District of Lake Country staff are using new technology to address complex issues.
Four managers have become cognitive edge accredited practitioners to facilitate solutions for complex issues through the Cynefin framework, which is a model used to describe problems, situations and systems.
“The most interesting part of the framework is the ability to use the information and define it without prejudging the source or the outcome,” Alberto De Feo, chief administrative officer.
“It is making sense of stories that collectively describe issues while at the same time revealing possible solutions and ways forward.”
The framework is the foundation to many cognitive edge methods that assist in gathering and interpreting narrative data in the context of social systems in such a way that they are situated in one of five domains: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, or disorder.
Once data and perspectives are understood at a deeper systemic and phenomenological level, the pieces of the issues and the solutions can be identified and tackled according to whether they belong to one of those five realms.
“Now that we have a number of managers accredited to use these tools, we have created a working team that will facilitate the discussion and solution-seeking for major complex issues we are facing,” said De Feo.
“In particular, we are going to target aging infrastructure problems, major development application that seem to be controversial, and other community complex issues that need more participation from different and diverse stakeholders from the community.”
