Check out this article: The Wisdom of Clouds by Cynthia Kurtz about four kinds of situational awareness and decision-making:
- multiple perspectives (patterns in identities)
- continuous variation (patterns in dimensions)
- internal diversity (patterns in social “cloud” computing)
- change over time (patterns in dynamics)
She explains all of it within the Cynefin framework and has another long insightful post about how storytelling plays out in practice (Story Colored Glasses).
It is also hyperloaded with really juicy metaphors. I like how she illustrates the boundaries between simple/complicated/complex/chaotic situations with the kinds of games people play (memory/tic-tac-toe/poker/spoons).
Dave Snowden also explains the Cynefin sensemaking framework – a way of dealing with complex problems that might appear to be simple – in his own words:
These have influenced my own thinking. Recently I experimented with a game to assign meanings to groups of stories. This group of people generated a complex hierarchy that illustrates how to capture b for each story in a set. The emergence of meta-categories and sub-categories illustrates a sort of innate “continuous variation” in story categories.
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[...] more on complexity theory and storytelling, see The Wisdom of Clouds by Cynthia [...]