Cynefin is a conceptual model that can be used to facilitate decision-making. The word itself is Welsh for ‘habitat’ and was coined by an IBM engineer in 1999.
At Angry Creative, we think it’s an important part of digital projects. It helps us understand the task we’re looking at, communicate the task (both internally and with our clients), and recommend a methodology (and estimate) that is appropriate for that task.
There is a very wide range of tasks that we are asked to perform. Sometimes the task is a simple change, something that basically any of our developers would know how to implement and it is therefore easy for us to estimate based on our experience. Sometimes the task is completely new or so complex that there is simply no way for us to know how to proceed without experimenting, which has a high risk of failure.
In other words, this means that some things can be appreciated but others are simply impossible to appreciate. It all depends on the task itself.
In Cynefin (and therefore also in Angry Creative), tasks are therefore divided into four different categories (called “Domain” in Cynefin):
Chaotic
These we cannot appreciate; they often involve obscure debugging, e.g. problems with many external code libraries or integrations. What we do here is to proceed to the best of our ability and then provide feedback to you regularly. Normally, we debug and provide feedback every four or eight hours depending on what is appropriate for the specific situation (e.g. whether it is an urgent task or not).
Complex ones
These we cannot estimate, but here we will ask for investigation time, normally 4 or 8 hours. Most of the time we can find out what the problem is and how we can solve it urgently, and sometimes we can even actually solve it during the investigation period.
Complicated
We have a pretty good sense of what these tasks involve and how we can solve them, but there are often several possible solutions. This means that we need to carry out some work to identify the best solution. We therefore normally give an estimate within a wide range for these types of tasks, e.g. 20-40h.
Obvious (also called “simple”)
These are tasks that we have solved many times before, and the solution is obvious to us. Here we usually give estimates within a narrow range, e.g. 6-8 hours or sometimes even a fixed cost.
When we assess a new task, we will categorise it according to these rules and act accordingly – each Cynefin domain comes with its own process:
We have seen many benefits of using this methodology and encourage all new clients to spend some time reading and understanding it as it is something that very clearly defines our everyday work and will be prevalent in how we manage and communicate about tasks that you ask us to work on. You may even find yourself using the methodology outside of our working relationship to help you assess and act on your own tasks.