snowded.bsky.social

Stories, attractors and the ecology of the mind, using Le Guin as a narrative spine and rejecting the whole nonsense of memes.  A new blog post.

Apologies for the actual banner picture being replaced by company branding. I'm trying to find out what happened

 thecynefin.co/the-pattern-...

The Book on the Shelf - The Cynefin Co I have a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management on my shelf. It was given to my paternal grandmother, Florence Wild, in 1911 as a prize for proficiency in dressmaking (advanced grade). The ...

A blog post for International Women's Day, picking up on the Augustine/Pelagius theme using as a spine three women, my paternal Grandmother, my mother and my Grandaughter coupled with a theme of Manda Scott's Boudica and Roman novel series. thecynefin.co/the-book-on-...

The Container and the Landscape - The Cynefin Co “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972): The Intent is Pelagian. The A...

The Intent is Pelagian. The Architecture is Augustinian.

A criticism of dialogical work, stage theory, participative action research, deliberative democracy, neo-colonialism, Theory-U, cultural appropriation and a few other things besides

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From Gestalt to the Estuary - The Cynefin Co “in hoc quippe duoarum uiarum optione, in hac libertate utriusque partis, rationabilis animae decus positum est. in hoc, inquam, totius naturae nostrae consistit honor, hinc dignitas, hinc denique opt...

Another philosophical post - but an important one. It examines issues of the individual and the collective, the links between gestalt and anthro-complexity and more. thecynefin.co/from-gestalt...

Twelvetide 25:12 The Navigator's Return - The Cynefin Co A Manifesto for Custodianship He told the story of his journey, and they listened — the Cyclops, Circe, the land of the dead. But elsewhere in the house, late into the night, a different story was bei...

From the twelvetide series on wayshaping, perdurability & narrative through the metaphor of the Estuary, ’The Navigator’s Return’, using Homer’s Odyssey as the epigram. Contains the Estuarine Manifesto; seven key propositions for understanding wayshaping
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Finding Things Within - The Cynefin Co Wanderer, there is no road; the road is made by walking.” Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares XXIX, Campos de Castilla(1912) Fable, Spinoza, and the Narratives We Need I had a long drive back from ...

Still on my Spinoza theme. Contrasting our fable form story with the Hero's Journey as a means of effective communication thecynefin.co/finding-thin...

Second round complete - The Cynefin Co I’m going to break what has been (and will continue to be) a fairly serious set of blog posts to record the completion of my second full round of the Wainwrights yesterday. The first round I completed...

Reflections on walking & wayshaping in the context of completing my second full Wainwright round yesterday. thecynefin.co/second-round...

The gap that isn’t there - The Cynefin Co “It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to...

Picking up on yesterday's theme of Spinoza and systems thinking, but this time with a criticism of what I thought was an injustice to Weick on social media thecynefin.co/the-gap-that...

“… curled up with Spinoza’s latest.” - The Cynefin Co “Spinoza is a largely untapped resource for systems thinking. For example, his concept of ‘conatus’ (an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself) anticipates the concept o...

“… curled up with Spinoza’s latest”, an exploration of Spinoza, systems thinking and complexity science inspired by Dr Mike C Jackson OBE. thecynefin.co/curled-up-wi...

Twelvetide 25:11 The Delta - The Cynefin Co Emergence, Complexity and the Ever-Changing Coastline The wolves had given him the law of the pack. Bagheera had given him the hunt. Baloo had given him the words that open doors in the jungle. But wh...

’The Delta’: “Emergence in narrative is the appearance of meaning that no single story contains. A phenomenon that is easy to illustrate but surprisingly difficult to design for, and the difficulty is precisely what makes Wayshaping a practice rather than a method”

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St David’s 2026 a work in progress - The Cynefin Co Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being Spinoza, Ethics It’s St David’s Day, and time to provide the annual update on methods, tools, acronyms, software, and f...

Annual St David's Day update on where we are with various methods, tools, frameworks etc. thecynefin.co/st-davids-20...

Twelvetide 25:10 Twelvetide & the Ritual Calendar - The Cynefin Co Perdurability in Time He had expected pictures, like the ones in books — things he could examine and set aside. But the spirit did not show him pictures. It brought him back inside them, so that he fe...

'Twelvetide the Ritual Calendar’ using Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as the epigram. “The Wayshaper who attends to an organisation’s ritual calendar is attending to one of the most important and most neglected instruments of perdurability.”

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Twelvetide 25:09 Skin in the Game - The Cynefin Co Sacrifice, Consequence and the Stories That Last Call me Ishmael, because I survived to tell it, and survival is not the same as victory, nor telling the same as understanding. But the story that cost...

The metaphor of the Estuary, the post titled ’Skin in the Game’, uses Melville’s Moby Dick as the epigram. “The Wayshaper’s goal is not to provide the organisation with a better story but to increase the organisation’s own capacity for narrative sense-making”

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Twelvetide 25:08 The Brackish Zone - The Cynefin Co Where the Interesting Work Happens I have been circling the brackish zone since Post One, and it is time to address it directly. The brackish zone is where salt water and fresh water meet in the estua...

“Organisations that rush through the brackish zone consistently arrive at new stable states that are less rich, less adaptive and less genuine than they could have been, precisely because they have not done the work that only the brackish zone makes possible.”

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Twelvetide 25:07 Storm Channels - The Cynefin Co How Disruption Creates New Pathways The entry for Earth in the Guide had read: Mostly Harmless. Ford had always meant to go back and expand it. He had notes. He had, he was fairly sure, a great deal w...

’Storm Channels’, using Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the epigram. “In narrative terms, anti-fragility appears most clearly in two forms: the heresy that renews doctrine, and the story of failure that becomes the founding lore of future success”

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Llwybr - The Cynefin Co My recent Twelvetide series introduced the idea of perdurability and linked it to our current work on Wayshaping.  The original concept came from work by my good friends Mark James and Mushfiqa Jamalu...

An update post on the concept of wayshaping in organisations, its links to perdurability, and the Welsh word Llwybr, which means much more than 'path'. Links to an earlier post for those who want to sign up for the development of the WRASSE, which we can now get started on.

thecynefin.co/llwybr/

Twelvetide 25:06 The River Goddess & the River Pilot - The Cynefin Co Two Modes of Custodianship The Mole once asked the Rat whether he had ever followed the river all the way to the sea. The Rat was quiet for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know where the banks go soft in ...

'The River Goddess & the River Pilot’, 'Wind in the Willows’ as epigram. “The pilot’s orientation is to the passage within a defined time. The goddess’s is toward the system: the long-term health of the waterway itself, the conditions that make all passages possible”

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Acumen revisited - The Cynefin Co Acumen (n): Sharpness of wit, quickness or penetration of perception, keenness of discrimination; (now esp.) the ability to make good judgements and decisions. Oxford English Dictionary Yesterday I wr...

Another post in the series of frameworks to understand the correct balance between humans and AI, this time looking at acumen both as a unique human concept and as a useful acronym. As with yesterday's post, this was informed by my visit to Ukraine just over a week ago. thecynefin.co/acumen-revis...

Twelvetide 25:05 Dredging - The Cynefin Co The Necessary Work of Removing Obsolete Stories The cake had rotted and the dress had yellowed and the clocks had stopped, and still she called it her wedding day. There is no haunting so thorough as ...

Twelvetide series: 'Dredging’, using Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’ as the epigram. “A zombie story is not a false story. That is what makes it difficult to address. It was true once, or at least it was a reasonable interpretation of conditions that once obtained”

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Twilight’s Last Gleaming - The Cynefin Co Yesterday I started to revisit an old framework that predates Cynefin, one I used at our Vancouver event when we were working through the balance between AI and human decision-making. I’m still not su...

The 3S triad (sentience, sapience & salience) was introduced as part of my continued work on the role of AI/Human balance. This post also positions the importance in the context of my experiences in Ukraine (a week of teaching in Lviv) just over a week ago. thecynefin.co/twilights-la...

Twelvetide 25:04 The Cartographer and the Sailor - The Cynefin Co Who Has the Right to Draw the Map? The chart showed where the treasure had been buried. It showed the anchorages and the soundings and the shape of the bay. What it could not show was what the island ...

“... epistemic legitimacy: the question of whether a story reflects genuine knowledge of the terrain it purports to describe, or whether it is a construction produced at sufficient distance from that terrain to be, in the most fundamental sense, fictional.”

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Twelvetide 25:03 The Salinity Index - The Cynefin Co Measuring the Balance Between Tradition and Novelty Dandelion had told the story of El-ahrairah so many times that the does knew it by heart. But when they reached the high downs and the runs were str...

not the preservation of specific stories but the maintenance of the narrative infrastructure that allows new stories to be recognised as belonging to the same living culture. The question is never what happened? But always, what does this teach us about how to navigate?
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An old friend revisited - The Cynefin Co As part of our Vancouver discussions on AI, I returned to a framework first developed twenty-five years ago in the context of early knowledge management work.  That contrast between types of culture a...

Revisting an old framework which gave rise to Cynefin, but this time in a new context thecynefin.co/an-old-frien...

Twelvetide 25:02 The Salt Marsh & the Mangrove - The Cynefin Co Resilience as Identity Through Storm He lay on the cot and slept. In the harbour, the fishermen measured the skeleton with a piece of line. Eighteen feet, nose to tail. The old man did not go down to ...

Wayshaping, perdurability & narrative through the metaphor of the Estuary, post 'The Salt Marsh & the Mangrove’, with Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as the epigram. “The crisis communicator is managing the surface. The Wayshaper is attending to the substrate.”

thecynefin.co/twelvetide-2...

As an FYI, I will be in Paris from the 6th to the 14th of November for a Ring Cycle at the Paris Opera, so other than the 6th, 7th, 10th and 13th (from 1600), I'm free if anyone wants to organise something. We may do a public event, but we will then be looking for a host.

Twelvetide 25:01 Where River Meets Sea - The Cynefin Co The Custodian, Not the Pilot He had been a man, then a woman, then something the language had no ready word for, and through all of it the same self persisted — not the self that others saw, which cha...

Any 'chief story officer's role is: "Not to compose the approved narrative, but to tend the meaning-making substrate: to keep the estuary in the condition of productive tension that allows stories to form, be tested against experience, be sedimented if they hold"

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Twelvetide 25:00 A Word for Christmas Eve - The Cynefin Co How a Twelvetide Series Begins It is Christmas Eve, and I have been sitting with this word for a fortnight. I came across it in the way that useful words usually arrive: obliquely, while looking for s...

Rivers go one way. Organisations don't. My Twelvetide series — 12 posts, 12 novels — argues for the estuary metaphor and against the Chief Storyteller. The voyage makes the hero. The tending makes the home.
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Final post in the M&A opens up (I hope) some new pathways & opportunities. Very happy to talk with in-house teams & specialist consultants. We may create a field book. With very little amendment, it could become a generic approach to organisational change thecynefin.co/ma-12-12-a-n...

M&A 11/12: Cynefin as Meta-Framework - The Cynefin Co The Cynefin framework is not a single method but a foundational meta-framework that informs when, why, and how to apply the methods previously described in a merger. It provides the essential sense-ma...

Penultimate post in the M&A series now up, on using Cynefin as a meta-Framework, navigating the domains of merger integration and including what may be a significant update to the nature and use of the aporetic domain. thecynefin.co/ma-11-12-cyn...

M&A 10/12: Mapping the integration landscape - The Cynefin Co In the previous nine posts, we’ve established the fundamental principles of anthro-complexity approaches to M&A: from understanding the living culture of organisations to designing interventions that ...

Tenth post in the M&A series, this time on mapping both where we are, and what we know thecynefin.co/ma-10-12-map...