Finding your way in complexity
Cynefin, sensemaking and leading through uncertainty.
A half day on finding your way in complexity: VUCA and BANI, the Cynefin framework, sensemaking, probe-sense-respond and safe to fail experiments, and leading through uncertainty.
- Level
- Explore
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £129
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Leaders and managers in councils, housing, health and the voluntary sector facing problems without clear answers
Overview
Treating a complex problem as merely complicated is a costly error. The first half of the Immerse When there is no right answer begins by naming the world we lead in: VUCA alongside Jamais Cascio's BANI of brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible conditions. It turns to Snowden and Boone's Cynefin framework, with Avanti's own mapping of member and officer relationships from Dr. Jonathan Huish's Cranfield research. Karl Weick's sensemaking and probe, sense, respond follow, with safe to fail experiments and the NHS vanguard sites. Last, it looks at leading through complexity, from Heifetz's adaptive challenges to Edmondson's psychological safety and Taleb's antifragility.
Aims
The ambition is to help leaders name the problem before they solve it: telling complex from complicated, designing probes that are safe to fail, making sense of events as they unfold and leading with steadiness when the way ahead is unclear.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Diagnose what kind of problem you face using the Cynefin framework, including Avanti's mapping of member and officer relationships.
- Design safe to fail probes using probe, sense, respond and lessons from the NHS vanguard sites.
- Lead steadily through uncertainty using adaptive leadership, psychological safety and Taleb's idea of antifragility under pressure.
What you'll develop
Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:
- Distinguish volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and identify which of the four mainly responds to more information.
- Describe the five Cynefin domains and the response pattern each one calls for, from sense, categorise, respond to act, sense, respond.
- Explain how Weick's sensemaking reverses the conventional analyse, decide, act sequence, and identify when careful analysis still fits better.
- Explain why best practice and good practice fail in the Complex domain, and distinguish probe, sense, respond from the act, sense, respond needed in chaos.
- Diagnose whether a situation is clear, complicated, complex or chaotic using VUCA, Cynefin, the Stacey Matrix and the distinction between tame and wicked problems.
- Apply the discipline of asking which letter applies to which specific decision, including where political, financial and statutory pressures compound in local government.
- Use four locating questions to place a live situation in a domain, and distinguish a Complicated problem from a Complex one.
- Describe the four basic properties of a complex adaptive system and use them to explain why hunting for a single root cause can fail.
Built from 5 modules.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Foundations: Naming the World We're Actually Leading InVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity40 min
- 02The Cynefin Framework: Making Sense of ComplexityVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity41 min
- 03Sensemaking in Complex SystemsVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity39 min
- 04Probe-Sense-Respond: Acting in the Complex DomainVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity38 min
- 05Leading through Complexity and UncertaintyLeadership1h 16m