I recently discovered the Cynefin framework, a mental model for situational decision making created by IBM’s Dave Snowden over 20 years ago. Now I’m a big “Business Process System” skeptic these days. I’ve seen way too many of them wildly overfit, seen them become bibles for teams where it seems like we’re working for the process, and not the other way around. Cynefin seems useful because it’s a course mental model more than some sort of Agile-like totalizing system for how to get work done. It intends to help you classify problems and orient yourself versus telling you what to...

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

What a great line from Oliver Wendell Holmes.

When you think you’re coming up with “simple” responses to complex problems, make sure you’re not (as Bob Moesta says) creating “simplicity on the wrong side of the complexity.”

What we really want is to work through all the tangled complexity ourselves as we’re picking apart the problem and designing well-fit solutions.

A great...