Christmas is over and we now move on to the New Year celebration. With a general consensus as to its secular nature, we are fortunately not subjected to wringing hands about any wars against it.  We do, however, have to deal with the seemingly unending ‘Best of 2011’ lists and talk about resolutions for the new year (as well as the Mayan prophecy about the end of world).

There is nothing terribly wrong with all that.  In fact, there is definitely a value in taking time to reflect on what has transpired and ponder how we could be better in the unfolding of our lives just around the corner. Yet, while we generally understand the arbitrary nature of the decision about where to mark the shift between one calendar year and the next, it does reflect an impulse (embedded within that amorphous thing known as human nature?) to perceive our lives as a series of autonomous, discrete segments; a desire for a clear and real closure and the beginning of something new.

I bring this up because some recent discussions here (in particular Destor’s blog on poverty) and elsewhere have me thinking about, among other things, how we think about the problems and issues we face in our communities and country (and around the globe).  More specifically, the fundamental assumptions, those conscious or beneath the surface, about the dynamics of life, and how this thing we call society unfolds.  One offshoot of this is the implications it has about our assumptions regarding human nature.  Another offshoot, which I want to touch on here, is the implications it has on how we perceive socio-economic (and therefore political) problems or issues.

I have also begun to slowly move my way through Douglas Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop.  This has brought back to the forefront of my mind systems and, more specifically, the notion of complex adaptive systems.  This topic alone is more than one blog can contain (especially when this topic moves toward explaining consciousness itself), so I will not attempt to provide some comprehensive summary of this notion (nor assume that I am telling anyone something they don’t already know). 

What I want to touch on that when we discuss and ponder the cause of and the solutions to issues like poverty or how government can be more effective, we are dealing with complex adaptive systems: those wildly dynamic networks of interactions and relationships (as opposed to aggregations of static entities) whose individual and collective behavior changes as a result of experience.  

One of my personal techniques to writing a blog, given to my proclivity to shoot off into a multitude of directions and then to try to synthesize the strands together (thus driving myself into a frustrated focal collapse) is to find a picture from the web to place at the beginning of the blog.  The picture provides an anchor of sorts in this regard, if not for any reason other than for me to inquiry what it is about the picture that resonated with me, given the broad topic I had taken on.  At the same time while searching through the various images the search engine popped up, I come across web sites I would otherwise never have come across.

This time around while searching for my loop image (the one used was found after completing this blog), I came across some sites that dealt with the Cynefin framework, which was originally developed in 1999 in the context of knowledge management and organizational strategy by Dave Snowden.  I had come across it before back around 2000 as I was doing some work for the organization I was working with at the time, but have since forgotten about it.

This framework touches upon what I mind was wandering around:

“the Cynefin framework draws on research into complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive science, anthropology and narrative patterns, as well as evolutionary psychology. It "explores the relationship between man, experience and context" and proposes new approaches to communication, decision-making, policy-making and knowledge management in complex social environments. ”

Partly as a little aside, and as an example of the quirkiness of human nature, I took a mild pleasure from the fact Cynefin is a Welsh word, being partly Welsh myself and there is not much attributed to my people in this country.  In the portion of the wiki summary that covered the translation of word and why Snowden used this word nicely covers the richness of the subject:

[the word] is commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place', although this fails to convey its full meaning. A more complete translation of the word would be that it conveys the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we can only be partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc. The term was chosen by the Welsh scholar Dave Snowden to illustrate the evolutionary nature of complex systems, including their inherent uncertainty. The name is a reminder that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by our experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience, and through collective experience, such as stories or music.

As a bit of a tangent to all this (because this blog isn’t quite long enough), as I was exploring around the web to see what was there on this approach, I came across this summary of Snowden and Mary Boone’s Leader’s Framework for Decision Making in the Harvard Business Review:

Snowden and Boone have formed a new perspective on leadership and decision making that's based on complexity science. The result is the Cynefin framework, which helps executives sort issues into five contexts. Simple contexts are characterized by stability and cause-and-effect relationships that are clear to everyone. Often, the right answer is self-evident. In this realm of "known knowns," leaders must first assess the facts of a situation--that is, "sense" it--then categorize and respond to it. Complicated contexts may contain multiple right answers, and though there is a clear relationship between cause and effect, not everyone can see it. This is the realm of "known unknowns." Here, leaders must sense, analyze, and respond. In a complex context, right answers can't be ferreted out at all; rather, instructive patterns emerge if the leader conducts experiments that can safely fail. This is the realm of "unknown unknowns," where much of contemporary business operates. Leaders in this context need to probe first, then sense, and then respond. In a chaotic context, searching for right answers is pointless. The relationships between cause and effect are impossible to determine because they shift constantly and no manageable patterns exist. This is the realm of unknowables (the events of September 11, 2001, fall into this category). In this domain, a leader must first act to establish order, sense where stability is present, and then work to transform the situation from chaos to complexity. The fifth context, disorder, applies when it is unclear which of the other four contexts is predominant. The way out is to break the situation into its constituent parts and assign each to one of the other four realms. Leaders can then make decisions and intervene in contextually appropriate ways.

Now as you read that last passage, you might be like me and remember a time when you heard someone else talk about this. A blast from the past, so to say.  It also reminded of a Slate article which turned it into a poem:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Rummy was given a bit of grief on the blogosphere for this little diddy.  It was offered as one more example of the twisted and nonsensical intelligence of the Bush administration and/or their endless attempts to obfuscate and otherwise keep everyone in the fog of politics.  Yet there is a truth to what he says.  At the time, as much as I detested the man and his buddy Cheney, in this particular instance I felt he was articulating a view of how we should approach our understanding of the world and the situational contexts within which we find ourselves having to making decisions as being pretty much right on.  A common error we make is to disregard something because of the messenger.

The video below gives a nice little summary of the four domains of the Cynefin model:

There are a lot of strands that come off this video.  One which is particular interesting to me is the role story telling plays in this.  But I want to take some time to develop my thoughts about this facet.  The issue I want to touch on briefly in this ramble is the four domains.  Namely, our proclivity to see the problems as being either belonging to the Simple Domain or the Complicated Domain, where the cause and effect is either obvious or emerges after a little analysis.  When we face these kind of problems and issues, we can easily apply best or good practices practices already known within the given field, be it organizational human resources or watershed management.

This is not say that people don’t realize there are problems or issues in the Complex Domain, when the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, or the Chaotic Domain, where there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level.  But these kinds of problems and issues require known solutions which either emerge as we deal with the problems and issues, or require new and un-thought of solutions.  It means for at least the moment we do not know what needs to be or could be done with a little thought or research to ensure a relatively good chance of success. 

It is this inherent uncertainty of complex systems, adaptive or otherwise, that makes life and society so scary and exciting, the blessing and the curse.  We tend, however, to see them through the curse angle, at least as initial response.  From an evolutionary (thus, survival) perspective this would make sense.  If the matter is one of life and death, one would have to be a tad crazy to want the solution to not be readily available for the taking.

The discomfort which comes from discovering one is confronted with a problem or issue in either the Complex or Chaotic domain creates an impulse, sometimes to the level of denial, that we are indeed facing such problems and issues.  Life would be so much easier if all of them would be Simple or Complex problems and issues.

Moreover, that amorphous human nature and the very structure of language through which we perceive and understand compels us to see the world through the binary framework.  Like a rock rolling back down to the low point in the valley, our minds will return to the either this or that mode of understanding the world.  Dark or light, heavy or light, man or woman, good or bad.  The list goes on and on.  Consequently, if we allow our minds to go with the flow, we tend to see problems and issues as either solvable or unsolvable. 

The fifth domain of the Cynefin approach is Disorder, where we don’t know what causality exists (obviously, if from a physics point of view if nothing else, there are always some causality at work), at least in terms of being able to find a way to deal with it.  The multitude of problems and issues are reduced to either those with which we can deal and those with which we must just let be.

Confronted with something like poverty or how government conducts itself, we, at least in the back of our minds, if we are not careful and thoughtful, will attempt to categorize it as either dealable or non-dealable.  And if we deep down don’t want to throw up our hands in despair and claim that there is nothing we can do about either one, we categorize them as a problem or issue with we can deal.  And if we are not careful and thoughtful, a desire for that which is comfortable drives us to see with what we believe we need to deal as being simple or at the very least complicated. 

I should probably heed the wisdom of Flavius and not write too much (probably a little too late for that), so I will try to wrap this up and bring this full circle. 

A key component of the complex (adaptive) system(s), is the feedback loop.  This means both negative (damping) and positive (amplifying) feedback exist, and these effects of an element's behavior are fed back to in such a way that the element itself is altered – thus altering future outputs.

When we look at the challenges presented by issues like poverty in America or how our government operates, we are dealing a multitude of complex (adaptive) systems, up and down the scale, with complicated nesting and fusions between them.  Attempting to untangle them enough to get something close to implementing a successful intervention is almost impossible.  It is easy to fall into despair, or to seek some approach that tells us what we are dealing with is just a simple or complicated problem, the answers right there in front of us.

But we can deal with those nasty complex and chaotic problems.  It takes a little more work for sure, and the willingness to exist for a least few moments or two, in a place where the ground shifts beneath our feet, where the loops spread out and turn in around us in a dazzling display.  It is like that moment when we are just beginning that activity called therapy, and that concrete thing we called “I” suddenly begin to break apart, its boundaries dissolving into a mist with the world around it. 

We can find comfort in bring to a close the year of 2011, and the start of  a new beginning in the year of 2012. We can take the time to reflect on that which has passed and ponder the future of what will be.  But what will be was contained in that past, and what was lives in that which will be.  If we are to really make some progress, to deal with the critical challenges our communities face, then we need to also see, as we count down to and reach zero, which ushers in the first moment of  January 1^st, 2012, we are emerging into just another (complex) moment, an expression of what past and seed for what will become. 

Zen master Dogen once said, “the moon inherits the moon.”  How true. Something to celebrate.

Don't fear the loop.