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

The idea of a learning alliance is introduced

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?

Complexity

Joining up the dots used as an exercise together with the "Just because you can look back and connect the dots" quote from Boisot

Key characteristics

• complex systems are non-linear
• systems can be nested, overlap and interdependent
• have emergent properties
• dynamic, open systems that co-evolve with their environment

The metaphor of recipe & chef metaphor

There is a need for sense-making and a profound understanding of context