Cynefin & a girl’s birthday

David Snowden is a genius. Sense-making is his mission. Check out the essays at Cynefin Centre. Cynefin is Welsh, like Dave. It’s meaning is inscrutable. It’s Welsh for the Japanese word Baa. Sort of.
This story of planning a girl’s birthday party (Dave’s great with illustrative stories) captures the essence of why informal learning trumps corporate claptrap every time:

Imagine organising a birthday party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of learning objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would those objectives be aligned with the mission statement for education in the society to which you belong

Would you create a project plan for the party with clear milestones associated with empirical measures of achievement? Would you start the party with a motivational video so that the children did not waste time in play not aligned with the learning objectives? Would you use PowerPoint to demonstrate to the children that their pocket money is linked to achievement of the empirical measures at each milestone? Would you conduct an after action review at the end of the party, update your best practice database and revise standard operation procedures for party management?

No, instead like most parents you would create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviour, you would use attractors (party games, a football, a videotape) to encourage the formation of beneficial largely self organising identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early, to prevent the party becoming chaotic, or necessitating the draconian imposition of authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been a success, but you could not define (in other than the most general terms) what that success would look like in advance.

The Cynefin Centre has three interlinked focus areas:

SOCIAL COMPLEXITY: helping to establish this new discipline, applying complexity science to human systems

OPEN SOURCE: the creation of an open source movement for consultancy practice and theory based on social complexity

DISTRIBUTED RESEARCH: development of trans-disciplinary research based on emergence, participation and co-evolution

The Centre’s white papers (you need to register, but it’s free) are great conversation-starters. Check Art and Science of Story: Gathering and Harvesting Material, The Intranet as a Complex Ecology, and Just in Time KM: Roots and Interventions.