The Cynefin Meetup in Melbourne kindly gave me the opportunity to discuss the overlap between Cynefin and Transition Design about a year ago. We streamed the talk to allow others outside of Melbourne to ‘attend’ so there is a low quality recording (it is unfortunately not possible to hear the audience questions and comments).
The gist of the talk is that:
- some misinterpretations of the Cynefin framework either suggest that it is desirable to always dwell in dynamically complex situations, or even that all situations tend to have dynamically complex qualities, in which case it is not possible or desirable to have visions for preferable futures (‘you can’t predict the force, learn to ride the rapids of neoliberal emergence!’)
- if the task is to change our situations into preferable ones rather than merely learn to tolerate our existing situations, we need appropriate forms of vision-based designing as forces for motivating, enabling and even guiding such transitions
- the visions of vision-led designing do always risk being procrustean (in Cynefin-speak, dangerously try to force complicated or even simple initiatives into dynamically complex contexts) so there is an emerging art to designing stories of preferable futures that are not seeing-like-a-state plans but do still have redirective force
- an important part of transitioning is not just the experimentalism (‘safe to fail’) that is fashionable in technovation discourse these days, but timespaces in which to practise modifying material social practices – i.e., living labs to rehearse transitions, entraining new ways of living and working, while also learning about all the adjacent sociotechnical regimes that will have to be also modified to form a more receptive ecosystem for those new practices.
the measures taken 