Why is Chaotic higher than Complex?
In October a new book came out from The Cynefin Company: The Cynefin Co. Field Guide: Cynefin in the age of entanglement. Dave Snowden and his colleagues have made a small book that is meant to be taken out and used.
Chapter 3 includes my illustration Cynefin in 3D. I made it together with Christopher Bramley and Rob England. This is what they write about it in the book:
“The best we have seen is this one by Rob England, Martin Berg, and Christopher Bramley.”
I am proud of that.
The spread from The Cynefin Co. Field Guide is shown with permission from Dave Snowden.
The question I get most often
I get a lot of questions about the picture. Some come from people I show it to, but also from people who found it online and get in touch by email or message. One question keeps coming back, so it seems to matter to many: why is Chaotic higher up than Complex? Shouldn’t chaos be at the bottom?
The height in the picture shows energy. The idea comes from Rob England’s 3D version of Cynefin, which Dave Snowden himself helped improve. The vertical axis is negentropy: energy and order. It takes energy to keep a system in chaos. Stop adding that energy and the system slides down into Complex.
People create order
Dave writes about it on the page next to my picture. In physics it is the other way around. But human systems don’t tolerate chaos:
“In the same spirit as Nature abhors a vacuum. Even in disastrous circumstances, humans create connections, stabilise constraints, and establish micro-orders. In human systems, as in nature, order emerges naturally as interactions increase.”
Think about what happens after an accident. People immediately start talking to each other and helping out. Soon there are a few simple rules that everyone follows. Nobody decided them.
What does it mean for you?
If you are in the middle of chaos, you don’t have much time. Order will emerge anyway. What you do in the first days shapes which patterns remain once things have calmed down.
Print the picture
If you want the picture in high resolution, it is available in several versions at vige.se/cynefin. Feel free to use it, and credit me, Christopher Bramley and Rob England.
You can find the book at The Cynefin Company.