The “C’s” of Complexity

by Patti Anklam

A while back, I shared musings about how the powerful letter “C” invokes the purposes and principles of knowledge management.  I concluded with the work “complexity.” Colleague Dave Snowden (whose perspective on complexity has formed the basis for much of my thinking about working with networks) has been working on his list of the “C”s of complexity.

The initial three: Constraint, Coherence, and Connectivity.

Augmented to five  with the addition of Context (yeah!) and Coalescence

As of yesterday, the sum is now seven  if you think of Culture and the word Complexity itself (though Dave had earlier posited using Cynefin in this list, which is his framework). In my generational view of knowledge management (as blogged in the link above), the overlap between Dave’s list and the “KM” list currently consists of the words Context and Connectivity (“Connections”  in Dave Pollard’s words).

He promises more, but it gets more and more difficult to remember a list when its extent gets too large. It’s also impossible to use a mnemonic! c what I mean?

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1 Comment »

  Dave Snowden wrote @ October 26th, 2008 at 10:25 am

Its a work in progress Patti! 7Cs will mutate, I’m playing with it at the moment and all contributions appreciated

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