Cynefin

Goal: To find out which projects can and cannot be picked up with agile/lean.

Ask participants to generate an exhaustive list of all current and upcoming projects; one project per note.
Draw four quadrants and explain the basic categorization (only explain first terms in list below):
1. lower right—Percievable, Predictable, Repeatable; Known; Lay people with instructions and procedures. Sense Categorize Respond; Best Practices
2. upper right—Separated in time and space; Potentially knowable; Domain Expert or Subject Matter Expert, Craftspeople; Sense Analyze Respond; Good Practices
3. upper left—Not repeatable, unique; Retrospectively coherent; Adventurers, Entrepreneurs; Experiment; Probe Sense Respond; Emergent Practices: Ever Evolving Pearl Language
4. lower left—Not perceivable; Incoherent; Discovery; Act Sense Respond; Novel, Innovative Practices
5. middle—Disorder
Ask everyone to stick their projects in the most appropriate quadrant.
Explain more detail about the quadrants: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic, Unordered.
1. Simple—suited for straightforward project planning.
2. Complicated—thorough analysis, planning, and moderate agile and lean approach; use good practices and pearl languages.
3. Complex—suited for experiments with double- and triple-loop learning; read: agile, lean, cooking with principles, play with recipes; use pearl language when appropriate;
4. Chaotic—suited for a flurry of short, intense experiments, followed by observation and educated guesses for new experiments.
5. Unordered—leave alone; skip; drop.

Complexity

Shift from fail safe env to safe to fail experiments; you can't explore what's possible in a complex system until you act in it.
Parallelism and contradiction are key.
Human systems are complex adaptive. we co-evolve with the patterns formed so recognize them early.
Manage the evolutionary capability of the present (complex adaptive) rather than working idealistic future states (systems thinking).
All symbiosis starts as a parasitic relationship.