What’s cooking?

In a recent post I introduced you to the Cynefin framework, a sense-making model that can help you in difficult situations of decision-making and problem-solving. This framework comprises five domains: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. Looking for a coherent set of illustrative examples, I thought about cooking with friends as a common story line. Just imagine you … Continue reading What’s cooking?

Know where you are!

Life is full of challenging situations and difficult problems you need to overcome, full of decisions you have to make. You constantly consider options, evaluate trade-offs, make choices. And your understanding of the circumstances is of paramount importance to make such decisions well. You need to know where you are in order to prepare your next steps. Easily said, but difficult without a map. Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework is such a map that can give you this all-important sense of where you are and what you could do.

The risks of economic narrow-mindedness

It is all too tempting to judge an economy's health simply by its growth rate. No big wonder then that many economic policies are devised with growth as their only goal. However, this approach grossly simplifies the complexity of an economy's inner workings. Rather than searching for the one perfect signal of economic success, we should take the opposite angle and try to understand what could go wrong. Today, I'll offer a more detailed sketch of this concept to illustrate how our own economic narrow-mindedness makes us susceptible to economic failure, i.e., how a singular focus on growth blinds us for many important aspects of economic health.

Rethinking value

Our values shape our views of life, of good and bad, of right and wrong. We hold our values dear as guiding stars that give us fundamental orientation. They are the long-standing core of our cultures, traditions, and beliefs. And over time, we have constructed our social, economic and legal institutions on the foundation of shared values.
However, our values have changed drastically in the historic past. And I'll argue that they will morph again in the near future as the Digital Revolution is in full swing.