Me, myself and I and ethics and Briany and Cynefin and a load of other smartarses

I've been properly admonished and instructed to explain myself and apologise. In doing so, I shall be playing the "yes and" game not the "no but" game and therefore already there are too many "ands".

The cause of my fall from grace was picking on the lovely Dave Snowden during last week's System's Thinking Summit in Cardiff. Yes and at a time when Dave was at a low ebb, rugby blues, in more than one sense!

In my defence and for those of you who don't know Dave, that wasn't what either of us would call picking on. I bet I barely even scratched the surface of someone who's been tempering his philosophical armour since before the Romans arrived. Ethnographically speaking, it's why he's not distracted by the intervening millennia of man made religio-political social control fantasies. So, he doesn't need you to protect him from me. 

Anyway it wasn't me, it was your own fault, Briany! Doesn't sound much like an apology yet, oops!

By the way, Briany is not their real name, like me they enjoy their multiple identities and this, by the way, is only one of mine. Why should you have to spend your life stuck in the box you fell into as a child, when you can be anybody you want to be and not be awkward, eccentric, insane or any one of those other labels someone else slaps on the outside of your damned box. How many identities do you have ... answer is many, you simply don't allow most of them any agency. How can the hierarchical bastards keep control, if people go about with lots of identities? Oh sorry, rant for another day!

Back to the point, it was Briany who first showed me Dave's little boxes of magic. Now I'm going into dangerous territory, because I have to give you some Briany context or you won't get the synthesis and Briany is going to undoubtedly read this. Briany has a secret, oh shit, her we go! Briany has an IQ of 187 (personal best some years ago) and has spent most of their life trying to hide it, or as I prefer to say, hiding from it. For what it's worth some of you may understand our relationship better if I say that I was Briany's mentor. Over the years, however, that has become a wholly inadequate and inappropriate word. I may well be a touch more worldly wise, but Briany is my intellectual soul mate or to use the label they hate the most, my muse. Like a pretty little medieval thing that hangs around me while I'm working. Oh fuck, I'm now in real trouble! This apology is going to hell in a hand cart.

Yes and talking of hell, the only thing that I ever learnt from Richard Dawkins is: be careful what you focus on. He's spending a lifetime, trying to replace Religion (a word used for a list of righteous traits that allow an omnipotent one to sit above an unrighteous many) with Science (a word used for a list of qualified traits that allow an omnipotent one to sit above an unqualified many) in the hope that the world will be a better place. I don't like mystical religious dogma either, but also don't want to live in a world run by rationalist scientific dogma. General Systems Rule Number 4: you will get more of whatever you focus on, not better nor worse, just more.

Yes and that's the scratchy brain malarkey that sits, quite literally, at the heart of the Cynefin Framework. What's Dave focussing on? He'd probably say it's all about periphery not focus and I do apologise profusely for setting him up to tweet an answer that won me a free pass on the drinks round.

Some years ago Briany went to a couple of days with Cognitive Edge and came back all enthused with, "new words to explain the stuff I kind of knew but couldn't articulate". As you can imagine, from a statement like that - pens, paper, wine and several hours later we couldn't remember where the conversation started.

Briany is a very highly qualified designer of sorts and was intrigued by Dave's explanation of a 2 by 2 matrix, with extra fuzzy bits that enabled the explainer to explain that it wasn't a 2 by 2 matrix. Now something it took me many years to understand, is that Briany sees the world differently, it's the IQ multiplied by the designer inside. At one glimpse, Briany can see a thing, anything, from an apple to a cathedral in a splendid three dimensional thingamajig that can be spun around and manipulated in real time. Briany sees the whole form in the mind, almost like an entity in itself. Prompted by the right question Briany can then explode that entity in the mind and move through it in glorious Hollywood blockbuster style SciFi magic. The first time I saw this in action, CGI hadn't even been invented, so I couldn't understand what, how or even why bother, when I could just as easily walk into the Cathedral and see it for myself?

So there's Dave, intellectually dancing in his favourite pyjamas and Briany quietly exploring an imaginary three dimensional reconstruction. Later that night amidst some brown beer and blather, Briany redrew Cynefin on a napkin in that special Briany way and showed it around.

Now Briany (I'm in so much trouble I may as well go for it), has a tattoo of the word 'Bertalanffy' on the right buttock, just as a slightly weird drunken homage to the fact that wherever you happen to be, there's always a system just beneath it. Briany and I also both enjoy Ackoff's splendid analogy that we are in the midst of a change in age. My tattoo would say 'Boltzmann' or perhaps 'embrace uncertainty'!

Anyway for the best part of two millennia, the world has been subjected to the rise of mass religious order. No matter which book you read and I've waded through most of them, they are the same, based on a list of traits that are good, goodness is good and therefore in our ethic and badness is bad and therefore out. Context is inconvenient and absent. Ethical people abide by the traits in the authentic belief that it is, for the good of goodness. Unethical people game the traits for their own advantage and therefore, perpetually rewrite the ethics to remain ethical, as anything unethical is bad and therefore outside our dogma = aesthetic proselytism. Was that about religion or science?

Either way when you have a mostly uneducated population the best way to keep them ploughing their fields and paying their taxes is to say "don't worry about all those scary big unexplainable things; that's god's business he'll deal with that; you just keep ploughing; god likes ploughing; here's a list of other righteous things god likes; if you behave like this you too can be righteous; you will be rewarded; no not in this life; in the next one ... keep ploughing!"

When the enlightenment kicked off, rediscovering all the splendid human stuff that was around before the religions turned up, Locke and his contemporaries started to replace the mysticism with human reasoning. Trouble is, they didn't actually change the paradigm, they just started replacing the words and redrew a few of the lines on the same old hierarchy diagram. Important righteous stuff at the top and nice straight lines through tiers to lots more less righteous stuff at the bottom, like ploughing. But whereas those lines had previously been ideologically convenient, the enlightenment boys, most notably (in my head) Kant, demanded some empirical evidence. Leibniz actually believed that to understand the science of machines was to understand god: I rest my case your honour!

Whenever humans are involved, there does tend to be a touch of trouble with rewriting all this ethical malarkey leading to a kind of unstable short-termism. I think it's called Politics! But this is the key point of that last ramble, essentially replacing god with bod. It's the human component that makes the difference. Briany could see that in the mind when looking at Cynefin for the first time, there is a human in the middle, on the inside, constructing it in real time.

The explanation of Cynefin on a sheet of paper is a Cartesian two dimensional chart. Yes and, producing each unique evolution of the framework in context, in the real world, requires a bod in the centre ground. Sorry "bod" a colloquialism for a random ordinary person, a body. Briany noticed that the disorder element even in Dave's own description was a bit off-hand, kind of lazily dismissed compared to the intricate descriptions of the other domains. Interestingly, over the years we've noticed Dave pay more attention to disorder, with more detailed analogies and now the Cynefin diagram even has a new fuzzy smudge inside disorder!

This observation creates a classic system paradox. Because if there's a bod in the centre working out in real time how the agents and agency relate, there is a real transition from embracing uncertainty to deriving greater understanding (Boltzmann-esque). To produce the framework you engage in a cycle of emergent knowing attracted by uncertain stuff, a classic complex adaptive system. You use CAS to understand and produce CAS, even Dave says the Cynefin Framework is partially constrained and therefore belongs in its own Complex domain! So why isn't Cynefin a self fulling prophecy just like any of the other ethicalness dogma?

Briany believes that Dave himself represents the cognitive edge to the method, yes and that needs an explanation! Briany says that there is a fifth domain, as indicated, but it's not disorder, it's cognition. Remember, you don't actually own knowledge as an entity, you are perpetually immersed in the act of knowing. 

The cognitive domain is different to the other domains, because there is a conscious brain in it and so it has it's own conditions. Now before anyone gets all arsey about natural systems or man made ones, get a grip: all systems are natural, whether we make them or not. So people can be in a system without cognisance of it and in fact, this is the normal human position and it keeps Dave and me, in a job. However, when you are attempting to consciously understand and more importantly deliberately nudge that system, it's different from one that has no consciousness of itself. Without active cognition, Cynefin is a 2x2 categorisation matrix, like a million other versions of teleological four quadrant business bollox (best ever wikipedia page). 

With cognition Cynefin becomes 3 dimensional and profoundly connected to everything from apples to cathedrals. Consequently, some of the phenomena Dave attributes to the Complex domain is probably more accurately described in the cognitive domain for example, experimentation: preparing to enact ideas when in proximity to favourable conditions. This has caused me and Briany loads of booze and braincells as we all agree there's a fifth domain, but I see the landscape of Cynefin slightly differently to Dave and Briany.

I believe complex systems are always in real time, loosely akin to Husserl's bracketing, the complex system is the emergent live one, inside the brackets. Therefore the cognitive bod is always stood in the complex space making sense of the landscape, there and then, emerging in real time. Subsequently on Cynefin, what Dave calls Complex is what Briany calls cognitive, or my favourite word, tactical. It's a degree of entropy more than complex, or in other words more disordered than complex, so is not in the centre as disorder it sits as an expanding boundary between complex and chaotic. Hence complex goes to the centre where the bod is and the tactical domain is top left.

Tactics (unlike cognition which exists in all domains), are about casting forward in time to multiple possibilities that simply do not yet exist: 'apple flavoured' - while complex is now: 'tasting the apple'. In the past when sculpting a new Cynefin Framework and learning more about the dynamical boundaries and shallow dives into chaos and learning cycles, it became increasingly more apparent that there's a phenomenological component. Hence the Entspace model that Briany and I now use. Noema is not the right phrase, but there is certainly something about the 'reaching out of consciousness within Cynefin', reinforcing the systems axiom that agency is more vital than the characteristics of the agent, or the domain.

Cynefin is complete but not in the way Dave tells everyone and this was the inspiration for the taunting tweets. What Briany and I do agree on is Cynefin, or more accurately Dave is wrong, so far wrong, that he is in fact, right again! Yes and profoundly right!

So by way of apology, I humbly offer a 5 domain framework of the inspiring man that is Dave Snowden. Yes and for fuck's sake, please don't tell him about this piss poor apology that he won't be looking for anyway!

PS Briany, sorry ... wrth swsus ar y gwaelod!