A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making
A 2007 Harvard Business Review article (reprint R0711C) by David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone that popularized the Cynefin framework. It sorts a leader’s situation into five contexts defined by the relationship between cause and effect: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. Each calls for a different practice: best practice when cause and effect are obvious, good practice from experts when they are knowable, emergent probe-sense-respond in the complex, and rapid response in the chaotic. The central claim: diagnose your context first, because good leadership is not one-size-fits-all.