Complexity and the Cynefin Framework - learnings for AoH - AoPL - The Art of Hosting2024-03-29T11:22:06Zhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/complexity-and-the-cynefin-framework-learnings-for-aoh-aopl?id=4134568%3ATopic%3A96909&feed=yes&xn_auth=noWOW, real time and digital ti…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2017-10-03:4134568:Comment:1102172017-10-03T09:01:15.442ZBhavesh Patelhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/BhaveshPatel
<p>WOW, real time and digital time...</p>
<p>WOW, real time and digital time...</p> Still appreciated Bhavesh!!!tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2017-10-03:4134568:Comment:1100222017-10-03T08:28:40.533ZRia Baeckhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/RiaBaeck
<p>Still appreciated Bhavesh!!!</p>
<p>Still appreciated Bhavesh!!!</p> Yes, so if you look up Ritual…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2017-10-03:4134568:Comment:1103372017-10-03T06:32:14.372ZBhavesh Patelhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/BhaveshPatel
<p>Yes, so if you look up Ritual Dissent, I basically follow that process. However after two rounds of that I throw in a round of Ritual Contribution by asking people to only appreciate instead of criticise!</p>
<p>Sorry it took 2 years to reply!!!</p>
<p></p>
<p><br></br> <br></br> <cite>Ria Baeck said:…</cite></p>
<p>Yes, so if you look up Ritual Dissent, I basically follow that process. However after two rounds of that I throw in a round of Ritual Contribution by asking people to only appreciate instead of criticise!</p>
<p>Sorry it took 2 years to reply!!!</p>
<p></p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>Ria Baeck said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/complexity-and-the-cynefin-framework-learnings-for-aoh-aopl?commentId=4134568%3AComment%3A104175&xg_source=msg_com_forum#4134568Comment103992"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>could you say more about this - sounds really interesting!</p>
<p>Ria<br/> <br/> <cite>Bhavesh Patel said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/complexity-and-the-cynefin-framework-learnings-for-aoh-aopl?commentId=4134568%3AComment%3A104282&xg_source=msg_com_forum#4134568Comment104282"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>P.S. I have started using a few rounds of ritual dissent followed by a round of appreciative inquiry when facilitating probe/prototype development.</p>
<p></p>
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</blockquote> could you say more about this…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2016-08-16:4134568:Comment:1039922016-08-16T17:45:43.209ZRia Baeckhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/RiaBaeck
<p>could you say more about this - sounds really interesting!</p>
<p>Ria<br></br> <br></br> <cite>Bhavesh Patel said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/complexity-and-the-cynefin-framework-learnings-for-aoh-aopl?commentId=4134568%3AComment%3A104282&xg_source=msg_com_forum#4134568Comment104282"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>P.S. I have started using a few rounds of ritual dissent followed by a round of appreciative inquiry when facilitating…</p>
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<p>could you say more about this - sounds really interesting!</p>
<p>Ria<br/> <br/> <cite>Bhavesh Patel said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/complexity-and-the-cynefin-framework-learnings-for-aoh-aopl?commentId=4134568%3AComment%3A104282&xg_source=msg_com_forum#4134568Comment104282"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>P.S. I have started using a few rounds of ritual dissent followed by a round of appreciative inquiry when facilitating probe/prototype development.</p>
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</blockquote> Bhavesh, great that you are p…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2016-08-16:4134568:Comment:1041752016-08-16T17:44:36.488ZRia Baeckhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/RiaBaeck
<p>Bhavesh, great that you are posting and contributing here!</p>
<p>and;..</p>
<p>it might reach more people if you post it on the AoH FB group or on the AoH emaillist; just my idea.<br/>With love,</p>
<p>Ria</p>
<p>Bhavesh, great that you are posting and contributing here!</p>
<p>and;..</p>
<p>it might reach more people if you post it on the AoH FB group or on the AoH emaillist; just my idea.<br/>With love,</p>
<p>Ria</p> P.S. I have started using a f…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2016-08-16:4134568:Comment:1042822016-08-16T06:37:16.117ZBhavesh Patelhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/BhaveshPatel
<p>P.S. I have started using a few rounds of ritual dissent followed by a round of appreciative inquiry when facilitating probe/prototype development.</p>
<p></p>
<p>P.S. I have started using a few rounds of ritual dissent followed by a round of appreciative inquiry when facilitating probe/prototype development.</p>
<p></p> Open Space in Snowden languag…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2016-08-16:4134568:Comment:1039912016-08-16T06:35:41.826ZBhavesh Patelhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/BhaveshPatel
<p>Open Space in Snowden language for FUN:</p>
<p></p>
<div><div class="O">•Theme but no agenda</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Disposition / Direction but no clear outcome except we should have some!</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Participants create agenda together</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Co-evolution</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Each individual participant decides what is best for them</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Distributed cognition…</b></div>
</div>
<p>Open Space in Snowden language for FUN:</p>
<p></p>
<div><div class="O">•Theme but no agenda</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Disposition / Direction but no clear outcome except we should have some!</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Participants create agenda together</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Co-evolution</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Each individual participant decides what is best for them</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Distributed cognition</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Participants are free to join any group and also leave the group at anytime</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Safe-to-fail probes</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Most people report high amounts coincidences</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Exaptation – because of messiness</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•The person who suggested the topic is kind of in charge but can also leave conversation</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>No formal facilitator – closer to natural conversations with freedom to allow</b> <b>conversation to flow – no agenda</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•Discussion notes captured and shared with everybody leading to the emergence of results that could not have been predicted in advance</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Emergence</b></div>
<div class="O1"></div>
<div class="O">•There are 4 principles and 1 Law that guide behaviour</div>
<div class="O1">–<b>Heuristics / Simple Rules</b></div>
</div> Dear Ria, thank you so much f…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2015-12-02:4134568:Comment:999862015-12-02T00:53:27.123ZRosa Zubizarretahttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/RosaZubizarreta
<p>Dear Ria, thank you so much for posting this conversation here. I don't really check out FB too often...</p>
<p>and Sophia, thank you for your post... it confirms my sense that different people (including different scientists) are defining these terms differently... which gets confusing especially when people present their own definitions as though they are the "only way" to understand something.</p>
<p>I'm learning a lot from watching the video -- just got through the first one, very…</p>
<p>Dear Ria, thank you so much for posting this conversation here. I don't really check out FB too often...</p>
<p>and Sophia, thank you for your post... it confirms my sense that different people (including different scientists) are defining these terms differently... which gets confusing especially when people present their own definitions as though they are the "only way" to understand something.</p>
<p>I'm learning a lot from watching the video -- just got through the first one, very slowly, as I wanted to take notes. And, I do have some concerns.... one is, it seems Snowden is mushing together processes which require "ideal person" with processes that include any depiction of "ideal future states", and dismissing those both quite quickly. As to the former, I completely get that we want to work with every day reality as it shows up, and totally agreed with not focusing on "ideal participants"...</p>
<p>As to the latter, I also agree that we don't want to prematurely define a single end state, we don't want to support premature convergence, as that allows us to discover a more "sustainable and resilient future which we couldn't have anticipated". At the same time though, it seems to me that the valuing function is inherent, in even being able to determine which emerging patterns we want to amplify, and which ones we want to dampen...I am currently reading Vickers, and his description of humans as "appreciative systems" who are continuously making sense of what is, and contrasting that to what they would like it to be, seems quite brilliant and fundamental, both -- and also, part of what we would be doing in a complex system, whenever we choose which emerging patterns to amplify and which to dampen.</p>
<p>(How THAT choice squares with "not being agents" is not clear to me at all -- really glad you offered a different perspective on that one, Sophia!)</p>
<p>So, back to "desired states".... seems to me that surfacing participants' "desired states" (as we do in both Appreciative Inquiry and in Dynamic Facilitation, albeit in different ways) can be seen as a part of exploring the fullness of what is already present, right here right now, which includes the human valuing function -- and, it's not necessarily an attempt to overdetermine the future at all, unless we were to simply choose one of those desired futures and attempt to make it happen, instead of allowing it to be another element in the larger stew...</p>
<p>I still haven't seen the other videos, including Senge's, so I will come back later, once I have done so...</p>
<p>In closing, I must say that for all of his self-acknowledged "exaggerating to make a point", I find it much easier to watch Snowden in video form, than to read the polemics in his social media writing... I had quite a strong reaction to his sweeping, over-the-top dismissal of experiential evidence in his "it works for me" blog post which I only read a few days ago, though you had posted it quite some time back, Chris... </p>
<p>The good part of that encounter, is it became a helpful example for a paper I was in the middle of writing (for a course on Praxis!) as an instance of the kind of attitudes that don't go very far in supporting a good relationship between theory and practice. Now that I have finished doing my penance by watching this videotape, I am glad to see that he seems a bit kinder in person... :-)</p>
<p></p> Hi Ria, and so I finally get…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2015-11-11:4134568:Comment:999512015-11-11T15:51:20.048ZSophia van Ruthhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/SophiavanRuth
<p>Hi Ria, and so I finally get to answering your question! Sorry it is so long, it is hard to be concise with this material I find!</p>
<p></p>
<p>I don't want to speak for the chaordic path and the cynefin framework definitively as whilst I am familiar with these processes, but certainly no expert in these theories. If you want to be sure how they are using the term chaos then perhaps you need to ask their founders. That said, I am happy to give you my impression and to explain a bit more…</p>
<p>Hi Ria, and so I finally get to answering your question! Sorry it is so long, it is hard to be concise with this material I find!</p>
<p></p>
<p>I don't want to speak for the chaordic path and the cynefin framework definitively as whilst I am familiar with these processes, but certainly no expert in these theories. If you want to be sure how they are using the term chaos then perhaps you need to ask their founders. That said, I am happy to give you my impression and to explain a bit more about chaos in the mathematical sense...</p>
<p></p>
<p>In a mathematical sense, chaos is quite specific (and it is technically called deterministic chaos). Deterministic chaos is interested in how a dynamical system changes over time. Scientists use very simple iterated equations to generate and model chaos. Iterated just means repeated over and over. So you might have a simple equation that models population growth where you start with a particular population and then run the equation to see what the population will be in the next generation. This output becomes the new input and is put through the equation again to determine the following generation's population and so on ad infinitum. Even though the equations used are often very simple and totally unambiguous, the results of these equations can be very unpredictable in the longer term and they can generate wild and seemingly erratic fluctuations which is called deterministic chaos.</p>
<p></p>
<p>There are some consistent features of these kinds of chaotic systems.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>A system like this is very sensitive to the initial conditions – this is often called the butterfly effect (this means very sensitive to small changes in the state of the elements involved – one more person added to the population in one of these equations can cause the future population statistics to change dramatically)</p>
</li>
<li><p>They can often generate seemingly random behaviour</p>
</li>
<li><p>they sometimes have 'strange attractors', so that seemingly random behaviour to the observer can be shown to have some pattern to it if you map it in a certain way</p>
</li>
<li><p>“even though prediction becomes impossible at the detailed level there are some higher level aspects of chaotic systems that are indeed predictable.” (Quoting Melanie Mitchell in her book Complexity a Guided Tour)</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p>In the last point Melanie is talking about phenomena such as the period doubling route to chaos and Feigenbaum's constant which I won't go into here much except to say that systems can transition between being static, having repeating cycles, displaying complex patterns and displaying randomness (which may or may not be chaotic). As a system approaches a transition to deterministic chaos, it will often have a repeating pattern that contains a higher and higher number of values by doubling it's period each time (the period doubling route to chaos). For example a dripping tap will drip with one drip first, then if you increase the flow a little it will go to two drips in a cycle, then 4, then 8 and then it will eventually become chaotic in how the drips come. This is the period doubling route to chaos and it is seen frequently in systems capable of producing chaos.</p>
<p></p>
<p>This is all getting a bit technical, and it becomes difficult to build links back to the real world sometimes from the very abstract world of mathematical chaos. Real world systems that show the conditions of mathematical chaos include convection currents, the pattern of dripping taps, the pattern of the human heartbeat and chaos is also present in weather dynamics (which is why prediction is impossible in the longer term). In the real world each system we can look at is networked with other systems and embedded in broader systems so it then becomes near impossible to be able to just literally transfer knowledge from the abstracted and simplified world of chaos and complexity mathematics and modelling to a real world situation. If you take the human heartbeat as an example, this is a dependable organ which whilst having slight variations in the beat to beat interval time which slow a chaotic pattern is still producing very dependable results. In this way you can see how there can be small elements of chaos blended into larger, quite dependable complex systems.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Scott Page's online course called 'Model Thinking' I can highly recommend in terms of how the knowledge generated by modelling of both complexity and chaos is being applied. <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking">https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p>David Feldmans course 'Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos' is a very good one if you want to get a good basic understanding of deterministic chaos in general. You can find this on the Complexity Explorer website <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.complexityexplorer.org/online-courses/22-introduction-to-dynamical-systems-and-chaos-winter-2015" target="_blank">http://www.complexityexplorer.org/online-courses/22-introduction-to...</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>So, before I come to talk about the chaordic path and cynefin, I want to point out that the terminology used in the complexity sciences is not actually consistently defined even amongst scientists sometimes. There are many different definitions for example of what complexity even is!! I consider deterministic chaos to fall under the banner of complex systems science and to be a form of complexity, but not everyone might think that way.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The term chaos as it is used colloquially means simply disordered. I think that this is the way that it is being used in the Chaordic Path and Cynefin. This kind of disorder may well be deterministic chaos or it may not. If scientists bothered to look for the signatures of chaos (such as sensitivity to initial conditions) they may be able to prove if it is deterministic chaos or not. In a way that doesn't really matter for the purposes of these processes/theories. The point I was making in my original post is that I think it should be called randomness or disorganised rather than chaotic when used in theories that are not scientific to make sure people don't believe it to be deterministic chaos. However, the term chaos is commonly used in theories in it's colloquial sense, this is just a part of how language has evolved. Whilst I feel it can be confusing and misleading sometimes, it is not actually 'wrong' to use it that way. The colloquial use was there before deterministic chaos was discovered after all. In some ways it is a small point at the end of the day, as I feel that both the Chaordic Path and Cynefin provide metaphors that are useful to people when working in complex situations. This is what we should focus on really.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I will just clarify one more thing. When David Snowdon speaks of systems being sensitive to small changes in his video, he is not necessarily only referring to the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect refers to changes in the <i>state</i> of individual elements in a system. There are also other sensitivities complex systems can have. Systems can be very sensitive to changes in the way that the elements are connected or the rules/constraints that govern how elements can operate in the system. Metaphorically, the butterfly effect might refer to changes that happen if one person is home sick from work one day and that sets a whole different chain of events in process in the organisation. The other sort of sensitivity I describe might refer to one small change in the rules governing how people can trade online leading to a whole other pattern emerging in the economy. In the first case the system hasn't changed in nature and is still capable of the same spectrum of behaviour it was before. In the second case, the nature of the system has changed and it might now display new patterns of behaviour that it was not capable of before.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I feel like I have typed enough for now. Phew! I will end by quoting Peter Senge from in the video of him posted above:</p>
<p>“What is all this 'systems perspective' stuff? … although we are familiar with the some of the lingo and a lot of the ideas … I think none of us understands what it means. Underline <u>none of us</u>, myself included. It really is the awakening of something that I think is very deep and will ultimately have a transformative impact on all of our institutions over the next 2-3 generations”</p>
<p></p>
<p>I agree with him 100% and I think it is very important to understand this and realise that these theories (when taken out of their scientific and mathematical arena) provide metaphors in the real world that can help us develop ways of thinking that are useful when dealing with complex situations. But - we should be wary of taking them too literally.</p> Thanks Sophia! Fantastic cont…tag:artofhosting.ning.com,2015-10-30:4134568:Comment:1001132015-10-30T13:26:54.609ZRia Baeckhttp://artofhosting.ning.com/profile/RiaBaeck
<p>Thanks Sophia! Fantastic contribution here!</p>
<p>Would you mind to explain me (and others) what's the difference of the word chaos used in 1)the chaordic path 2) Cynefin 3) how science uses it???</p>
<p>I think that would help me a lot, as I am not sure how they are different, although I have a hunch...</p>
<p>Thanks Sophia! Fantastic contribution here!</p>
<p>Would you mind to explain me (and others) what's the difference of the word chaos used in 1)the chaordic path 2) Cynefin 3) how science uses it???</p>
<p>I think that would help me a lot, as I am not sure how they are different, although I have a hunch...</p>