Shows / The Cynefin Co
Episodes
- The Cynefin Co
Review: Eric Wenzel on Cynefin
Instead of trying to establish a certainty that is virtually nonexistent in social contexts in any case, we should spend more time testing the reasonableness…
- The Cynefin Co
Handing on a torch
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. Ecclesiastes 1:4 (KJV) The first Cynefin Field Guide, Cynefin in…
- The Cynefin Co
Vico, Ginzburg & anthro-complexity
Carlo Ginzburg died in Bologna on 17 June this year, at the age of 87. His work and mine have no lineage in either direction, but the tributes to him led me to…
- The Cynefin Co
Map, don’t trace
Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT. Charles…
- The Cynefin Co
We Need to Talk About Taylor
In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911 Everything…
- The Cynefin Co
Shooting the Elephant
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) Mike Jackson’s case for eradicating elephants, icebergs and…
- The Cynefin Co
Back to the sources
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version (1611) In the first post in this series I…
- The Cynefin Co
Change the banks, not the water
We tried the carrot, then we tried the stick, and never thought to ask about the road. A fortnight ago I put a single line on LinkedIn to see how it would be…
- The Cynefin Co
Design in the field
Field Guide (n): A book for the identification of animals, birds, flowers, or other things in their natural environment; (also in extended use) a book (often…
- The Cynefin Co
Five years in the field
To live in the wilderness is the beginning of creation R. S. Thomas, in the spirit of his desert theology The Cynefin Field Guide has been in the making for a…
- The Cynefin Co
Why the Novel Has No Understudy
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 1904 A note after Dostoevsky and before Sartre, Camus, and Murdoch in…
- The Cynefin Co
Philosophy through novels: Dostoevsky
Twice two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground I’ve mentioned before that my ethics…
- The Cynefin Co
Novels for Philosophy: Dostoevsky
But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." Luke 15:20 (KJV) In my last post…
- The Cynefin Co
Neither cave nor plain
The arrogant claim in some aspects of systems thinking, to claim that the Systems Thinker is able to see both the trees and the forest, is, after all, (in…
- The Cynefin Co
Tensegrity & Lotus part 2
How the invisible structure quietly erodes In most places of work, there are a few people who have been around forever but their worth is not really measured…
- The Cynefin Co
Tensegrity & Lotus part 1
Places a Pair of Suede Boots Can Take You: Tensegrity, Lotus, and the invisible structure of organisations Last winter I bought a pair of chocolate-coloured…
- The Cynefin Co
On Salience
I'm pleased to welcome our latest Guest Blogger, Maritina Dimopoulou. In her own words, she is a clinical pharmacist by training. She spent two decades in…
- The Cynefin Co
At the autumn equinox
The equinox does not pause the wheel; it only marks where it turns in the spirit of Heraclitus A summary of posts since the summer solstice of 2026 The sun is…
- The Cynefin Co
Practice Theory and Anthro-complexity:
This post continues a series I started in March to explore anthro-complexity and how it differs from other bodies of thought. The series to date, with links…
- The Cynefin Co
First the Man Shapes the Tool, Then the Tool Shapes the Man
Recently I orchestrated a webinar along with The Complexity Lounge, where Kari Zeller and Dave Snowden were discussing AI and its impacts on organisations…
- The Cynefin Co
Old Wine, New Wineskins
"And no man putteth new wine into old wineskins, else the new wine doth burst the skins, and the wine is spilled and the skins will be marred. But new wine…
- The Cynefin Co
Damned Magician
No fifteenth-century bard wrote Owain Glyndŵr a marwnad. He simply vanished after 1415, and the poets who came after him, Lewys Glyn Cothi among them, could…
- The Cynefin Co
Matching repertoires
"What is your aim in philosophy? To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §309 Benjamin Taylor posted "on…
- The Cynefin Co
Testing for parasites
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out. Robert Frost, "Mending Wall" The bridge above is a packhorse bridge at the back of…
- The Cynefin Co
25 years on
The worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.' King Lear, Act IV, Scene 1 Five years ago, on the twentieth anniversary, I wrote about the morning…
- The Cynefin Co
Cognitive outsourcing 3/3: analogue asymmetry
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.” — William James, The Will to…
- The Cynefin Co
Cognitive outsourcing 2/3: legiblity
“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” — William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890 The obvious reading…
- The Cynefin Co
Cognitive outsourcing 1/3: the trade
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." — William James, Talks to Teachers, 1899 Adult brains…
- The Cynefin Co
THERE IS NO EFFING ELEPHANT
Who is the genius who can see the whole and knows it is an elephant? And if there is no such genius? How do we know that there is an elephant there? Prof Mike…
- The Cynefin Co
"Bad money drives out good"
Counterfeit coin spends as easily as real, until someone asks what backs it. The title is Gresham’s Law, the above is my reworking Simple is good, but too much…
- The Cynefin Co
The Lotus Eaters 4/3: The Inner Sun
"We have been disappointed; but disappointments will work for our good, if we make the right use of them.... Be watchful; be patient, be persevering." —…
- The Cynefin Co
The estuary, overlaid
"The river is within us, the sea is all about us." — T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages (Four Quartets) Extending estuarine mapping to decide where AI belongs This…
- The Cynefin Co
Is there even a driver?
If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." The Cheshire Cat, in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Brian Arthur’s…
- The Cynefin Co
Complexity in the Wild: What Leaders from across industries are learning from startups and each other
What happens when you send a corporate executive to advise a startup that might not exist in six months? Throughout 2024-25, I had a front-row seat to a…
- The Cynefin Co
No rosy-fingered dawn
The public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their Tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of the people's…
- The Cynefin Co
The Trouble with Text Analysis
AI can now code, cluster and summarise open text responses faster than any human research team. I have witnessed organisations almost completely outsource…
- The Cynefin Co
The Idiot's Guide to an Early Diagnosis
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense…
- The Cynefin Co
Hypermutating thoughts from Hay-on-Wye
The How The Light Gets In festival of science, music, comedy, and philosophy is a month into the past as I am writing this, and God only knows how far into the…
- The Cynefin Co
The next right thing(s)
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.Traveller, there is no path; the path is made by walking. Antonio Machado So there are goals in a complexity…
- The Cynefin Co
We don't need a better bestiary
"The river is within us, the sea is all about us." T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages An estuary, tended rather than defended, salt and fresh water and storm surge…
- The Cynefin Co
Epistemic hygiene
"The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion, draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and…
- The Cynefin Co
Just a fancier box?
Complexity is having a moment. It is also having its meaning hollowed out in real time. This is the first in a series of posts, prompted by one of Virpi’s…
- The Cynefin Co
Complexity Is Not Beyond Us?
“Matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II…
- The Cynefin Co
CBI KM 3/3: approaching the hub
"Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; if it is, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh…
- The Cynefin Co
CBI KM 2/3: map before you manage
"Old wine does not set easily in new wineskins." CBI/IBM Guide to Knowledge Management, 1998 I finished the last post promising two things: an expansion of the…
- The Cynefin Co
CBI KM 1/3: small wonder
"Small wonder that Trojans and Achaeans should endure so much and so long, for the sake of a woman so marvellously and divinely lovely." Homer, Iliad, Book III…
- The Cynefin Co
The paradoxes of the knife
If you want good roses, sharpen your knife and harden your heart. Patience Strong, The Glory of the Garden (1951) A second Gaping Void illustration today, and…
- The Cynefin Co
The Cross Is Not a Diagram
“Grace is not a strange, foreign element which invades us from outside; it is the secret entelechy of our own being.” Karl Rahner S.J. Entelechy, from the…
- The Cynefin Co
A Field Guide to Epistemic Parasites
So, naturalists observe, a fleaHath smaller fleas that on him prey,And these have smaller still to bite ’em,And so proceed ad infinitum. Jonathan Swift, On…
- The Cynefin Co
The Lotus Eaters 3/3: A Futurist on a Stage
"So they came presently to the Lotus-eaters... and there was no thought of return." Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) The introduction to this…
- The Cynefin Co
The Lotus Eaters 2/3: The Next Colour
"Nor did any sight of smoke, nor any sound... reach them from that shore; only the lotus, and the wish to eat it, and, having eaten, to remain." Homer…
- The Cynefin Co
The Lotus Eaters 1/3: of caves & fires
"Whoever ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus... wished to stay there forgetting all about going home." Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) The…
- The Cynefin Co
The lotus eaters 0/3
Whoever ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus... wished to stay there forgetting all about going home*." Homer, Odyssey, Book IX (trans. Samuel Butler) This…
- The Cynefin Co
Supermindlessness?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ — T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock It is early Wednesday…
- The Cynefin Co
Struggle and the Shawl of Wisdom
Fionn gained the wisdom of the Salmon of Knowledge not by seeking it deliberately, but by accident: a burnt thumb, instinctively sucked. From then on the…
- The Cynefin Co
Defining a Complex System
… whereas strong dynamic links among components (characterized as nodes) result in a “strong cluster”, weak links between strong clusters give rise to a…
- The Cynefin Co
The llwybr
"Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with fierce desire for ancestors, marriage and descendants. For everything there is an artificial…
- The Cynefin Co
The mirrorball
"You're not guilty of anything. It can't be that your life is already completely ruined." Prince Myshkin, The Idiot For a little while I was the team coach of…
- The Cynefin Co
The enchanting game
I had also observed fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that it took total possession of the man who had succumbed…
- The Cynefin Co
Finding Yourself in the Wrong Fairytale
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in." Virginia Wolf, A room of one’s own I send her a voice…