human-AI collaboration protocols" ], "actions": [ "Identify tasks where AI aids vs. replaces thinking", "Maintain manual skill practice alongside AI tools", "Design workflows that preserve cognitive engagement" ] }, { "name": "Neurodiversity-Inclusive AI Strategy", "goal": "Leverage AI to unlock potential in neurodiverse team members", "deliverables": [ "Inclusive AI tools assessment", "Translation support protocols", "Cognitive accessibility guidelines" ], "actions": [ "Identify translational constraints in team", "Deploy AI as translation layer for neurodiverse thinkers", "Measure output quality vs. cognitive effort" ] } ] }, "Knowledge Management": { "description": "Strategies for capturing, sharing, and leveraging organizational knowledge", "strategies_count": 2, "deliverables_count": 6, "strategies": [ { "name": "Map Before You Manage", "goal": "Understand knowledge flows before implementing KM systems", "deliverables": [ "Knowledge flow map", "Expertise directory", "Knowledge gap analysis" ], "actions": [ "Identify critical knowledge holders", "Map knowledge transfer pathways", "Create safe spaces for knowledge sharing" ] }, { "name": "Exaptive Knowledge Networks", "goal": "Create connections that enable novel applications of existing knowledge", "deliverables": [ "Cross-domain connection map", "Innovation catalyst workshops", "Knowledge recombination protocols" ], "actions": [ "Identify knowledge from unrelated domains", "Create cross-functional exploration sessions", "Document unexpected knowledge applications" ] } ] }, "Leadership in Complexity": { "description": "Strategies for leading effectively in complex, uncertain environments", "strategies_count": 2, "deliverables_count": 6, "strategies": [ { "name": "Distributed Cognition Leadership", "goal": "Leverage collective intelligence rather than individual genius", "deliverables": [ "Team cognitive diversity assessment", "Distributed decision-making framework", "Collective intelligence protocols" ], "actions": [ "Assess cognitive diversity in teams", "Create safe-to-fail experiment culture", "Enable decision-making at appropriate levels" ] }, { "name": "Wayfinding Over Way-Shaping", "goal": "Navigate emergence rather than trying to control outcomes", "deliverables": [ "Emergence detection system", "Adaptive strategy templates", "Probe-sense-respond protocols" ], "actions": [ "Run multiple small experiments", "Monitor for emergent patterns", "Amplify positive patterns, dampen negative ones" ] } ] }, "Estuarine Mapping & Strategy": { "description": "Strategies for mapping organizational landscapes and energy allocation", "strategies_count": 2, "deliverables_count": 6, "strategies": [ { "name": "Estuarine Mapping for Strategic Clarity", "goal": "Understand the organizational landscape and where to invest energy", "deliverables": [ "Estuarine map of organizational context", "Energy allocation framework", "Constraint identification report" ], "actions": [ "Map the four key landscapes (valley, mountain, river, coast)", "Identify constraints and affordances", "Allocate resources to highest-impact areas" ] }, { "name": "Constraint-Based Strategy", "goal": "Work with constraints rather than fighting them", "deliverables": [ "Constraint taxonomy", "Governing vs. enabling constraint inventory", "Strategy-to-constraint alignment matrix" ], "actions": [ "Classify constraints as governing or enabling", "Identify which constraints can be shifted", "Design strategies that leverage existing constraints" ] } ] }, "Narrative & Organizational Culture": { "description": "Strategies for using narrative to shape and understand culture", "strategies_count": 2, "deliverables_count": 6, "strategies": [ { "name": "Narrative Pattern Analysis", "goal": "Understand organizational culture through story patterns", "deliverables": [ "Narrative pattern report", "Cultural archetype inventory", "Story-based change interventions" ], "actions": [ "Collect organizational stories", "Identify recurring patterns and archetypes", "Design interventions that shift narrative patterns" ] }, { "name": "Safe-to-Fail Narrative Experiments", "goal": "Test cultural shifts through small narrative interventions", "deliverables": [ "Experiment design templates", "Success/failure criteria", "Learning capture framework" ], "actions": [ "Design small narrative experiments", "Run parallel experiments", "Capture learning from both success and failure" ] } ] } }, "total_posts": 176, "posts": [ { "id": 73540, "title": "Cognitive outsourcing 2/3: legiblity", "date": "2026-09-06", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/cognitive-outsourcing-2-3-legiblity/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "AI" ], "excerpt": "\u201cGenius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.\u201d \u2014 William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890 The obvious reading of LLMs as cognitive outsourcing doesn't " }, { "id": 73531, "title": "Cognitive outsourcing 1/3: the trade", "date": "2026-09-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/cognitive-outsourcing-1-3-the-trade/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "AI" ], "excerpt": "The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.\" \u2014 William James, Talks to Teachers, 1899 Adult brains physically remodel in response to what you " }, { "id": 73392, "title": "THERE IS NO EFFING ELEPHANT", "date": "2026-08-29", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/there-is-no-effing-elephant/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Who is the genius who can see the whole and knows it is an elephant? And if there is no such genius? How do we know that there is an elephant there? Prof Mike Jackson commenting on LinkedIn A couple o" }, { "id": 73360, "title": "\"Bad money drives out good\"", "date": "2026-08-27", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/bad-money-drives-out-good/", "categories": [ "Polemic", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Counterfeit coin spends as easily as real, until someone asks what backs it. The title is Gresham\u2019s Law, the above is my reworking Simple is good, but too much of what spreads easily is simplistic, ca" }, { "id": 73317, "title": "The Lotus Eaters 4/3: The Inner Sun", "date": "2026-08-25", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-lotus-eaters-4-3-the-inner-sun/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"We have been disappointed; but disappointments will work for our good, if we make the right use of them.... Be watchful; be patient, be persevering.\" \u2014 William Miller, letter, August 1845, written in" }, { "id": 73307, "title": "The estuary, overlaid", "date": "2026-08-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-estuary-overlaid/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"The river is within us, the sea is all about us.\" \u2014 T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages (Four Quartets) Extending estuarine mapping to decide where AI belongs This is a more extensive follow-up to my post " }, { "id": 73288, "title": "Is there even a driver?", "date": "2026-08-23", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/is-there-even-a-driver/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "AI" ], "excerpt": "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.\" The Cheshire Cat, in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Brian Arthur\u2019s mystery tour, Emily Bender\u2019s empire, & two" }, { "id": 73111, "title": "Complexity in the Wild: What Leaders from across industries are learning from startups and each other", "date": "2026-08-17", "author": "Beth Smith", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/complexity-what-leaders-industries-learning/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "What happens when you send a corporate executive to advise a startup that might not exist in six months? Throughout 2024-25, I had a front-row seat to a programme that treats this question as a seriou" }, { "id": 72827, "title": "No rosy-fingered dawn", "date": "2026-08-10", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/no-rosy-fingered-dawn/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their Tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of the people's consciousness.\" Wagner, \"Art and Revolution\" (1849" }, { "id": 72773, "title": "The Trouble with Text Analysis", "date": "2026-08-06", "author": "Beth Smith", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-trouble-with-text-analysis/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "AI" ], "excerpt": "AI can now code, cluster and summarise open text responses faster than any human research team. I have witnessed organisations almost completely outsource their analysis to AI using large language mod" }, { "id": 72708, "title": "The Idiot's Guide to an Early Diagnosis", "date": "2026-08-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-idiots-guide-to-an-early-diagnosis/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cHope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.\u201d V\u00e1clav Ha" }, { "id": 72659, "title": "Hypermutating thoughts from Hay-on-Wye", "date": "2026-08-03", "author": "Anna Panagiotou", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/hypermutating-thoughts-from-hay/", "categories": [ "Reflections", "Science", "Cynefin", "Organisational Development", "Constraints", "HTLGI" ], "excerpt": "The How The Light Gets In festival of science, music, comedy, and philosophy is a month into the past as I am writing this, and God only knows how far into the past by the time I have actually gotten " }, { "id": 72676, "title": "The next right thing(s)", "date": "2026-08-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-next-right-things/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.Traveller, there is no path; the path is made by walking. Antonio Machado So there are goals in a complexity account of change, but they are just\u00a0adja" }, { "id": 72651, "title": "We don't need a better bestiary", "date": "2026-07-31", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/we-dont-need-a-better-bestiary/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"The river is within us, the sea is all about us.\" T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages An estuary, tended rather than defended, salt and fresh water and storm surge all still arguing This is one of a series" }, { "id": 72595, "title": "Epistemic hygiene", "date": "2026-07-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/epistemic-hygiene/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion, draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other" }, { "id": 72584, "title": "Just a fancier box?", "date": "2026-07-23", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/just-a-fancier-box/", "categories": [ "Polemic", "Complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Complexity is having a moment. It is also having its meaning hollowed out in real time. This is the first in a series of posts, prompted by one of Virpi\u2019s cartoons, and I\u2019m shamelessly promoting her b" }, { "id": 72491, "title": "Complexity Is Not Beyond Us?", "date": "2026-07-21", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/complexity-is-not-beyond-us/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cMatters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health.\u201d Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II \u201cIt is the mark of an educated mind to exp" }, { "id": 72474, "title": "CBI KM 3/3:\u00a0approaching the hub\u00a0", "date": "2026-07-20", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/cbi-km-2-3-approaching-the-hub/", "categories": [ "Knowledge Management", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; if it is, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.\" Matt" }, { "id": 72468, "title": "CBI KM 2/3:\u00a0map before you manage", "date": "2026-07-19", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/cbi-km-2-3-map-before-you-manage/", "categories": [ "Knowledge Management", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Old wine does not set easily in new wineskins.\" CBI/IBM Guide to Knowledge Management, 1998 I finished the last post promising two things: an expansion of the tacit-explicit material I'd only mention" }, { "id": 72459, "title": "CBI KM 1/3: small wonder", "date": "2026-07-18", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/small-wonder/", "categories": [ "Knowledge Management", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Small wonder that Trojans and Achaeans should endure so much and so long, for the sake of a woman so marvellously and divinely lovely.\" Homer, Iliad, Book III (tr. Samuel Butler) Two Models That Laun" }, { "id": 72452, "title": "The paradoxes of the knife", "date": "2026-07-17", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-paradoxes-of-the-knife/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "If you want good roses, sharpen your knife and harden your heart. Patience Strong, The Glory of the Garden (1951) A second Gaping Void illustration today, and as I promised, something focused on pract" }, { "id": 72438, "title": "The Cross Is Not a Diagram", "date": "2026-07-16", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-cross-is-not-a-diagram/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cGrace is not a strange, foreign element which invades us from outside; it is the secret entelechy of our own being.\u201d Karl Rahner S.J. Entelechy, from the Greek etymon or  \u1f10\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03bb\u03ad\u03c7\u03b5\u03b9\u03b1 in Aristotle" }, { "id": 72409, "title": "A Field Guide to Epistemic Parasites", "date": "2026-07-15", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-field-guide-to-epistemic-parasites/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "So, naturalists observe, a fleaHath smaller fleas that on him prey,And these have smaller still to bite \u2019em,And so proceed ad infinitum. Jonathan Swift, On Poetry: A Rhapsody, 1733 One of the many unp" }, { "id": 72371, "title": "The Lotus Eaters 3/3: A Futurist on a Stage", "date": "2026-07-13", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-lotus-eaters-3-3-a-futurist-on-a-stage/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"So they came presently to the Lotus-eaters... and there was no thought of return.\" Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) The introduction to this series, and the two posts that followed on S" }, { "id": 72365, "title": "The Lotus Eaters 2/3: The Next Colour", "date": "2026-07-12", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-lotus-eaters-2-3-the-next-colour/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Nor did any sight of smoke, nor any sound... reach them from that shore; only the lotus, and the wish to eat it, and, having eaten, to remain.\" Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) The intr" }, { "id": 72360, "title": "The Lotus Eaters 1/3: of caves & fires", "date": "2026-07-11", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-lotus-eaters-1-3-of-caves-fires/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Whoever ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus... wished to stay there forgetting all about going home.\" Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) The introduction to this series set out three f" }, { "id": 72343, "title": "The lotus eaters 0/3", "date": "2026-07-10", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-lotus-eaters-0-3/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Whoever ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus... wished to stay there forgetting all about going home*.\" Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) This time last week, I was finalising material " }, { "id": 72288, "title": "Supermindlessness?", "date": "2026-07-01", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/supermindlessness/", "categories": [ "Knowledge Management", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?\u2019 \u2014 T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock It is early Wednesday morning, and I am reflecting on day two " }, { "id": 72264, "title": "Struggle and the Shawl of Wisdom", "date": "2026-06-30", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/struggle-and-the-shawl-of-wisdom/", "categories": [ "Knowledge Management", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Fionn gained the wisdom of the Salmon of Knowledge not by seeking it deliberately, but by accident: a burnt thumb, instinctively sucked. From then on the knowledge was always already his, available si" }, { "id": 72172, "title": "Defining a Complex System", "date": "2026-06-29", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/defining-a-complex-system/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2026 whereas strong dynamic links among components (characterized as nodes) result in a \u201cstrong cluster\u201d, weak links between strong clusters give rise to a community or a world. Since any node can simult" }, { "id": 72116, "title": "The llwybr", "date": "2026-06-28", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-llwybr/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with fierce desire for ancestors, marriage and descendants. For everything there is an artificial, pitiful substitute.\" Franz Kafka, Diaries " }, { "id": 72112, "title": "The mirrorball", "date": "2026-06-27", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-mirrorball/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"You're not guilty of anything. It can't be that your life is already completely ruined.\" Prince Myshkin, The Idiot For a little while I was the team coach of three board executives during a very turb" }, { "id": 72109, "title": "The enchanting game", "date": "2026-06-26", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-enchanting-game/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "I had also observed fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that it took total possession of the man who had succumbed to its magic.\" Hermann Hesse, The Glass " }, { "id": 72106, "title": "Finding Yourself in the Wrong Fairytale", "date": "2026-06-25", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/finding-yourself-in-the-wrong-fairytale/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.\" Virginia Wolf, A room of one\u2019s own I send her a voice note: I am writing this article about Ro" }, { "id": 72102, "title": "The helper must not enter the forest", "date": "2026-06-24", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-helper-must-not-enter-the-forest/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Ce porunce\u0219ti, st\u0103p\u00e2ne? Mul\u021bumesc lui Dumnezeu c\u0103 a dat \u0219i vremea mea\" \"What do you command, master? I thank God that my time has also come.\" Petre Ispirescu Tinere\u021be f\u0103r\u0103 b\u0103tr\u00e2ne\u021be \u0219i via\u021b\u0103 f\u0103r\u0103 de " }, { "id": 72095, "title": "The horse knows how to get there", "date": "2026-06-23", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-horse-knows-how-to-get-there/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Music must not be approached from its intellectual, rational side. The way should be paved for direct intuition.\" Zolt\u00e1n Kod\u00e1ly, 1929 My Process Work mentor spent weeks stuck in her PhD analysis, una" }, { "id": 72044, "title": "Long before words", "date": "2026-06-22", "author": "Enache Corina", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/long-before-words/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.\" Virginia Wolf Corina Enache doesn\u2019t like labels, but for the purpose of an introduction, she\u2019ll reach for a " }, { "id": 72040, "title": "Summer solstice", "date": "2026-06-21", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/summer-solstice/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The solstice does not choose between rising and falling; it is the moment both are true.\"Trobwynt nid yw terfyn A summary of posts since the Spring Equinox of 2026 At the time of my Spring Equinox pos" }, { "id": 72033, "title": "The Copenhagen Fallacy: complexity science and the organisations that keep changing without ever changing", "date": "2026-06-19", "author": "Beth Smith", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/complexity-science-organisations-keep-changing-without-ever-changing/", "categories": [ "Knowledge Management", "Organisational Development", "Complexity" ], "excerpt": "I once worked with a client who was on their fifteenth transformation in as many years\u2026 Not their fifteenth project, their fifteenth wholesale attempt to change how the organisation works. The first o" }, { "id": 71963, "title": "Curation for those who usually avoid it: blogs to support you in SenseMaker design", "date": "2026-06-17", "author": "Anna Panagiotou", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/curation-for-sensemaker-design/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker" ], "excerpt": "There are blog posts that unpack the exploration of new ideas and insights, practical or conceptual. There are blogs that are personal reflections, mulling on an idea. There are blogs that are essenti" }, { "id": 71769, "title": "Two Marys and (The) Mission", "date": "2026-06-08", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/two-marys-and-the-mission/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Before I built a wall I\u2019d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.\u2019 \u2014 Robert Frost, Mending Wall Mary Midgley is having a moment. Metaphysical Animals by Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, which tr" }, { "id": 71758, "title": "A Promise to Adam Kahane", "date": "2026-06-07", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-promise-to-adam-kahane/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Grace is not a strange, foreign element which invades us from outside; it is the secret entelechy of our own being.\u2019 \u2014 Karl Rahner S.J. Entelechy is probably an unfamiliar word for most readers, so I" }, { "id": 71741, "title": "Verfremdungseffekt: strange, not distanced", "date": "2026-06-06", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/verfremdungseffekt-strange-not-distanced/", "categories": [ "Reflections", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Plenty of hope, for God \u2014 no end of hope \u2014 only not for us.\u2019 Franz Kafka, to Walter Benjamin This is the third in what has become a habit rather than a series: using pairs of theatrical performances " }, { "id": 71731, "title": "A marriage market of ideas", "date": "2026-06-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-marriage-market-of-ideas/", "categories": [ "Polemic", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "It is a truth universally acknowledged that any sufficiently original idea in organisational change must be in want of a Buddhist antecedent. Jane Austen\u2019s famous opening to Pride and Prejudice, to wh" }, { "id": 71718, "title": "ToC 3/3: Understanding the Substrate", "date": "2026-06-04", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/toc-3-3-understanding-the-substrate/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Each set of questions comes in from a different angle and needs a different kind of solution \u2026 There is no way in which they can be piled up into a sequence where one set of answers translates or sup" }, { "id": 71684, "title": "ToC 2/3: ontological shifts", "date": "2026-06-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/toc-2-3-ontological-shifts/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Just so, at an imaginative level, many people are inclined to think that physics can reduce the muddled living world to an idealised mathematical form. Does this perhaps present us with a deeper real" }, { "id": 71666, "title": "ToC 1/3: Foreclosing the Territory", "date": "2026-06-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/toc-1-3-foreclosing-the-territory/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018The truth is, of course, that no map shows everything. Each map concentrates on answering a particular set of questions. Each map \u201cexplains\u201d the whole only in the sense of answering certain given que" }, { "id": 71625, "title": "A Trialectic for organisational practice & coaching", "date": "2026-05-31", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-trialectic-for-organisational-practice-coaching/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"The system does not lack what you think it lacks. The question is what you are willing to risk becoming in the process of being\" For some years, I have written occasional posts using the Augustine/Pe" }, { "id": 71621, "title": "Edgar Morin (1921\u20132026): A Completed Life", "date": "2026-05-30", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/edgar-morin-1921-2026-a-completed-life/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "It is your footsteps that make the path, and nothing else. Antonio Machado I was present, as a very minor and peripheral figure, at one of the Christian-Marxist dialogue gatherings in Paris in the mid" }, { "id": 71607, "title": "Of Poachers and Gamekeepers", "date": "2026-05-29", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/of-poachers-and-gamekeepers/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The Senchus M\u00f3r, the great compendium of early Irish law compiled in the eighth century, states that blotches would appear on a jurist\u2019s cheek if he deviated from the truth. The tradition marks those " }, { "id": 71600, "title": "Karl Weick (1936\u20132026)", "date": "2026-05-28", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/karl-weick-1936-2026/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "argue as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong Karl Weick The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969) Karl Weick died on 21 May, aged 89. He can legitimately claim to have founded a field, an" }, { "id": 71566, "title": "Common Ground, Uncommon Selves", "date": "2026-05-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/common-ground-uncommon-selves/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "This stranger, whose name I do not know, has come to my house in his travels from east or west. He asks for his passage home, and seeks our confirmation. Let us further his going, as with others in th" }, { "id": 71507, "title": "The Consciousness-Upgrade Industry", "date": "2026-05-21", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-consciousness-upgrade-industry/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cThose who ate the honey-sweet lotus fruit had no longer any wish to bring back word or to return.\u201d Homer, Odyssey IX (tr. A.S. Kline) This is a post I have been meaning to write for some time, and Ot" }, { "id": 71476, "title": "Peter Checkland (1930\u20132026)", "date": "2026-05-19", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/peter-checkland-1930-2026/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"We should never say something in the world: 'it is a system'; only: 'it may be described as a system.'\" Checkland, P. (1983). O.R. and the Systems Movement: Mappings and Conflicts. Journal of th" }, { "id": 71423, "title": "From AI to AIR", "date": "2026-05-18", "author": "Alice Jing Shan", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/dao-from-ai-to-air/", "categories": [ "Complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "What Learning Systems Fail to Register A learning system depends on what it has learned to register as meaningful, reproducible, and actionable. If a representational layer was never properly built in" }, { "id": 71410, "title": "When Letters Turned into Chicken Wings: Pinyin, Tone Marks, and Interface Failure", "date": "2026-05-15", "author": "Alice Jing Shan", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/dao-the-art-of-the-long-game-2/", "categories": [ "Complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "A Small Experiment at Home Earlier in the Dao: The Art of the Long Game series, I described Dao as a living interface in language. This piece stays close to that thought, but approaches it through a m" }, { "id": 71329, "title": "The Less-Known Partner of Dao: Li (\u7406)", "date": "2026-05-14", "author": "Alice Jing Shan", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-less-known-partner-of-dao-li/", "categories": [ "Complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "First, a few words about the author:\u00a0 Dr Alice Jing Shan is the founder of ScholarLand Ltd, originator of Relational Dynamics\u2122, and an independent researcher focused on how systems form, hold, and evo" }, { "id": 71349, "title": "\"Come hear the music play\"", "date": "2026-05-13", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/come-hear-the-music-play/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"We hope we are not the last cabaret. We are one of the first conversations.\" From now on, I am going to take a pause from blogging for anywhere between 3 and 7 days every month. We are bringing back " }, { "id": 71272, "title": "Three without resolution?", "date": "2026-05-12", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/three-without-resolution/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cThe pattern which connects.\u201d \u2014 Gregory Bateson This series began with a provocation from Plato\u2019s Sophist: three kinds, each irreducible to the others, that is where thinking must begin. It ends with " }, { "id": 71266, "title": "Conditions, Not Conclusions", "date": "2026-05-11", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/conditions-not-conclusions/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The practitioner does not supply what the system lacks.The practitioner creates conditions in which what is already present becomes operative. This is the fifth in a series on the trialectics. For an " }, { "id": 71252, "title": "Neither Repair nor Revolution", "date": "2026-05-10", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/neither-repair-nor-revolution/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The object of any change programme is to ensure that there is never another one? This is the fourth in a series on the trialectics. For an introduction to the trialectic approach and the full series l" }, { "id": 71244, "title": "The Shape of Knowing", "date": "2026-05-09", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-shape-of-knowing/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "We evolved to make sense of a world that does not come with explanations attached. This is the third in a series on the trialectics. For an introduction to the trialectic approach and the full series " }, { "id": 71203, "title": "What We Cannot Say", "date": "2026-05-08", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/what-we-cannot-say/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "What we know is not a thing we possess. It is a capacity we enact. This is the second in a series on the trialectics. For an introduction to the trialectic approach and the full series list, see the i" }, { "id": 71194, "title": "Decomposition and Recombination", "date": "2026-05-07", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/decomposition-and-recombination/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The question is never whether you want more of what works. The question is what \"more\" means in a system that is not a machine. This is the first in a series on the trialectics, three-term diagnostic " }, { "id": 71173, "title": "Trialectics, or thinking in threes", "date": "2026-05-06", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/thinking-in-threes/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Three kinds, each irreducible to the others. That is where thinking must begin.\" \u2014 after Plato, Sophist Most of the conceptual tools we reach for when we want to think carefully about a problem are b" }, { "id": 71160, "title": "Where the Abductive Warrant Sits", "date": "2026-05-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/where-the-abductive-warrant-sits/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cIntuition is recognition.\u201d Gary Klein, Sources of Power \u201cIntuition is compressed experience.\u201d Larry Prusak \u201cThe total personality is what responds.\u201d Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind My 20" }, { "id": 71147, "title": "The Sediment of Signs", "date": "2026-05-04", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-sediment-of-signs/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cWe were a people bred on legends,Warming our hands at the red past.\u201d R.S. Thomas, Welsh History On semiosis over time, naturalised constraints, and survival in informal containers This post follows d" }, { "id": 71140, "title": "Signs All the Way Down", "date": "2026-05-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/signs-all-the-way-down/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cEvery thought is a sign.\u201d \u201cMan is a sign.\u201d both from C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers On Peirce, Saussure, and why the distinction matters for anthro-complexity This post follows directly from \u2018Reading " }, { "id": 71129, "title": "Reading Ingold from the Estuary", "date": "2026-05-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/reading-ingold-from-the-estuary/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cA rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.\u201d Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Processual Anthropology as a Triangulation Point for " }, { "id": 71123, "title": "Beltane and the Barricade", "date": "2026-05-01", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/beltane-and-the-barricade/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The fire is not a signal. It is the thing itself. Those who wait for permission to light it have already misunderstood. Today is the first of May, and I want to use it to open a conversation about wha" }, { "id": 71086, "title": "All Models Are Wrong", "date": "2026-04-30", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/all-models-are-wrong/", "categories": [ "Cynefin", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cThis model is wrong,\u201d said Alice, examining it carefully.\u201cAll models are wrong,\u201d said the Hatter cheerfully. \u201cHave some more tea.\u201d\u201cBut this one contradicts itself,\u201d said Alice.\u201cThat,\u201d said the Hatter" }, { "id": 71081, "title": "Leadership in the Estuary", "date": "2026-04-29", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/leadership-in-the-estuary/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "All things counter, original, spare, strangeWhatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty Yesterday\u2019s post raised the questions that the CRP tradition needs to resol" }, { "id": 71057, "title": "Stacey Unresolved", "date": "2026-04-28", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/stacey-unresolved/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motion And the actFalls the Shadow T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men A dialectic within CRP Tradition, and a Question Not Yet Answered Chris Mowles has announc" }, { "id": 71044, "title": "\u00a0... all set about with fever-trees", "date": "2026-04-27", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/all-set-about-with-fever-trees/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake scuffled down from the bank and said, \u201cMy young friend, if you do not now, immediately and instantly, pull as hard as ever you can, it is my opinion that your a" }, { "id": 71027, "title": "The braided river", "date": "2026-04-26", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-braided-river/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018The elephant does not need a moral compass. It needs enough space to move.\u2019 Roger Dennis posted an image of a braided river in Glenorchy, New Zealand, alongside the key takeaway from the 2026 WEF rep" }, { "id": 71015, "title": "The Estuary Responds", "date": "2026-04-25", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-estuary-responds/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018The estuary did not need the elephants to agree on a direction. It needed them to show up.\u2019 This is the third post in a sequence. The first, building on the Channel and the Estuary series, introduced" }, { "id": 71009, "title": "Big Red Elephants Dance Rather Thoughtfully", "date": "2026-04-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/big-red-elephants-dance-rather-thoughtfully/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "An elephant in a canal is a problem. An elephant in an estuary is just an elephant. This post follows directly from yesterday\u2019s piece on fjords, deltas, flood plains and salt marshes, and is part of t" }, { "id": 71002, "title": "Fjordic & Deltic: Two Modes of Suppression", "date": "2026-04-23", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/fjordic-deltic-two-modes-of-suppression/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Mental frameworks are also prisons of the longue dur\u00e9e.\u2019 Fernand Braudel, \u2018Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue dur\u00e9e\u2019, 1958 Extending the channel & estuary metaphor; implications for Estuari" }, { "id": 70975, "title": "Lessons learning", "date": "2026-04-22", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/lessons-learning-2/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Alone in the cornerone sits whose silence persuadesof the pointlessnessof the discourse. He drinksat another fountain that buildsitself equally from the dust of ruffiansand saints. R.S. Thomas, \u2018The L" }, { "id": 70816, "title": "Conrad Taylor, 1954\u20132026", "date": "2026-04-21", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/conrad-taylor-1954-2026/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "It is better to be somewhat pixellated than completely dotty Conrad Taylor I learned of Conrad's death somewhere over the Pacific, en route between Hong Kong and Atlanta. It felt appropriate, somehow," }, { "id": 70807, "title": "... camped on before?", "date": "2026-04-20", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/camped-on-before/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Our pioneers keep strikingInwards and downwards,Every layer they stripSeems camped on before. Seamus Heaney, \u2018Bogland\u2019, Door into the Dark (Faber & Faber, 1969) Instruments for reading entrained s" }, { "id": 70795, "title": "Always in brown?", "date": "2026-04-19", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/always-in-brown/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "On co-creation, calling forth, and what happens when the sediment responds.A hurry through which known and strange things pass Seamus Heaney, \u2018Postscript\u2019, The Spirit Level (Farrar, Straus and Giroux," }, { "id": 70777, "title": "In a brownfield ...", "date": "2026-04-18", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/on-a-brownfield/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ... I'll dig with it. Seamus Heaney, \u2018Digging\u2019 (1966) Path dependency, distributed memory, and the limits of designed change in complex systems. There is a persiste" }, { "id": 70755, "title": "The loop, well, looped", "date": "2026-04-17", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-loop-well-looped/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cThat world was just not good enough, so I decided to create a new one.\u201d Boyd, U.S. Air Force Oral History Interview, 1977 A response, to more responses The volume and quality of response to the OODA " }, { "id": 70734, "title": "I Can Destroy a World", "date": "2026-04-16", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/i-can-destroy-a-world/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cI don\u2019t mind destroying an existing world. I can destroy a world, a mental world. I love to do it.\u201d Boyd, U.S. Air Force Oral History Interview, 1977 Responses, Boyd in his own words, and some thread" }, { "id": 70725, "title": "The Wild Place: War Poets\u00a0", "date": "2026-04-15", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-wild-place-war-poets/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Why must I live in this grim age,When, to a far horizon, GodHas ebbed away, and man, with rage,Now wields the sceptre and the rod? Hedd Wyn (Ellis Humphrey Evans), Rhyfel (War), translated by A. Z. Fo" }, { "id": 70717, "title": "The Wild Place: Goidelic", "date": "2026-04-14", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-wild-place-goidelic/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "He was revolted by the thought of known places and dreamed of strange migrations. Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray, Faber, 1983 Second in a series of three on the Celtic traditions and the forest that te" }, { "id": 70708, "title": "The Wild Place: Brittonic", "date": "2026-04-13", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-wild-place-welsh/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "I have been in a multitude of shapes, before I assumed a consistent form. Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees), Book of Taliesin, translated by W. F. Skene First in a series of three on the " }, { "id": 70671, "title": "The Shoulder Shot and the Altar", "date": "2026-04-12", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-shoulder-shot-and-the-altar/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "He jams his hat on his head and stomps off towards his own villa. General bewilderment. Maxim Gorky, Summerfolk, translated by Stephen Mulrine, Nick Hern Books Drama Classics Suslov has just finished " }, { "id": 70664, "title": "SF: Dark forest or generative estuary?", "date": "2026-04-11", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/sf-dark-forest-or-generative-estuary/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "They gazed at one another. Homer, Iliad Book XXIV (Johnston translation) On collaboration, mediation and the limits of the universal translator. This is the first in the occasional series I promised, " }, { "id": 70660, "title": "Ashby Inverted", "date": "2026-04-10", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ashby-inverted/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cThe channel requires a keeper. The estuary keeps itself.\u201d On requisite variety, constant overhead, and the structural case for distributed sense-making The banner semiotic image from the ever perspic" }, { "id": 70524, "title": "Seeing slant", "date": "2026-04-09", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/seeing-slant/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Tell all the truth but tell it slant \u2014Success in Circuit liesToo bright for our infirm DelightThe Truth's superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children easedWith explanation kindThe Truth must dazzle gr" }, { "id": 70494, "title": "An Unkindness", "date": "2026-04-08", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/an-unkindness/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"Huginn and Muninn fly every day over all the world; I fear for Huginn that he may not return, but I fear more for Muninn.\" \u2014 Gr\u00edmnism\u00e1l, Poetic Edda In the hills of Eryri, the croak of a raven in the" }, { "id": 70476, "title": "Scaling", "date": "2026-04-07", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/scaling/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T.S. Eliot, Choruses from \u201cThe Rock\u201d (1934) You Cannot Roll Out Wisdom Yesterday saw an interesting L" }, { "id": 70459, "title": "Epistemic Parasitism", "date": "2026-04-06", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/epistemic-parasitism/", "categories": [ "Polemic", "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. T.S. Eliot, 'Philip Massinger', The Sacred Wood, 1920 A Field Guide to the Narrative AdjacentThe channelling of ideas, the laundering of intellectual credit" }, { "id": 70445, "title": "A Game of Encirclement", "date": "2026-04-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-game-of-encirclement/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u770b\u5c71\u662f\u5c71\uff0c\u770b\u5c71\u4e0d\u662f\u5c71\uff0c\u770b\u5c71\u8fd8\u662f\u5c71\u3002 Before studying the Way, mountains are mountains.While studying, mountains are no longer mountains.After understanding, mountains are mountains again. Alice Jing Shan, whose Dao poem" }, { "id": 70430, "title": "On Misappropriation, Not Exegesis", "date": "2026-04-04", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/on-misappropriation-not-exegesis/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. Confucius As has been the case in many of my posts over the last two months, what started as a single post is developing into a series, " }, { "id": 70419, "title": "The Way Is Not a Map", "date": "2026-04-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-way-is-not-a-map/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "On the Dao, wayshaping, and the temptation to systematise what can only be walked Reading Alice Jing Shan\u2019s recent piece in her ongoing series Dao: The Art of the Long Game gave me the structure to wr" }, { "id": 70399, "title": "A summary and a foretaste", "date": "2026-04-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/70399-2/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "I spent the last two days, including my birthday, working on a NATO project here in Copenhagen. Great location (shown in the banner picture), and Copenhagen was in one of those magical spring moods, c" }, { "id": 70377, "title": "And here I am still", "date": "2026-04-01", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/and-here-i-am-still/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Ac wele fi yma o hyd \u2014 T.H. Parry-Williams, Hon Not darkness but twilightIn which even the bestof minds must make its waynow. And slowly the questionsoccur, vague but formidablefor all that. We pass o" }, { "id": 70342, "title": "The channel and the estuary: epilogue", "date": "2026-03-31", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-epilogue/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u201cSail on, a wiser man.\u201d The Sirens, Odyssey XII \u2014 Homer \u201cWe must look to our own conscience, not to the capacity of others, when we set standards for ourselves.\u201d Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias These fi" }, { "id": 70326, "title": "The channel and the estuary: 5/5", "date": "2026-03-30", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-5-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u201cI\u2019m gonna make him an offer he can\u2019t refuse.\u201d Vito Corleone, The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) \u201cThe lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.\u201d Mario Puzo" }, { "id": 70323, "title": "The channel and the estuary: 4/5", "date": "2026-03-29", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-4-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u201cIt\u2019s easy to know what you are against, but quite another to know what you are for.\u201d Damien O\u2019Donovan, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (dir. Ken Loach, 2006) The Silt We Came From There is a scene ea" }, { "id": 70311, "title": "The channel and the estuary: 3/5", "date": "2026-03-28", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-3-5/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Anthro-complexity", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u201cPeople either survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo. Few recognise the significance of the paradoxical reconciliation of the two.\u201d Stanley Johnston, The Gentlemen, Series 1 Episode 1 (dir. Guy Ri" }, { "id": 70301, "title": "The channel and the estuary: 2/5", "date": "2026-03-27", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-2-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u201cYour name is Guinness. That is not who you are. It is what you are.\u201d House of Guinness, Episode 4 (dir. Steven Knight, Netflix 2025) Between the Buoys The previous post made the civilisational argume" }, { "id": 70297, "title": "The channel and the estuary: 1/5", "date": "2026-03-26", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-1-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\u201cI think, Arthur. That\u2019s what I do. I think. So that you don\u2019t have to.\u201d Tommy Shelby, Peaky Blinders The Estuary and the Algorithm A post appeared recently on LinkedIn drawing attention to Beatrice F" }, { "id": 70232, "title": "The channel and the estuary: 0/5", "date": "2026-03-25", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-channel-and-the-estuary-0-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "Estuarine Mapping" ], "excerpt": "\"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.\" Marshall McLuhan \"The fish is the last to discover water.\" (proverbial) A Note on the Cultural Material This is a five-part series on anthro-com" }, { "id": 70217, "title": "\"Every step is a first step\"", "date": "2026-03-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/every-step-is-a-first-step/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I\u2019m not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.\u2019 Terry Pratchett, speech to the Alzheimer\u2019s Research Trust Conferen" }, { "id": 70194, "title": "The Compositor Removed", "date": "2026-03-23", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-compositor-removed/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.\u2019 Eric Gill, Art and a Changing Civilisation, 1934 How the organisational storytelling movement industrialised the c" }, { "id": 70186, "title": "The plays were already written", "date": "2026-03-22", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-plays-were-already-written/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.\u2019 Septimus Hodge, Arcadia \u2014 Tom Stoppard (1993) \u2018People make mis" }, { "id": 70151, "title": "Are we wrongly scripted?", "date": "2026-03-21", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/are-we-wrongly-scripted/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u2018Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way of giving us an understanding of any society, including our own" }, { "id": 70059, "title": "Spring Equinox", "date": "2026-03-20", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/spring-equinox/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The estuary does not choose between river and sea; it becomes what flows through itTawelwch nid yw distewi A summary of my posts since Winter Solstice 2024 Now that I am back to blogging with reasonab" }, { "id": 70077, "title": "Old wool, new fleece", "date": "2026-03-19", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/mutton-dressed-as-lamb-2/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cEvery revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.\u201d Kafka \"There are other people who develop something new and then spend the next 50 years of their life trying to re" }, { "id": 70065, "title": "A Lamb in Wolves\u2019 Clothing", "date": "2026-03-18", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-lamb-in-wolves-clothing/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.\u201d Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Towards rew" }, { "id": 70036, "title": "She Wants to Be Flowers", "date": "2026-03-17", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/she-wants-to-be-flowers/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cShe wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.\u201d \u2014 Alan Garner, The Owl Service There is a line in Alan Garner\u2019s The Owl Service that has stayed with" }, { "id": 70011, "title": "Anthro-complexity 5/5", "date": "2026-03-16", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-5-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "And even in our sleep pain that cannot forgetfalls drop by drop upon the heart,and in our own despite, against our will,comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. \u2014 Chorus, Agamemnon, Aeschylus (tr" }, { "id": 70001, "title": "Anthro-complexity 4/5", "date": "2026-03-15", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-4-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "To set you up near Theban territory, so they can use their power to control you,without you setting foot inside the state. That's why they want to keep younear their land, but not where you might live" }, { "id": 69988, "title": "Anthro-complexity 3/5", "date": "2026-03-14", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-2-5/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "It is still good to learn from a thought well spoken. \u2014 Haemon to Creon, Antigone, Sophocles (trans. Johnston, line 725) Power, Legitimacy, and the Ghost in the Framework The epigraphs in this series " }, { "id": 69959, "title": "Anthro-complexity 2/5", "date": "2026-03-13", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-2-3/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Think: all men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride. Tiresias to Creon, Antigone, Sophocles (trans. Fitts and Fitzgeral" }, { "id": 69942, "title": "Anthro-complexity 1/5", "date": "2026-03-12", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-1-3/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "You do not know what your life is or what you are doing or who you are. Dionysus to Pentheus, Bacchae, Euripides (trans. Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library, 2003) Moving towards a definition The other day" }, { "id": 69886, "title": "Differences?", "date": "2026-03-11", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/differences/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making", "AI" ], "excerpt": "\"It is the turning aside... to the miracle of the lit bush\u201d R.S. Thomas, The Bright Field (from Collected Poems 1945\u20131990) This post is part of a continuing March experiment in working with several LL" }, { "id": 69760, "title": "Differences Which Make a Difference", "date": "2026-03-10", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/differences-which-make-a-difference/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.\"\u2014 Seneca, Letters from a Stoic My 2024/5 Twelvetide series stalled at nine posts, and" }, { "id": 68688, "title": "Artificialising with hands and minds", "date": "2026-03-09", "author": "Anna Panagiotou", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/artificialising-with-hands-and-minds/", "categories": [ "Reflections", "Retreats", "Events", "AI" ], "excerpt": "I'm not an \u201caha moment\u201d chaser. I often see people deliberately pursuing those moments, and I firmly believe that they can't be engineered or intentionally summoned. But there is no one who doesn't en" }, { "id": 65653, "title": "The Pattern Which Connects", "date": "2026-03-09", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-pattern-which-connects/", "categories": [ "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The story \u2014 from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace \u2014 is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the" }, { "id": 65637, "title": "The Book on the Shelf", "date": "2026-03-08", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-book-on-the-shelf/", "categories": [ "Cynefin", "Sense-making", "Education", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "I have a copy of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management on my shelf. It was given to my paternal grandmother, Florence Wild, in 1911 as a prize for proficiency in dressmaking (advanced grade). The " }, { "id": 65627, "title": "The Container and the Landscape", "date": "2026-03-07", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-container-and-the-landscape/", "categories": [ "Polemic", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.\u201d attributed to Gregory Bateson: The Intent is Pelagian. The Architecture is Augusti" }, { "id": 65616, "title": "From Gestalt to the Estuary", "date": "2026-03-06", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/from-gestalt-to-the-estuary/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"in hoc quippe duoarum uiarum optione, in hac libertate utriusque partis, rationabilis animae decus positum est. in hoc, inquam, totius naturae nostrae consistit honor, hinc dignitas, hinc denique opt" }, { "id": 65580, "title": "Finding Things Within", "date": "2026-03-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/finding-things-within/", "categories": [ "Reflections", "Narrative", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Wanderer, there is no road; the road is made by walking.\u201d Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares XXIX, Campos de Castilla(1912) Fable, Spinoza, and the Narratives We Need I had a long drive back from " }, { "id": 62985, "title": "Second round complete", "date": "2026-03-04", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/second-round-complete/", "categories": [ "Walks & Bike rides", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "I\u2019m going to break what has been (and will continue to be) a fairly serious set of blog posts to record the completion of my second full round of the Wainwrights yesterday. The first round I completed" }, { "id": 62958, "title": "The gap that isn\u2019t there", "date": "2026-03-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-gap-that-isnt-there/", "categories": [ "Cynefin", "Complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\"It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to" }, { "id": 62941, "title": "\u201c\u2026 curled up with Spinoza\u2019s latest.\u201d", "date": "2026-03-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/curled-up-with-spinozas-latest/", "categories": [ "Cynefin", "Complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "\u201cSpinoza is a largely untapped resource for systems thinking. For example, his concept of \u2018conatus\u2019 (an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself) anticipates the concept o" }, { "id": 62912, "title": "St David\u2019s 2026 a work in progress", "date": "2026-03-01", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/st-davids-2026-a-work-in-progress/", "categories": [ "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being Spinoza, Ethics It\u2019s St David\u2019s Day, and time to provide the annual update on methods, tools, acronyms, software, and f" }, { "id": 62840, "title": "Description, Statistical Significance, and Terrain on Sensemaker\u00ae", "date": "2026-02-26", "author": "Kari Zeller", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/description-statistical-significance-terrain-on-sensemaker/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "We had been hired by a University to support identifying their strategic direction for the next five years. In the process, we conducted MassSense across their entire ecosystem. A recent conversation " }, { "id": 62827, "title": "Llwybr", "date": "2026-02-25", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/llwybr/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "My recent Twelfetide series introduced the idea of perdurability and linked it to our current work on Wayshaping.\u00a0 The original concept came from work by my good friends Mark James and Mushfiqa Jamalu" }, { "id": 62807, "title": "Acumen revisited", "date": "2026-02-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/acumen-revisited/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "Quotations", "AI" ], "excerpt": "Acumen (n): Sharpness of wit, quickness or penetration of perception, keenness of discrimination; (now esp.) the ability to make good judgements and decisions. Oxford English Dictionary Yesterday" }, { "id": 62784, "title": "Twilight\u2019s Last Gleaming", "date": "2026-02-23", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twilights-last-gleaming/", "categories": [ "Great places", "Sense-making", "AI" ], "excerpt": "Yesterday I started to revisit an old framework that predates Cynefin, one I used at our Vancouver event when we were working through the balance between AI and human decision-making. I\u2019m still not su" }, { "id": 62763, "title": "An old friend revisited", "date": "2026-02-21", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/an-old-friend-revisited/", "categories": [ "Cynefin", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "As part of our Vancouver discussions on AI, I returned to a framework first developed twenty-five years ago in the context of early knowledge management work.\u00a0 That contrast between cultural and learn" }, { "id": 62600, "title": "M&A 12/12: a new journey", "date": "2026-02-12", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-12-12-a-new-journey/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The methods and principles outlined in this series represent decades of practice navigating the most difficult aspects of organisational change. From that beer at a Datasolve management event to compl" }, { "id": 62573, "title": "AI and process: hope your road is a long one", "date": "2026-02-11", "author": "Anna Panagiotou", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ai-and-process/", "categories": [ "Reflections", "Thinking events", "Retreats", "Events", "Sense-making", "AI" ], "excerpt": "The Exploratory in Vancouver wrapped up almost two weeks ago, and I have been sitting with my thoughts and impressions of it ever since. I had the pleasure of facilitating it, which means I had very m" }, { "id": 62583, "title": "M&A 11/12: Cynefin as Meta-Framework", "date": "2026-02-11", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-11-12-cynefin-as-meta-framework/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The Cynefin framework is not a single method but a foundational meta-framework that informs when, why, and how to apply the methods previously described in a merger. It provides the essential sen" }, { "id": 62541, "title": "M&A 10/12: Mapping the integration landscape", "date": "2026-02-10", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-10-12-mapping-the-integration-landscape/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "In the previous nine posts, we've established the fundamental principles of anthro-complexity approaches to M&A: from understanding the living culture of organisations to designing interventions t" }, { "id": 62545, "title": "Can the Cynefin Framework help us navigate AI\u2019s impact on meaning?", "date": "2026-02-09", "author": "Rhiannon Davies", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-framework-navigate-ai-impact-on-meaning/", "categories": [ "Strategy", "Cynefin", "AI" ], "excerpt": "The Cynefin Co\u2019s recent retreat in Vancouver has got me thinking about whether and how we can apply the Cynefin Framework to the challenges posed by AI to \u2018meaning\u2019. Just a quick recap! Briefly, the C" }, { "id": 62533, "title": "M&A 9/12: Social scaffolds", "date": "2026-02-09", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-9-12-social-scaffolds/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "The EU Field Guide, while focused on crisis management, provides a powerful manual for handling a merger or acquisition, which generally has a liminal crisis-management element anyway! I will pick up " }, { "id": 62528, "title": "M&A 8/12: Story virus", "date": "2026-02-08", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-8-12-story-virus/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Of particular importance during integration is the nuanced management of organisational narratives. Every organisation operates with a corporate script, the official, sanctioned story of its values an" }, { "id": 62522, "title": "M&A 7/12: Story templates", "date": "2026-02-07", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-7-12-story-templates/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "In the chaos of merger integration, organisations often struggle to articulate what makes them fundamentally themselves, not the values printed in the annual report, but the lived logic that" }, { "id": 62516, "title": "M&A 6/12: Attitude mapping", "date": "2026-02-06", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-6-12-attitude-mapping/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "In the third part of this series, I talked about narrative in general and the use of SenseMaker\u00ae in particular. \u00a0I emphasised scale and the need to allow people to self-signify what their anecdote or " }, { "id": 62496, "title": "M&A 5/12: the use of archetypes", "date": "2026-02-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-5-12-the-use-of-archetypes/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "In M&A, the critical task is navigating the clash and fusion of narrative identities. Traditional, expert-led cultural assessments often impose frameworks and miss the authentic, subsurface belief" }, { "id": 62478, "title": "M&A 4/12: Sacred Story Books", "date": "2026-02-04", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-3-12-sacred-story-books/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Sacred Story Books (SSBs) are powerful collections of employee (or Citizen) sourced & interpreted stories that capture an organisation's true narrative identity. The self-signification of SenseMak" }, { "id": 62457, "title": "M&A 3/12: Narrative & epistemic justice", "date": "2026-02-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-3-12-narrative-epistemically-justice/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "This is a transitional post, moving into methods and tools for mergers and acquisitions and, by implication, major change initiatives that involve some loss of identity.   Many of the ones I will" }, { "id": 62443, "title": "M&A 2/12: Principles", "date": "2026-02-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-2-of-12-principles/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Yesterday, I provided an anecdotal introduction to the subject based on my own experiences over the years. \u00a0Based on that, and after many years of reading and conversations, I developed seven dynamic " }, { "id": 70682, "title": "A Cynefin Framework Lens: Where Machines Work Best and Why Humans Remain Indispensable", "date": "2026-02-02", "author": "Mahathir Rosul", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-framework-lens-machines-human-work-together/", "categories": [ "Cynefin", "AI" ], "excerpt": "As artificial intelligence and automation become more capable, a familiar question keeps surfacing: What should machines do, and what must remain human?\u00a0 The Cynefin\u00ae Framework offers a grounded way t" }, { "id": 62434, "title": "M&A 1/12: lessons from experience", "date": "2026-02-01", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ma-1-of-12-lessons-from-experience/", "categories": [ "Organisational Development", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Far too many moons ago, I was chatting over a beer at a Datasolve management event with a small group, including our MD Ian Taylor. Those were the days in IT when, if you had any computing capability " }, { "id": 62741, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:12 The Navigator's Return", "date": "2026-01-05", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2512-the-navigators-return/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "A Manifesto for Custodianship He told the story of his journey, and they listened \u2014 the Cyclops, Circe, the land of the dead. But elsewhere in the house, late into the night, a different story was bei" }, { "id": 62738, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:11 The Delta", "date": "2026-01-04", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2511-the-delta/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Emergence, Complexity and the Ever-Changing Coastline The wolves had given him the law of the pack. Bagheera had given him the hunt. Baloo had given him the words that open doors in the jungle. But wh" }, { "id": 62735, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:10 The Ritual Calendar", "date": "2026-01-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2510-twelvetide-the-ritual-calendar/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Perdurability in Time He had expected pictures, like the ones in books \u2014 things he could examine and set aside. But the spirit did not show him pictures. It brought him back inside them, so that he fe" }, { "id": 62732, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:09 Skin in the Game", "date": "2026-01-02", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2509-skin-in-the-game/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Sacrifice, Consequence and the Stories That Last Call me Ishmael, because I survived to tell it, and survival is not the same as victory, nor telling the same as understanding. But the story that cost" }, { "id": 62729, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:08 The Brackish Zone", "date": "2026-01-01", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2508-the-brackish-zone/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Where the Interesting Work Happens She had been told many times that the garden was locked, the key was lost, and there was nothing to see. But the robin sang fromthe wall, and the ivy was thick and o" }, { "id": 62725, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:07 Storm Channels", "date": "2025-12-31", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2507-storm-channels/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "How Disruption Creates New Pathways The entry for Earth in the Guide had read: Mostly Harmless. Ford had always meant to go back and expand it. He had notes. He had, he was fairly sure, a great deal w" }, { "id": 62718, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:06 The River Goddess & the River Pilot", "date": "2025-12-30", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2506-the-river-goddess-the-river-pilot/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Two Modes of Custodianship The Mole once asked the Rat whether he had ever followed the river all the way to the sea. The Rat was quiet for a moment. 'No,' he said. 'I know where the banks go soft in " }, { "id": 62713, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:05 Dredging", "date": "2025-12-29", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2505-dredging/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "The Necessary Work of Removing Obsolete Stories The cake had rotted and the dress had yellowed and the clocks had stopped, and still she called it her wedding day. There is no haunting so thorough as " }, { "id": 62709, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:04 The Cartographer and the Sailor", "date": "2025-12-28", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2504-the-cartographer-and-the-sailor/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Who Has the Right to Draw the Map? The chart showed where the treasure had been buried. It showed the anchorages and the soundings and the shape of the bay. What it could not show was what the island " }, { "id": 62706, "title": "Twelvetide 25:03 The Salinity Index", "date": "2025-12-27", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2503-the-salinity-index/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Measuring the Balance Between Tradition and Novelty Dandelion had told the story of El-ahrairah so many times that the does knew it by heart. But when they reached the high downs and the runs were str" }, { "id": 62701, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:02 The Salt Marsh & the Mangrove", "date": "2025-12-26", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2502-the-salt-marsh-the-mangrove/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "Resilience as Identity Through Storm He lay on the cot and slept. In the harbour, the fishermen measured the skeleton with a piece of line. Eighteen feet, nose to tail. The old man did not go down to " }, { "id": 62698, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:01 Where River Meets Sea", "date": "2025-12-25", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2501-where-river-meets-sea/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "The Custodian, Not the Pilot He had been a man, then a woman, then something the language had no ready word for, and through all of it the same self persisted \u2014 not the self that others saw, which cha" }, { "id": 62685, "title": "Twelfthtide 25:00 A Word for Christmas Eve", "date": "2025-12-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2500-a-word-for-christmas-eve/", "categories": [ "Christmas Blogs", "Narrative", "Wayshaping" ], "excerpt": "How a Twelfetide Series Begins It is Christmas Eve, and I have been sitting with this word for a fortnight. I came across it in the way that useful words usually arrive: obliquely, while looking for s" }, { "id": 62162, "title": "Positioning systems approaches", "date": "2025-12-24", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/positioning-systems-approaches/", "categories": [ "Anthro-complexity", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "For those of us who have been advocating the use of Complexity science in organisations, the current interest is bittersweet\u2014my banner picture from the ever-perceptive Gaping Void has multiple layers " }, { "id": 52286, "title": "SenseMaker\u00ae for Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning and Impact White Paper", "date": "2025-12-23", "author": "The Cynefin Co", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/sensemaker-for-monitoring-evaluation-learning-impact/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "Thank you both, Beth Smith and Rhiannon Davies, for your outstanding contributions to the White Paper. In a world that constantly generates data at an unprecedented pace, making sense of it all can be" }, { "id": 62191, "title": "AI-related posts", "date": "2025-12-22", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/ai-related-posts/", "categories": [ "AI" ], "excerpt": "\u201cAI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity.\u201d \u2013 Stephen Hawking Back in 2018, I wrote a series of blog posts in which I redefined \"AI\" by using the acronym to stand for various phrases, sati" }, { "id": 61890, "title": "2025/2026 Year End Training Promotions", "date": "2025-12-03", "author": "The Cynefin Co", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-cynefin-co-2026-year-training-promotions/", "categories": [ "Training" ], "excerpt": "The Cynefin Co hosts a variety of events, including members-only and public meetups, training and in house learning programmes, as well as partner events. All details regarding training and registrati" }, { "id": 61661, "title": "Granularity in culture change", "date": "2025-10-31", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/granulatory-in-culture-change/", "categories": [ "Sensemaker", "Culture", "Sense-making", "Quotations" ], "excerpt": "By this means, our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world... wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great myste" }, { "id": 61568, "title": "Invitation to incubate", "date": "2025-10-17", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/invitation-to-incubate/", "categories": [ "Retreats", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "In my last post, I talked about AI as a new form of animism through the lens of the OED definitions of a fetish.  This is not the type of animism that develops over time through an inti" }, { "id": 61514, "title": "A new animism", "date": "2025-10-13", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/a-new-animism/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "Quotations" ], "excerpt": "An inanimate object, natural feature, animal, etc., revered or worshipped because it is believed to have magical powers, to be inhabited by a spirit, or to be able to influence the material world or h" }, { "id": 61340, "title": "Wayshaping for substrate management", "date": "2025-09-28", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/wayshaping-for-substrate-management/", "categories": [ "Strategy", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "In chapter one of The Wind in the Willows, the Mole has been working very hard with spring-cleaning, and he is weary, splattered with whitewash. \u00a0\"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth b" }, { "id": 61274, "title": "The artist formerly known as \u201cretreat\u201d", "date": "2025-09-25", "author": "Anna Panagiotou", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-artist-formerly-known-as-retreat/", "categories": [ "Events", "Method development", "AI" ], "excerpt": "Some people who will read this post will probably have attended multiple retreats. Others might have attended or considered one. For all of you, your ear probably perked by the word retreat. You remem" }, { "id": 61284, "title": "Weaving risk and strategy ...", "date": "2025-09-23", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/weaving-risk-and-strategy/", "categories": [ "Sense-making", "WRASSE" ], "excerpt": "The launch of the Estuarine Framework almost three years ago marked a critical step in a decade-long journey to develop an anthro-complexity approach to strategy.  Like all frameworks a" }, { "id": 61109, "title": "The substrate of safety", "date": "2025-09-03", "author": "Dave Snowden", "link": "https://thecynefin.co/the-substrate-of-safet/", "categories": [ "Health Care", "Sensemaker", "Sense-making" ], "excerpt": "A few months back, I was asked to speak at an NHS event on the role of complexity with a focus on safety, broadly interpreted.  I promised to write a blog post at the time, and I am somewhat late" } ] }