Hello again and welcome back to the Educated Leadership
blog! It’s week eight and we are examining a system for classifying the context
in which a decision must be made. The system is called the Cynefin Framework
and was described in an article in the November 2007 Harvard Business Review
titled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” (Snowden and Boone).
The framework is divided into five domains. In increasing
order of complexity and entropy, they are: simple, complicated, complex,
chaotic, and disorder.
Simple decisions are the type that is sensed and then a
response is made. The answer seems almost immediately apparent. As an example,
I think of the action one takes when approaching a stop sign when driving.
Complicated decisions are sensed, some analysis is required,
and then a response is made. The answer may be dependent on some variables, but
there is no doubt an answer will be discovered. This reminds me of what sorting
mail must be like for a postal worker. They read the address and decide which
box the mail goes into for delivery or return.
Complex decisions are those to which an answer is not
readily apparent. There must be probes made, the decision sensed, and then a
response made. Interestingly the complex situations appear to have been merely
complicated, often, upon hindsight. However, at the time of presentation, the
path to an answer is not immediately evident. It may not even be clear, until
time and investigation are applied, that there will be an answer to a complex
problem. At my work, we face complex decisions when dealing with customer
requests that are outside of our normal offerings. Many times, our ability to
satisfy the request requires extensive investigation and coordination before we
can reply. Our answer to the customer remains in doubt for periods of time and
our ability to agree is never totally a given.
Chaotic situations require a leader to act in the best way
they can initially. The goal here, frankly, is to buy time by mitigating the
most emergent aspects of the situation to allow one to sense the holistic
situation and then respond accordingly. This is the rare time that a leader has
to make the quick answer from instinct, experience, or just pure intuition.
Emergent situations that are out of the ordinary are the easiest examples to
cite. Many Americans above the age of 30 will flash to September 11, 2001 when
asked about a time they faced that was unlike any other. When facing chaos, the ultimate goal for the
leader is to drive the situation as safely and quickly as possible toward a
lower state of entropy, and thus, manageability. If one remains in the
dictatorial mode too long, the probability of generating more complex or
chaotic situations increases. Servant and transformational leaders will
definitely know that they need to be directive only as long as absolutely necessary.
I know, because I ascribe to those leadership styles.
In the middle of those four levels of entropy lies an area
of disorder. In this area, decisions cannot be made. It is up to the leader to
break the situation down into parts that can be classified and handled via one
of the other four classifications. When faced with a situation like this, I am
reminded of the adage, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Tackle
the situations that are readily identifiable and start working on classifying
the rest.
In the aviation operation of which I am in charge, we are
constantly looking for ways to move complex situations down in entropy to a
complicated state. At the same time we look for opportunities to move
complicated decisions to a simple state.
We do this by reviewing situations and looking for similarities. For
instance, we are asked to have our pilots apply for pilot’s licenses with
regulators all over the world. Each country has its own form and required
documentation that must be completed and submitted. We know that the data on many of the forms
will be the same; the difference is where it is entered. We also have learned
that many regulators are looking for the same documentation (passport, FAA
License, FAA medical, etc.) We have created a database, on an encrypted server,
to hold this data. By having the data readily on file, we have lowered the
number of steps required to reply to a customer, reduced the turnaround time, and
lowered many of the requests from a complex task to a complicated one.
Another area we attempt to reduce entropy is in the area of
chaotic situations. In our business, it is not a question of if, but when we
will face a chaotic situation. Whether it is an aircraft incident or accident,
having an employee pass away while deployed in a foreign country, having an
employee become the victim of crime or a natural disaster, the possibility of a
chaotic situation presenting itself is ever present. To help drive those
situations from chaotic toward complex, or even complicated, we have done
pre-planning. We have created
check-lists for all the situations we could dream up. We all know that our
ability to think broadly is severely hampered in times of stress. Utilizing the
benefit of calm times, we took time to build emergency reaction plans. Were we
able to think of everything? I am sure we were not. However, we have tools in
place that will assist us greatly in driving chaos toward complex and
complicated levels of entropy.
If we look at the cynefin framework from a critical thinking
point of view, we could say the tool is a way to classify situations and
provide a guide for how to handle each type of decision. In other words,
cynefin provides a way to quickly categorize situations while illustrating both the way a
leader can begin to handle the decision process and attempt to drive situations
of high entropy toward lower levels.
For example, the next
time you go get the board game Monopoly ™ from your kids’ closet and open it,
chances are the pieces and money will be in disarray. That is chaos. If you
separate the money, pieces, and cards into piles, you are now looking at a
complex situation. If you organize the money into denominations, the deeds into
colors, and the pieces by into hotels, houses, and characters, you’re looking
at a complicated situation. For a game of Monopoly ™, that’s about as low as
one will get the entropy. Even dice rolls in the game can lead to complicated
decisions.
It’s like rotating a camera lens to get a picture into
focus. One can make order out of the chaos, but like a picture from the Hubble
telescope, even a picture in focus can be complex, complicated, or simple.
See you next week!
David J. Snowden, M. E. B. (2007, November
2007). A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment