Cynefin Framework (Complex Domain)

Once we are aware, we thrive in Complexity

We created a series of experiments to nudge us in the direction of safer experimentation in programs, more support for associates, and transparency about what changes we were making and what we were learning from those changes. The first experiment was an “advice call”. The gist of it was this: When you did work that didn’t involve one of the firm’s leaders, (initially a group cringingly called “homeys” and now called “Cultivators”), you would schedule a small panel of people and ask them for advice. Here was our original formulation for the letter where we announced this experiment:

• You pick (at least) two people, not on the project group to be your advisors. One of those people can be any associate, but one will be what we have taken to affectionately call “homeys.”
• One thing Laloux recommends is that as you make your advice panel, you consider who is likely to be most affected by the work you’re doing (so if you’re doing a (Client A) gig, you might want to include others who have been involved with (Client A) before; if you’re doing a mindfulness workshop, you might want to talk with someone who has mindfulness as part of her or his personal expertise or brand).
• You have conversations with those people (at least one upfront and one after) and talk through the program and the issues above. You don’t have to take the advice of the others, but you have to consider it.

In the years since the advice call began it became the lifeblood of our organization. These rules have all shifted – some boundaries have dissolved, and others have grown. We were too leader-centric in our original formulation, and now there’s no rule that a Cultivator needs to be one of the advice-givers. We were too small in our original aspiration and imagined two or three people meeting. We quickly grew our boundary with the belief that more minds would be better. Now all of us are invited to Zoom in to every advice call, and each of us decides for ourselves which calls we are interested in or to which we can add value. Some calls have six people; others have 26.

Knowing that we were in the Complex domain of the Framework allowed us to iterate and learn about this experiment and have it solve challenges far beyond its original remit. We initially thought of advice calls as a control mechanism, but they quickly became emergent learning events. Now, these advice calls are core knowledge-sharing calls. They connect us to the work across the entire firm. And they connect us deeply to one another because everyone bumps into other people on these calls.

Our new frontier is opening these calls both internally and externally. Externally, we invite the clients we serve and the partners we work with. Internally, we are having conversations about the core ways in which we act as a community and how we can become a more deliberately inclusive firm. At the time of this account, these conversations also concern how quickly we should grow and how to handle our changing business model in a Covid-19 world.

We have additional experiments that have become core parts of who we are. And we have experiments that have gone nowhere, or ones that have been helpful and then just drop away over time. For a while we had a monthly Complexity Call where we just talked about the theory and practice of complexity. At first, they were wildly popular, and we geeked out on complexity theory. As these calls became less attended, we decided the time for them had passed. We have tried a variety of ways to encourage peer coaching calls, but none of these ways have been sticky enough to last. We realized that our advice calls encourage asking questions, but we didn’t have a place where people could share their deep expertise. Then we started “CLever” calls as a way for colleagues to teach each other about what they know.

More than just the nature of these calls, the way we meet is equally important and was enabled by what we learned probing the complexity space through Cynefin. We start every meeting with a “complexity check-in” – a question posed that everyone answers in turn, and then a second loop to have us make sense of the system that’s in the room. For example: What are the patterns we see? What are the outliers? What are the absences or silences – the things that aren’t said? We listen to learn from one another, knowing that deep listening is a requirement for taking in multiple perspectives in complexity. These conversations shape our capacity to see our system at that moment and nudge it toward a better future.