Ollie picked up the phone in his office. It was Raj on the other end. “Hey, buddy, are you looking at the email I just sent you?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Ollie replied, scanning his inbox for an email from Raj. It was hard to miss, with a subject like “COMPLEXITY!!! SCIENCE!!!” Ollie opened the email and saw a wavy diagram labeled “Cynefin.”
“Dude, I’ve been researching this complexity stuff that we’ve been talking about, and I found a Harvard Business Review article from 2007 by David Snowden and Mary Boone that introduces this framework called ‘Cynefin.’ It’s a way of thinking about complexity. And this framework is not just philosophy—it’s based on complexity science, and it’s practical, it’s usable.”
“Whoa, Raj, slow down. I’m looking at the diagram, but I’m not sure what to make of it yet.”
“All right. What we have here, my friend, is a framework that buckets systems into one of the five domains: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and, finally, unknown.”
“I see the first four... Where is the unknown one?”
“It’s right in the middle. It’s also known as ‘disorder.’”
“OK, got it. Go on.”
“Let’s start with obvious systems. Imagine a fast-food chain restaurant. The deep fryer station. There’s a very well-understood process of how to make fries reliably. It’s documented, and it’s highly optimized. There’s a best practice, which can be taught ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
