--- id: terms/cynefin about: label: Cynefin description: >- Dave Snowden's framework of five domains (clear, complicated, complex, chaotic and confused), each with its own mode of action and its own limits on prediction. tags: - Cynefin - complexity - decision making - sense-making - uncertainty - safe-to-fail - Dave Snowden depiction: terms/cynefin.jpg depiction_credit: >- The Cynefin framework, redrawn in 2022 from earlier artwork. Tom@thomasbcox.com, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. term: aka: - Cynefin framework - Cynefin domains relations: - predicate: cites target: terms/foresight-and-anticipation domains: - people provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: Cynefin - Cynefin.io url: 'https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin' - title: Cynefin Domains - Cynefin.io url: 'https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin_Domains' - title: About - Cynefin Framework - The Cynefin Co url: 'https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/' - title: >- The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world (Kurtz and Snowden, IBM Systems Journal 42(3), 2003) url: >- https://web.archive.org/web/20060918205828/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~brooks/storybiz/kurtz.pdf - title: 'Crossref record for doi:10.1147/sj.423.0462' url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1147/sj.423.0462' - title: >- A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making (Harvard Business Review, November 2007) url: 'https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making' - title: >- Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis. A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework (JRC123629, 2021) url: 'https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC123629' - title: Cynefin St David's Day 2019 (1 of 5) - The Cynefin Co url: 'https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-as-of-st-davids-day-2019/' - title: Cynefin St David's Day 2020 (1 of 5) - The Cynefin Co url: 'https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-st-davids-day-2020-cynefin-framework/' - title: The domain of disorder (ii) - The Cynefin Co url: 'https://thecynefin.co/the-domain-of-disorder-ii/' - title: Cynefin St David’s 2022 (1 of 2) - The Cynefin Co url: 'https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-st-davids-2022-1-of-2/' created: '2026-11-02' reviewed: '2026-11-02' reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed' status: draft --- Cynefin, created by Dave Snowden, helps people tell what kind of problem space they are in so they can decide how to act.[^1] Its wiki calls it "a decision support framework, not a method or model", resting on the view that there are few if any context-free solutions but many valid context-specific ones.[^1] The word is Welsh and is pronounced kuh-nev-in.[^3] Cynthia Kurtz and Snowden wrote that its literal translation, habitat or place, fails to do it justice, and that it is better understood as the place of our multiple affiliations: the cultural, religious, geographic and tribal roots that shape each of us.[^4] ## Origin The framework emerged at the close of the 1990s in the corporate worlds of knowledge management and organisational design.[^1] The wiki credits Max Boisot's I-Space framework as its first inspiration, and with its early focus on the difference between contexts where cause and effect could in principle be predicted and contexts where they could not.[^1] It dates the first reference to Cynefin as a framework to Snowden's introduction to *Liberating Knowledge*, a CBI publication of 1999.[^1] Snowden was a director in IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management and founded IBM's Cynefin Centre in 2002.[^4] In 2007 a project with Peter Ho in Singapore on risk assessment and [horizon scanning](/terms/foresight-and-anticipation/) led to the development of SenseMaker for what became known as weak signal detection.[^1] Cynefin is a registered trademark of Cognitive Edge, which trades as The Cynefin Company and dates its founding to 2005.[^7,3] The cynefin.io wiki was developed to support people using the framework.[^1] ## The domains Kurtz and Snowden's paper "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world", in IBM Systems Journal volume 42, issue 3 (2003), describes five domains, four named and a fifth, central domain of disorder.[^4,5] There the four were called known, knowable, complex and chaos.[^4] The old names, Snowden wrote later, confused the nature of things with how we know them, so known and knowable became simple and complicated.[^8] He then changed simple to obvious, since one can be simple in every domain, and in 2020 proposed clear in place of obvious, a change long sought by his co-author Mary Boone.[^8,9] The same post renamed disorder Confused, or Aporetic in the liminal version of the framework.[^9] Snowden and Boone's "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making" appeared in the Harvard Business Review in November 2007.[^6] A 2021 field guide by Snowden and Alessandro Rancati for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre gives each domain its mode of action:[^7] - **Clear.** Cause and effect are self-evident to any reasonable person, and constraints are rigid.[^2] Sense, categorise, respond.[^7] This is the only legitimate place for best practice.[^2] - **Complicated.** Cause and effect exist, but finding them takes expertise or analysis.[^2] Sense, analyse, respond, by applying one of many good solutions.[^7] - **Complex.** Constraints are enabling, and there is no linear material causality.[^2] Kurtz and Snowden wrote that emergent patterns here "can be perceived but not predicted", which they called retrospective coherence.[^4] Probe, sense, respond: probe with parallel experiments and amplify those that go well.[^7] - **Chaotic.** There is no effective constraint.[^2] Act, sense, respond: act to stabilise, then sense how the context reacts.[^7] - **Confused.** The central domain is the state of not knowing which domain you are in.[^10] Snowden writes that it is sometimes mistaken for chaos and that the match is false.[^10] People in it assume they are in whichever domain they find most comfortable.[^10] ## The cliff The wiki describes every shift between the primary domains as a phase shift, and between clear and chaotic it draws a catastrophic fold, or cliff, which people walk off blindly when they trust rigid constraints too far.[^2] Kurtz and Snowden called this boundary the strongest and most dangerous of the four, where "a perfectly working machine operates inches away from a devastating fire".[^4] Snowden treats workarounds and non-compliance in the clear domain as early weak signals of a system over-constrained and at risk of collapse.[^11] ## For a model of a place Kurtz and Snowden list single-point forecasting among the legitimate practices of the known domain, where repeatability allows predictive models.[^4] In the complex domain, they wrote, a pattern that has stabilised looks logical in hindsight but is only one of many that could have, so expert opinion based on historically stable patterns prepares people poorly for unexpected ones.[^4] They saw agent-based simulation as valuable in certain contexts but more limited when it comes to managing people and knowledge, and set out their reasons as challenges to agent-based simulation of human behaviour.[^4] For the complex domain Snowden advises probing in parallel on every coherent hypothesis, safe-to-fail, meaning that a probe which fails can be recovered from, and watching for weak signals of emerging patterns.[^11] The Cynefin wiki says the framework was not conceived to describe or predict the structure or functioning of anything, with the possible exception of movement between domains.[^1] Applied to a simulation of a place, its question is which parts of the place behave in ordered ways, where the framework counts forecasting as legitimate, and which are complex, where any link between cause and effect is known only in hindsight.[^4,8]