Snowden, then of IBM Global Services, began work on a Cynefin model in 1999 to help manage intellectual capital within the company. It has been compared to the Māori word tūrangawaewae, meaning a place to stand, or the 'ground and place which is your heritage and that you come from'. Snowden uses the term to refer to the idea that we all have connections, such as tribal, religious and geographical, of which we may not be aware. Cynefin is a Welsh word meaning 'habitat', 'haunt', 'acquainted', 'familiar'.
The idea of the Cynefin framework is that it offers decision-makers a 'sense of place' from which to view their perceptions. The framework draws on research into systems theory, complexity theory, network theory and learning theories. Ĭynefin offers five decision-making contexts or 'domains'- clear (known as simple until 2014, then obvious until being recently renamed), complicated, complex, chaotic, and confusion-that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people's behaviour. Created in 1999 by Dave Snowden when he worked for IBM Global Services, it has been described as a ' sense-making device'. The Cynefin framework ( / k ə ˈ n ɛ v ɪ n/ kuh- NEV-in) is a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making.
