Idea for May 2025: cynefin

My idea of the month is cynefin.

A Welsh word (and I’m a quarter Welsh, so I’m drawn to this) meaning ‘the place where we feel we belong, where the people and landscape around us are familiar, and the sights and sounds are reassuringly recognisable’. In a word, home. It captures people’s sense of the physical, human, natural, social and cultural dimensions of a place – and how they all help create a sense of our identity. It’s a concept that’s now on the curriculum for all school students in Wales. (It’s pronounced kun-nev-vin).

And it’s also a concept in strategy. It’s a framework for thinking, devised in 1999 by Dave Snowden at IBM Global Services. You plot your world in five decision-making domains – clear, complicated, complex, chaotic and confusion. Unlike most strategic thinking (including sometimes my own) it doesn’t imagine a rational, knowable, neat fantasy world, but the opposite. And it prioritises action over thinking, as the best way to create order. There’s more in this Harvard Business Review article.