What the hell is cynefin?
Cynefin (pronounced cahn-e-ven) is Welsh for a deep sense of belonging or habitat. I think of that as where you are when you are in the place that's "just right" for you.
Doesn't that sound like where you'd like to spend your time? Would you like to have a strong sense of cynefin in your psychology practice? If so, read on...
Origins of the Cynefin Model
IBM engineer Dave Snowden developed the Cynefin Model to help his colleagues manage the company's intellectual capital - all the processes and content that made IBM a financially successful organisation.
The core of the Cynefin model is four domains or context descriptions: Simple (or Clear), Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. If you know which domain or context you're in, you can determine the best approach to analysing and responding to the situation.
Here's how I'm using this framework to understand what's going on in therapy. But first, a witty quote:
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" H. L. Mencken
Mencken intuited what Snowden also discovered - some solutions work perfectly well in a Simple context, but when applied in a Complex context make things unintentionally worse due to unforeseeables. Cane toads, anyone?
The Complicated and Chaotic domains likewise call for different responses and toolkits. Let’s look at the four domains.
Simple Domain
"For every Simple problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and right" JP McNally
If we start with the Simple quadrant - note the "Best Practice" label - this is what we all wish we could do all the time. Unfortunately, very little of Therapy World appears in that domain.
However this is what routine medicine, especially surgery, does best. It categorises the challenge accurately and responds with a single precise solution. There's usually an unambiguous one to one correspondence between condition and response. Q: no heartbeat? A: do CPR, Q: broken bone? A: stabilise the limb.
Unfortunately, our clients rarely present with such easily categorised problems, or, when we think they have, don't respond as predictably as we'd hoped.
Complicated Domain
"For every Complicated problem there is an answer that is clear, complicated, and has a good chance of being right" JP McNally
The Complicated quadrant is where clinical psychology shines. If you think of relatively prescriptive therapies like exposure and response prevention, schema therapy, first wave behaviour analysis, EMDR, CBT-i and so on, these follow the pattern in the diagram: Sense (gather data), Analyse (assess and formulate), Respond (implement treatment).
In this quadrant we're dealing with knowable unknowns. Unlike the Simple quadrant, a quick appraisal may lead you down the wrong path. But if you follow the Sense-Analyse-Respond process fairly rigorously nobody will be able to fault your practice. Even though others following the same process may come up with slightly different solutions.
Complex Domain
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" H. L. Mencken
The Complex domain is intensely uncomfortable if you're used to working in the Simple and Complicated domains. This is because not only is there no one right answer, there may also be answers that are trade-offs against other problems, answers that have unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences and because no answer is ever final.
Problems in the Simple domain are like digging a trench, in the Complicated domain, like building a home and in the Complex domain, like turning a house into a home or running an economy. (The reason all the economists in the world laid end to end never reach a conclusion is because they think the economy is Complicated like a machine when it's actually Complex like an ecosystem.)
Ending the Psychotherapy Model Wars
There are a couple of sources for the conflict between the clinical and counselling psychology models that it's important to understand. Especially if you're planning on arguing with the other side.
- Training context. Clinical psychologists train in hospitals, counselling psychologists train in schools. In a hospital, the whole environment is designed to run for that patient like an arm of a randomized controlled trial. Isolation wards, surgical instruments, accurate medicine doses, procedural checklists - all there to eliminate any confounding factors. Schools, on the other hand, are full of confounding factors - other students, teachers, parental relationships, friendship groups, community and cultural background. It's just about impossible to do an intervention on the child in isolation. Everybody and everything else has to be taken into account.
- Personal context. Some of us like dealing with complexity, while others prefer stability and predictability. This obviously influences who's attracted to which way of working.
- Working context. You could be a clinical psychologist working in a community setting dealing with people struggling with addiction, homelessness, trauma, and a range of other challenges. Where do you start? You’re in a Complex domain, but perhaps your training was primarily for Complicated domains. On the other hand, you could be a counselling psychologist working in a prison where the inmates have all completed psychological assessments (and will complete more of them if you ask nicely), and where your work is scrutinised to ensure that what you're delivering is transparent and evidence-based. Congratulations! You’re a counselling psychologist who gets to work like a clinical or forensic psychologist. It’s not you, it’s your context that decides that.
Chaotic Domain
"For every chaotic problem there is only one answer. And it’s probably the one you came up with." JP McNally
The Chaotic context is the domain of unknown unknowns. This is a situation that is usually boundary-less, undefined, perhaps even undefinable and where the usual features you navigate your practice by are missing or broken. Think of being in a war zone, a hostage situation or mass shooting (initial stage), a bushfire or other catastrophe.
Clearly you don’t have the usual markers of a familiar psychological practice environment - no consulting room or formal appointment, nobody knows or cares that much who you are. You are making things up on the fly using your wits and your common humanity. Your best hope in this situation is to establish physical safety and try to introduce elements of a Simple domain response.
Your primary purpose in Chaos is survival - with daylight between that and normal practice principles such as evidence-based practice, privacy or ethics.
Hopefully you will never be in this situation. If you are, there’s not much I can give you to prepare for that apart from the quote above. If you survived, your choices were the right ones. Also, my own experience with such a situation may give you an idea of what the experience is like - draw from that what you will.
Conclusion: Locate Yourself
Unlike the economists, I will reach a conclusion, and here it is. The conflict between the two traditions of psychology is redundant and somewhat illusory. It can be resolved - or even better - sidestepped, by recognising we are often operating in different domains - Simple on our easiest days, but otherwise Complicated or Complex.
The ultimate skill for any practitioner - a meta-skill if you like - is to know which domain you're in and have a range of skills for responding to that domain’s challenges. When you master that you can truly be at home in your practice.
May you deeply belong where you are.