All Life Is Problem Solving

Recently, I’ve been having a good bit of fun with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book I’ve been meaning to read for awhile but only recently have gotten to. Taleb’s book is mainly about the difficulty of predicting the future due to the weakness (partially based in evolution) in human abilities to […]

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There are three interesting questions we’d like to take up in this part.
– First, assuming that the approach taken by Cynefin, requiring sensemaking through first selecting the context type one is dealing with is appropriate, is the Cynefin framework complete enough as it stands or does it fail to identify important types of decision […]

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It’s now time to review Dave’s characterizations of the three remaining contexts and to comment on them. Again using the HBR article as the primary source for my discussion, the “complicated” domain is characterized as follows.
Complicated
– Expert diagnosis required
– Cause-and-effect relationships discoverable but not immediately apparent to everyone;
– More than one right answer possible
– […]

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In earlier posts, I discussed Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework from the viewpoint of systems classification, offered an alternative to it, and then offered some critical comments. I did this because (a) Dave sometimes used the term “system” in describing one or another Cynefin “domain” and (b) a lot of the recent discussion on Cynefin in […]

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Types of Systems
The very circumscribed and also very partial and incomplete take on the history of General Systems Theory I provided in my last post, leaves us in the following position with respect to the problem of classifying systems. There are three very important dichotomies which have emerged out of the history of General Systems […]

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Introduction
 
One of the aspects of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin approach is the identification of three physical and five human “domains,” or “systems.” The physical systems are called “order,” “chaos,” and “complexity.” In the area of human systems Dave breaks “order” down into known (simple) and knowable (complicated) systems, and also adds a fifth “domain” called “disorder.” […]

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This is my second blog entry commenting on Dave Snowden’s “Wave-particle duality” piece. My first reply addressed the strawman, knowledge as thing and flow, and paradox issues. This one will address the other six issues he raised. Once again, they are:
1. “If you think in categories, then the world is presented in categories or a […]

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This week Dave Snowden discussed my views in two of his blog entries. My last blog entry, “Is There A Correct Interpretation of Hamlet?” answered his first entry. This blog installment and at least one, perhaps two, following it will begin to answer his second entitled: “Wave-particle duality.”
I must admit I had a funny feeling […]

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