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Happy Tuesday!
Quick update, I recently published the summary and notes for Made to Stick. The book is a masterclass in how to make ideas and messages understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior. A great framework for leaders, marketers, and anyone looking to inspire change. On to the newsletter!
Have you ever made a decision in a position of leadership that totally backfired?
Has a problem ever come up where you assessed the situation, tried to gather as much information as you could, and then chose a course of action that later turned out to be completely wrong?
Maybe someone had actually suggested the right solution, but you went against their advice anyway. Now you look incompetent, feel stupid, and the problem still persists or has even gotten worse.
"But wait a second," you might say, "the information I got was incomplete and some of it was just wrong! Plus, I didn't have a lot of time to analyze the information I did get! And a bunch of other people suggested solutions that were also wrong ... what was I supposed to do?"
One of the primary jobs of a leader is to make the best decisions possible, given the available information. But the quality and quantity of that information can vary significantly from context to context.
To make things even harder, the relationship between cause and effect is not always obvious.
Take these four leadership problem scenarios for example.
Imagine, for a moment, that you're the manager of a medium sized, independent department store.
One day, the large industrial freezer in the back of your store where you keep boxes of frozen foods stops working. All the packaging is starting to melt and food is starting to thaw out.
It's a seemingly regular Saturday afternoon and the store is full of customers. Suddenly, a large crowd of masked teenagers wielding bats and hockey sticks smash down the front door start running through the aisles, looting your shelves, and assaulting customers.
A customer comes in and starts complaining that the vacuum cleaner they just bought doesn't work at all and they want a full refund.
For the past 6 months sales have been consistently on the decline. You've been running the store for years and business has always been good but for some reason, when you're looking over the books at the end of the month, you're just making less and less.
What is the difference between each scenario?
So how does this apply to your own leadership problems?
In 1999 a leader at IBM named Dave Snowden observed that one way for leaders to become more effective decision makers is to help them identify where a particular leadership problem exists on this spectrum of information availability, and strength of cause and effect.
He called this methodology the Cynefin Framework (pronounced kuh-nev-in).
Snowden defined four decision making contexts. Each context requires different leadership strategies to be most effective.
This is the context of best practice. Knowledge already exists about how to solve a particular problem, cause and effect is clear. Leaders are most effective when the can accurately categorize the problem and apply the correct best practice.
This is the context of experts. The expert understands the relationships between cause and effect and can apply their knowledge to analyze the problem and find a good solution. It's the role of the leader to identify which expert is relevant and bring them in to help.
In complex contexts there is no specific right answer and lots of unknown unknowns. This is the context of emergence. Only in retrospect can cause and effect be established and there is missing information. In order to be effective in these contexts leaders must probe for more information, run tests, try things, and then evaluate those results before responding with further action.
In chaotic context cause and effect are unclear and often cannot be determined in hindsight either. All actions change the situation dynamically. This is the context of rapid response.
In these contexts the leader cannot wait for more information or for patterns to emerge. Instead they must act quickly to establish stability to move the situation from one of chaos back into complexity.
By know you're probably wondering, which of our store manager scenarios mapped to which context?
Let's take a look.
The broken freezer scenario is problematic and, as the store manager, you probably don't know anything about how to fix a freezer yourself. This is ok though because you can always call a freezer repairman. Because you need an expert this problem scenario falls in the complicated context.
The teenager looters scenario is (hopefully) fairly obvious. There is very little information, cause and effect is uncertain, and there is little time to act. Should you try to fight off the teenagers? Call the police? Where did these wild youths come from anyway? Regardless, you have to do something otherwise things are going to get worse. This is a chaotic context.
In the vacuum cleaner scenario you have a lot of information and a clear best practice. The customer either has a receipt or not. Your store has a return policy and either the customer violated it or not. Based on this you know exactly how to proceed. This is a simple context.
Finally, in the falling sales scenario cause and effect isn't really clear and you're not really sure why things have changed. The best course of action is likely to do some further investigation, figure out if any new competitors have moved in, interview customers and employees. Maybe stock some new items and see if they do better etc. This is a complex context.
For business leaders, many problems tend to exist in the complex context however it's easy to make the wrong decisions if you behave as if you're in a different context.
I find myself trying to navigate problems in a complex context all the time in my own business. I really liked this framework because it helps to shape they way I think about how I should respond to any given problem.
Often I feel like the problem should be Simple or Complicated but actually it's Complex. Knowing which is which helps to bring clarity, and focus and helps me move forward.
What types of problems in your life or business have you potentially mis-categorized? Could you change your approach to better fit the context?
Cheers,
Nick
P.S. For a more detailed explanation of the Cynefin Framework you can read Snowden's original piece in the Harvard Business Review here.