# The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World

*Kurtz & Snowden · Complexity & Systems, Culture & Context · IBM Systems Journal · 2003 · Open access*

This is the paper that introduced the Cynefin framework in its full form, the fuller and more radical predecessor to the Snowden and Boone Harvard piece that most people cite. Kurtz and Snowden open by challenging three assumptions they argue pervade management and policy: the assumption of order (that cause and effect are discoverable, so best practice must exist), the assumption of rational choice (that people decide by weighing pain against pleasure), and the assumption of intentional capability (that others' actions are deliberate, that every blink is a wink). These hold in some contexts but not universally, and the tools most managers reach for assume they always hold. Against this they set Cynefin, which they are careful to call a sense-making framework rather than a categorisation model: its five domains are not a two-by-two matrix with a preferred corner but a way of perceiving what kind of situation you are in. In the ordered domains, the known (sense-categorise-respond, legitimate best practice) and the knowable (sense-analyse-respond, the province of experts and analysis), cause and effect can be established. In the un-ordered domains they cannot: the complex domain (probe-sense-respond) is where patterns emerge from the interaction of many agents and can be read only in retrospect, and the chaotic domain (act-sense-respond) is turbulent crisis. At the centre sits disorder, the state of not knowing which domain you are in. The paper's most quoted idea is retrospective coherence, the observation that in a complex system a path looks logical only after it has stabilised though it was one of many that could have, so codifying yesterday's emergent pattern into tomorrow's procedure guarantees you will meet a pattern it cannot handle. For a corpus about psychological safety Cynefin matters twice over. Its account of the complex domain is the theoretical backing for treating teams and organisations as systems where you cannot plan the answer but must run safe-to-fail probes and let sense emerge, which requires people free to surface and question. And Kurtz and Snowden are unusually direct about the politics of this: they warn that in the knowable domain entrained patterns are most dangerous because a single wrong assumption goes unseen, that organisations facing disconfirming evidence tend to grasp at order and punish dissent until they collapse from the known straight into chaos, and that in their own sense-making sessions large power differences have to be dismantled first or people simply watch what the boss does. Its limits are that it is a framework paper grounded in action research and consultancy rather than controlled study, and that its richness makes it easy to apply loosely, a misuse the authors themselves complain about. (Text drawn from the 2003 IBM Systems Journal paper, 42(3), pp. 462-483.)

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/kurtz-snowden-2003/
- **View the source paper:** https://vdc.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Sense-making-in-a-complex-and-complicated-world.pdf
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=kurtz-snowden-2003

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