Moving the ladderfive days beforeRiffing on the cost of opinion piece, I realized that there’s a…Solved, solvable, unsolvable

OODA, unrolled2021In this framing, the OODA jank is the situation when the cycle…Decision-making mindsets2023I have this intuition that the process is not the most important…Micro and macro jank2021If our team’s OODA loop runs just a tiny bit slower than…I have been noodling on a decision-making framework, and I am hoping to start writing things down in a sequence, Jank-in-teams style. You’ve probably seen glimpses of this thinking process in my posts over the last year or so, but now I am hoping to put it all together into one story across several short essays. I don’t have a name for it yet.

Lenses, framings, and models2022At a meeting this week, I realized that I use the terms…Settled and “not settled yet” framings2021I was working on decision-making frameworks this week and had a pretty…The Four Needs Framework2020The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world around…The first step in this adventure is quite ambitious. I would like to offer a replacement for the Cynefin framework. Dear Cynefin, you’ve been one of the highest-value lenses I’ve learned. I’ve gleaned so many insights from you, and from describing you to my friends and colleagues. I am not leaving you behind. I am building on top of your wisdom.

Organizing and sensing connections2021

Asymptotes and Value Niches2023I have been thinking lately about a framing that would help clarify…This new purported framework is no longer a two-by-two. Instead, it starts out as a layer cake of problem classes. Let us begin the story with their definitions.

At the top is the class of solved problems. Solved problems are very similar to those residing in Obvious space in Cynefin: the problems that we no longer consider problems per se, since there’s a reliable, well-established solution to them. Interestingly, the solution does not have to be deeply understood to be a solved problem. Hammering things became a solved problem way before the physics that make a hammer useful were discerned.

Then, there is a class of solvable problems. Cynefin’s Complicated space is a reasonable match for this class of problems. As the name implies, solvable problems don’t yet have solutions, but we have a pretty good idea on how they will look when solved. From puzzles to software releases, solvable problems are all around us, and as a civilization, we’ve amassed a wealth of approaches on how to solve them.

Limits2022The third limit is obvious and I am surprised I haven’t noticed…Touching infinity2022As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately…The final class of problems loosely corresponds to Complex space in Cynefin. These are the unsolvable problems. Unsolvable problems are just that: they have no evident solution. At the core of all unsolvable problems is a curious adaptive paradox: if the problem keeps adapting to your attempts at solving it, the solution will continue being just out of reach. I wonder if this is why games like chess usually have a limited number of pieces and a clear victory condition. If the opponents are matched enough, there must be some limit to make this potentially infinite game finite. Another way of thinking about unsolvable problems is that they are trying to solve you just as much as you’re trying to solve them.

Complexity escape routes and listening to learn2021I was teaching the workshop on complexity this week, an outgrowth of…Life of a solution2022Looking at the framework in the previous piece, I am noticing that…You may notice that there is no corresponding match for Cynefin’s Chaotic space in this list. When describing Chaotic space, I’ve long recognized the presence of a clear emotional marker (disaster! emergency!) that seemed a bit out of place to how I usually described other spaces. So, in this framework, I decided to make it orthogonal to the class of the problem. But let’s save this bit for later.

Nudges, boosts, bumpers, and tilts2023Using these two properties as axes, we can draw a nice –…The interesting thing about all three classes is that they are a spectrum that I loosely grouped into three bands. Obviously, I tend to think in threes, so it’s nice and comfy for me to see the spectrum in such a way. But more importantly, each class appears to have a different set of methods and practices associated with it. You may already know this from our studies of Cynefin. Just think of how the effective approaches in Complex space differ from those in Complicated, and how both are different from those in Obvious.

A Solution2022If we are looking at a problem, and as we learned earlier,…The platform two-stepthe day afterWhen we last saw Uncle Steve on his ladder, I left him…A problemlinks here, 2022To get a more solid grounding of the newly born decision-making framework,…The problem understanding frameworklinks here, 2022With my apologies for taking a scenic route and sincere thanks for…Becoming a settinglinks here, 2022One of the greatest follies of high modernism – from architects to…Builder and Gardener Mindsetslinks here, 2022Briefly, the distinction emphasizes the difference in mindsets with which we approach…Nudging Embodied Strategylinks here, 2022Both of these pose questions to what appears to be unsolvable problems:…Models and structured reasoninglinks here, 2023To quickly recap, I posit in my framework that there are three…The third optionlinks here, 2024I facilitated a workshop on systems thinking recently (or “lensical thinking” as…Still, it is also pretty clear that the transition between these classes is fuzzy. As my child self was learning to tie shoes, the problem slowly traversed across the spectrum. First, the tricky bendy laces that kept trying to escape my grasp (oh noes, unsolvable!?) became more and more familiar, while tying the crisp Bunny Ears knot, despite being clearly and patiently explained, was a challenge (wait, solvable!). Then, this challenge faded, and tying shoes became an unbreakable habit (yay, solved). This journey across the problem class layers is a significant part of the framework, and something I want to talk about next.