Daniel Walsh: Change isn’t complicated...it’s COMPLEX

Organizations need more than a set of recipes and so called ‘best practices’ to affect change and fundamentally transform their culture. The Cynefin Framework is a transformational concept that uses a situational approach to ensure effective work, decision making, and management in environments with various degrees of uncertainty and strategic foresight. While many change agents readily embrace adaptive approaches, Cynefin explains why adaptive methods and resilient approaches work well in complex, uncertain environments. The Cynefin Framework helps leaders and change agents to effectively tailor methods and practices for different situations. Methods and practices based on complexity theory can help organizations harness change and turn complex situations into a competitive advantage for employees, customers, and the business.

Outline:

Why change is complex
Overview of the Cynefin Framework
Characterizing change across different Cynefin domains
Explain why many aspects of change are complex not complicated
Heuristics for working with complex change (e.g. manage in present, small bets, nudges, simple rules, disintermediation, distributed cognition)

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