cynefin

Runs Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework to sort a situation by its kind of cause-and-effect and so choose how to act. Cynefin is a meta-framework: it tells you what kind of problem you have and therefore which approach, and which other tool, fits, so you stop applying the wrong kind of response to it.

The five domains, their decision models, their diagnostic questions, the cliff between Clear and Chaotic, and the failure of misdiagnosis live in references/cynefin.md. Load that file before analyzing.

When to use

At the start of a hard or messy problem, to pick the right way to act and the right framework before committing to either. Reach for it when plans keep failing: usually a complex problem is being treated as merely complicated, so the team analyzes harder when it should be running experiments. The unit of analysis is a situation, which almost always spans several domains, not a single decision. Cynefin complements tosca-problem-definition and mece-decomposition: those frame and split a problem; Cynefin tells you what kind of cause-and-effect governs each part and so how to attack it. Use it before the analytic frameworks, not instead of them.

Language

Conduct the session and write the report in the language the user is writing in. The reference file is English; keep the framework keyed to it regardless of the output language.

Inputs

• SITUATION (required): the problem, decision, or mess to make sense of. If it is stated as one tidy question, push for the underlying situation, since a single phrasing usually hides several issues in different domains.
• CONTEXT (optional): what has already been tried and failed, the stakes and time pressure, who must act, and what decision the analysis should inform. This shapes which misdiagnoses are most costly and how to phrase the recommended action, not which domain an issue belongs in.