Shows / The Cynefin Co
Episodes
- The Cynefin Co
The helper must not enter the forest
"Ce poruncești, stăpâne? Mulțumesc lui Dumnezeu că a dat și vremea mea" "What do you command, master? I thank God that my time has also come." Petre Ispirescu…
- The Cynefin Co
The horse knows how to get there
"Music must not be approached from its intellectual, rational side. The way should be paved for direct intuition." Zoltán Kodály, 1929 My Process Work mentor…
- The Cynefin Co
Long before words
"A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it." Virginia Wolf Corina Enache doesn’t like labels, but for the…
- The Cynefin Co
Summer solstice
The solstice does not choose between rising and falling; it is the moment both are true."Trobwynt nid yw terfyn A summary of posts since the Spring Equinox of…
- The Cynefin Co
The Copenhagen Fallacy: complexity science and the organisations that keep changing without ever changing
I once worked with a client who was on their fifteenth transformation in as many years… Not their fifteenth project, their fifteenth wholesale attempt to…
- The Cynefin Co
Curation for those who usually avoid it: blogs to support you in SenseMaker design
There are blog posts that unpack the exploration of new ideas and insights, practical or conceptual. There are blogs that are personal reflections, mulling on…
- The Cynefin Co
Two Marys and (The) Mission
‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.’ — Robert Frost, Mending Wall Mary Midgley is having a moment. Metaphysical…
- The Cynefin Co
A Promise to Adam Kahane
‘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 is probably…
- The Cynefin Co
Verfremdungseffekt: strange, not distanced
‘Plenty of hope, for God — no end of hope — only not for us.’ Franz Kafka, to Walter Benjamin This is the third in what has become a habit rather than a…
- The Cynefin Co
A marriage market of ideas
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any sufficiently original idea in organisational change must be in want of a Buddhist antecedent. Jane Austen’s…
- The Cynefin Co
ToC 3/3: Understanding the Substrate
‘Each set of questions comes in from a different angle and needs a different kind of solution … There is no way in which they can be piled up into a sequence…
- The Cynefin Co
ToC 2/3: ontological shifts
‘Just so, at an imaginative level, many people are inclined to think that physics can reduce the muddled living world to an idealised mathematical form. Does…
- The Cynefin Co
ToC 1/3: Foreclosing the Territory
‘The truth is, of course, that no map shows everything. Each map concentrates on answering a particular set of questions. Each map “explains” the whole only in…
- The Cynefin Co
A Trialectic for organisational practice & coaching
"The system does not lack what you think it lacks. The question is what you are willing to risk becoming in the process of being" For some years, I have…
- The Cynefin Co
Edgar Morin (1921–2026): A Completed Life
It is your footsteps that make the path, and nothing else. Antonio Machado I was present, as a very minor and peripheral figure, at one of the…
- The Cynefin Co
Of Poachers and Gamekeepers
The Senchus Mór, the great compendium of early Irish law compiled in the eighth century, states that blotches would appear on a jurist’s cheek if he deviated…
- The Cynefin Co
Karl Weick (1936–2026)
argue as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong Karl Weick The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969) Karl Weick died on 21 May, aged 89. He can…
- The Cynefin Co
Common Ground, Uncommon Selves
This stranger, whose name I do not know, has come to my house in his travels from east or west. He asks for his passage home, and seeks our confirmation. Let…
- The Cynefin Co
The Consciousness-Upgrade Industry
“Those who ate the honey-sweet lotus fruit had no longer any wish to bring back word or to return.” Homer, Odyssey IX (tr. A.S. Kline) This is a post I have…
- The Cynefin Co
Peter Checkland (1930–2026)
"We should never say something in the world: 'it is a system'; only: 'it may be described as a system.'" Checkland, P. (1983). O.R. and the Systems Movement…
- The Cynefin Co
From AI to AIR
What Learning Systems Fail to Register A learning system depends on what it has learned to register as meaningful, reproducible, and actionable. If a…
- The Cynefin Co
When Letters Turned into Chicken Wings: Pinyin, Tone Marks, and Interface Failure
A Small Experiment at Home Earlier in the Dao: The Art of the Long Game series, I described Dao as a living interface in language. This piece stays close to…
- The Cynefin Co
The Less-Known Partner of Dao: Li (理)
First, a few words about the author: Dr Alice Jing Shan is the founder of ScholarLand Ltd, originator of Relational Dynamics™, and an independent researcher…
- The Cynefin Co
"Come hear the music play"
"We hope we are not the last cabaret. We are one of the first conversations." From now on, I am going to take a pause from blogging for anywhere between 3 and…
- The Cynefin Co
Three without resolution?
“The pattern which connects.” — Gregory Bateson This series began with a provocation from Plato’s Sophist: three kinds, each irreducible to the others, that is…
- The Cynefin Co
Conditions, Not Conclusions
The practitioner does not supply what the system lacks.The practitioner creates conditions in which what is already present becomes operative. This is the…
- The Cynefin Co
Neither Repair nor Revolution
The object of any change programme is to ensure that there is never another one? This is the fourth in a series on the trialectics. For an introduction to the…
- The Cynefin Co
The Shape of Knowing
We evolved to make sense of a world that does not come with explanations attached. This is the third in a series on the trialectics. For an introduction to the…
- The Cynefin Co
What We Cannot Say
What we know is not a thing we possess. It is a capacity we enact. This is the second in a series on the trialectics. For an introduction to the trialectic…
- The Cynefin Co
Decomposition and Recombination
The question is never whether you want more of what works. The question is what "more" means in a system that is not a machine. This is the first in a series…
- The Cynefin Co
Trialectics, or thinking in threes
"Three kinds, each irreducible to the others. That is where thinking must begin." — after Plato, Sophist Most of the conceptual tools we reach for when we want…