The Consequences of the Cynefin model on Service Management

You probably know the Cynefin model by now, for it has been around since 2007. Cynefin is a Welsh word and stands for the present or space, which we are living in, taking into account that it results from the interwoven pathways which led us there in our past. What we did has never been wrong. It simply brought us to where we are right now.

The Cynefin model has been invented by Dave Snowden, a Welsh lecturer, consultant and researcher, as a modification of Boisot’s I-Space. The model divides organisational environments into four categories: Chaotic, Complex, Complicated and Simple. The axes typically do not need to be specified, but you could substitute a decreasing velocity of environmental change times knowledge about the composition thereof on x-axis, and an increasing level of perceived environmental complexity on y.

But this doesn’t hold completely, so it’s a lot better to use more high quality images to illustrate these stages:

Chaotic

If we start out with anything new, we know very little about it. This is symbolized by our red organisation bubble, which shows little internal structure. At the same time, our environment seems to be in a chaotic shape. We cannot recognize any of its structures, there just seems to be a vast number of objects we cannot assign any meaning to, or discern good from bad. Furthermore what we observe seems to be rapidly changing. Since there is little internal routine and structure to be kept up, we can react pretty fast, and nobody blames us if our first attempts to see the light may seem nothing like funny grimaces to other people.

This applies to almost any new product situation:

• we know nothing about customer acceptance

• we know nothing about trends

• we have little experience from mistakes we already made

• we observe rapid changes in our environment because we can not
  grasp orientation from its higher level structure

It just all looks like asteroids to us. Everything we do here is novel practice. Without any known places to anchor, we must simply act first, then sense what’s happening, and try to act accordingly.

This is usually the stage when traditional IT is requesting a one year development plan from product management for any new product to come to be able to prepare accordingly.

Complex

As our market experience is becoming more mature, we can build up corresponding internal structures, which reflect many of the things from our environment. Not as a whole, but as some sort of abstract pattern. We know how to lift our legs, maybe even stand for a couple of seconds, but we will still have to learn how to even walk. Enough to work with, anyway.

Given our new freedom we realize that there is much more behind things in our surroundings than we were initially able to comprehend, and that everything seems to have its unique features. There seem to be no exact sames and we are almost getting lost in its variety.

At this stage usually a couple of expensive commercial off the shelf vendors come to your door and promise you they have seen, grasped and defeated all the beasts of this rough world, and offer you a software solution which will make it all easy for you to catapult you straight to market leadership. At the same time they also promise you to have the ideal software solution to administer your internal structures. At least the latter of the two may make you think.

Additionally, your experience may double, if your boss arrives at your office, presenting new targets and recommends you to “grow really fast”.

Bear with me. Only two to go.

Complicated

Things are getting better, when we realize, that many things look the same, behave the same, and we can therefore seperate them from other things in categories. Things are then getting complicated, when we notice that some of them, which basically look the same to us, at a closer look do not quite seem to be as similar as we initially thought.

Anyhow. From the moment we can draw conclusions from higher level categories, we can apply different standards when handling the external objects, which makes life for us a lot easier. After a couple of rounds of corrections and adjustments we can then apply what is considered good practice.

At this point, many talented, gifted, creative people stop working with you, because the job doesn’t have too much to do with creativity anymore, rather than categorizing, administrating, structuring and doing the same things over and over again. Which for some people for no obvious reason and against all better knowledge really identifies with ultimate boredom.

You will have to work through serious struggles between those people who need to keep up the rapid trial and error development of new features of your product to investigate their market acceptance and exploit their share, versus those who are responsible for operating your customer platform. They are separated by “The Threshold”. Typical groups of people who sometimes hardly understand each other are:

• product managers and programmers

• programmers and administrators

• administrators and product managers

• art directors and CEOs with all of the above

But only if they are operating on different sides of The Threshold.
This is also where quality considerations kick in and you should seriously reconsider whether the way you were doing things really was as cool and funky as you initially thought it would be.

Simple

Things become simple, when you’re pretty well organized, have developed a higher level of intelligence, implemented a decent routine, trained yourself in perfect shape and possess a voluptuous body of resources. Despite the fact that to your knowledge things are way more complicated than you will ever be able to comprehend you will find your way. Simply by deliberately chosing the level of abstraction you prefer.

If you’re lucky and there are enough other people who look at the world from this particular perspective, there is meta-experience which can be shared and distributed, so everybody can profit from it. This is called best practice. As there have been many many observations, what works for others will of course decently work for you. **)

**) Best practice will only work if your product experience reached this particular development stage. Best practice comes WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. Standard disclaimers apply. There is no guarantee that any of this will ever work for you, but recent, industry wide, independent studies have shown best pratice methods to perform above average. We can NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE if any of this will not work for you. Please do NOT contact us for any problems with any framework we published.

So what has all this to do with IT Service Management?

The frameworks which have been made for IT Service Management, Quality Management or even Corporate Governance are best practice frameworks. According to the model, best practice is only fit for purpose in Simple organisational environment situations.

To my experience, there is a huge chance, that:

• you will try to implement best practice frameworks in premature organisational stages just to do it like the big guys

• you will try to apply best practice to non-ready product stages just because “best practice” is “best”

• you will deliberately ignore if somebody tells you you shouldn’t consume what the grown-ups do

Don’t become childish, we know our business

Perfect. This is the key to do proper IT Service Management. Being able to realistically judge the maturity of your organisation in terms of product, market, production and information technology environment dynamics.

All you need is to do an inventory of your organisation. Then implement Agile IT Service Management methods for Chaotic and Complex product(ion) situations (the left side of The Threshold), best practice frameworks on the right. Gradually blend the two into each other from Chaotic to Simple to avoid organisational and cultural strain.

You’re all set. There’s nothing more I can tell you now. Please go away.