Enjoying complexity
Many years ago I learned the basics about the Cynefin Framework. The very basics. To repeat these very basics, Cynefin differentiates events into five different domains. Simple or obvious, Complicated, Complex, Chaos and Unknown or disorder. This helps to understand how to perceive situations and make sense out of them. Cynefin is based among others on systems thinking, which makes it sometimes a bit tricky to distinguish.
If you don’t know where you currently are, you assume the unknown domain. You first need to observe and conduct some more analysis to find out where you are. Simple is, well that. Complicated needs a bit more information to understand. Complex is not trivial to understand on first sight. And Chaos, well. When shit hits the fan.
Introspectively I found out about myself, that I tend to begin my evaluations in the complex domain. I don’t trust simple things. Is it really that obvious? Can’t be. The world around me is chaotic and complex, and there is barely anything simple left that is not connected somehow with something else.
I remember two or three colleagues many moons ago, who seemed to treat everything as simple or maximum a bit complicated. Just do A to reach B, how hard can it be. Well it was harder than that. Context matters, and context means the rest of the bloody system. So why remove the context? I still don’t understand that approach.
I enjoy a good complex system, no matter how sad and disappointing the insight might be. Economics, ecosystems, machines, politics, companies, you name it. Even in wood-working I don’t treat most things in a simple way. Just do A to get B. It might work in many attempts. But sometimes things might go wrong, and I want to know beforehand why they could wrong. I want to make more informed decisions. And wood is a complex material. You have grain patterns and thickness, you need to know what you want to use it for, the forces it will experience. Sure, you can also glue two pieces together, and maybe it works. Just do it! is a valid approach in wood working.
Maybe it’s my ADHD brain that likes to overthink things, but so far I was rarely disappointed or surprised. Even when being in a work context and you treat an IT system as more complex as it might be for others. You start examining the thing, trying to understand the dependencies and relations. How does it work, when does it not work. If the thing is really simple and it is just do A to get B, then that’s fine. I fall in the better direction. Imagine it’s the other way around. You think it’s just do A to get B and 2 minutes after the code hits production your system goes down, because: reasons. Of course I have fallen into this trap. Not with such a bad impact though. But I remember a few occasions where I looked at a bug, found the code to fix, “just” fixed it and thought it was done. Funny what can wrong sometimes.
As a systems thinker I enjoy complex systems, so I will continue to “land” in the complex domain, no matter how simple the situation might look like on first sight. I have seen too many things go wrong to trust that there are really many “simple” situations.
Stay imaginative!
