What is Kenevin and a little about the Lean Kanban Russia conference

Have you changed your work long ago? If so, it is possible that you or your colleagues have experienced this situation - when you move from one company to another, you begin to see the same problems and try to make decisions based on previous experience, but in this case it only aggravated the situation. Not only that, you begin to look for reasons that people do not work well enough and everything will work out, you just need to wait or something else. In short, despite all the surroundings and signals, firmly believe that you are right. After all, it seems counter-logical - not to trust your experience. This is called the “Expert Trap” - you become a hostage to your experience, it seems to you that everything is simple and you make the wrong decisions, sometimes leading to a deep crisis in management.

For example: I had such a story with a friend. He is a successful project manager who has successfully completed several projects using Scrum. Everything was perfect - the scaling worked perfectly, the customer was satisfied, the quality was at its best, the teams were on the rise, release, plans and velocity were stable and predictable, in general, everything was fine. And here he is invited to another large Russian company, and he sees a mess there, and his first reaction is “so, Scrum to everyone!”
And the situation, of course, in terms of the level of disorder does not differ much from the previous one, if only in scale, but in terms of the specifics of work and the interaction of people, it differs, and the results of the “Scrum All” policy, of course, help, but not for long. Then begins the howl “Scrum yours does not work” - and our, until recently, successful manager is already about to be fired.

What to do?

It turns out that we must be able to make a decision and understand when our experience is a plus and it is worth using, but sometimes it is a minus and this only prevents us from making a decision that is appropriate for the context.
That's why I want to tell you about the Cynefin / Kenevin framework. This is one of Cognitive Edge ’s core methods , which allows managers to look at things from new perspectives, learn complex concepts, and solve real problems. Using the Kenevin framework can help managers feel what they are in, so that they can not only make better decisions, but also avoid problems that arise when their standard management style makes them make mistakes.

Simply put, Kenevin and Sensemaking(it’s also a buzzword :)) in general - mercilessly break all the concepts of General Management, which are taught on all your favorite MBA programs or other courses in classical management. Do you want your company to have Business Flexibility not only at the level of a team or IT department, but develop as a Complex Adaptive System that is resistant to various kinds of uncertainty? And there is plenty of uncertainty at all levels of government.

I remembered this framework for a reason, of course. Dave Snowden, co-founder of Cognitive Edge and one of the main authors of Kenevin, arrives in Moscow for the Lean Kanban Russia conferenceI highly recommend visiting all C-level managers. At the conference, Dave will give a presentation “Thinking and acting in a new way”: he will talk about how in order to build successful companies, managers must learn to think outside the scope of the templates that their personal experience offers and focus on the unique specifics of current tasks .

Here I translated and voiced a short video player, which allows us to more or less understand why this framework is needed.
By the way, pay attention to the difference between the “best” solutions and the “good” solutions:

In addition to direct participation in the conference, Dave will also conduct a separate two-day training on the use of the Kenevin framework, which can be registered here .

In general, come.

If you are not a high-level leader yet, give the idea to your superiors to go to this conference.
Your boss will thank you :) I guarantee!