Cynefin Basecamp

An entry-level programme designed to be taught by third parties

Overall learning objectives

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Who can teach it

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Preparation

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Structure

Session 1

Opening exercise

1. Participants share an experience of what brought them to the course and their learning needs and plans for action
2. In a reduced form of Silent listening each person is listed to in silence with participants writing down needs/ ideas and issues on individual hexies
3. the hexies are then clustered and each cluster is given a name
4. the exercise is used to illustrate the wider principles of Complex facilitation

Systems

• A SYSTEM is a group of interacting or interrelated entities that form a coherent whole.
• A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning.
• An AGENT is anything which acts (has agency) within the system individual, group, story, idea etc.

Three types of system are then introduced

• Ordered where the system constrains agents to a level where they actions are predictable
• Chaotic were there are no effective constraints
• Complex where everything is entangled with most other things as the system itself changes over time and as a result of agent interaction

Ordered systems are defined by:

• predictable
• control levers (NEEDS EXPLANATION)
• repeatable
• aggregation
• the whole is the sum of parts
• long foresight
• constraints tend to contain

Chaotic systems are defined by:

• no effective constraints
• volatile
• not sustainable - always temporary
• no foresight
• nature is used as a positive with MassSense in Cynefin (this is a note not a characteristic)

Complex systems are defined by:

• constraints tend to connnext
• modulated and disposition no linear causality
• managed by influencing their change over time
• some foresight of dispositional state and probabilities

====closing exercise

• What are your biggest insights from the pre-work and up to now?
• Which paradigms and worldviews do you think are no longer sufficient? Why?
• Is there anything you’d like to clarify?