Sort the situation by its domain before you decide

Before you choose a response, decide whether the situation is simple, complicated, complex or chaotic.

Por qué funciona

The Integral Leadership Review reports that the authors draw on David Snowden’s Cynefin framework (a way of sorting situations into domains), which sorts unpredictable and predictable elements into the complex, the complicated, the chaotic and the simple. This page’s inference, not the review’s: sorting first matters because a response chosen before the kind of situation is known can be aimed at the wrong kind of problem. The review summaries do not map responses to domains, so this page does not either.

Cómo hacerlo

1. Name the situation in one sentence.
2. Ask whether the link between cause and effect is known in advance, can be worked out with analysis, or only becomes visible afterwards.
3. Write which of the four domains the situation sits in, and one reason you chose it.
4. Choose the response, then check it against the domain you named.

Evidencia

The Cynefin attribution and its four domain names are reported in the Integral Leadership Review summary of Garvey Berger and Johnston (2015). Snowden and Boone (2007) is an HBR article titled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”; its text was not read, so it is cited for existence only. (anecdotal)

The sorting step is only as good as the honesty of the first guess. Leaders often sort by how urgent a situation feels rather than by whether its cause and effect can be known.

Fuentes

• Integral Leadership Review (2015). Book review of Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders.
• Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007, November). A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review.

Error común

Sorting by urgency or familiarity, rather than by whether the cause-and-effect link can be known, and then applying the response that worked last time.