All Life Is Problem Solving

  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 […]

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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 […]

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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” […]

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