Emily Covington, Managing Director, ig New York
We’ve all heard the terms: complexity, transformation, disruption, ‘VUCA’.
But in many leadership conversations, these words float untethered, more noise than signal. The real challenge is making sense of what they mean in practice, for people leading teams right now.
For me, that’s where the Cynefin framework can be a helpful lens. Developed by Dave Snowden, it’s a decision-making model that helps leaders understand the context they’re operating in – recognising that all problems are not created equal.
The five domains
The model distinguishes between five domains:
- Clear: where cause and effect are clear and repeatable.
- Complicated: where expert analysis is needed, but there’s a knowable answer.
- Complex: where patterns emerge only in retrospect, and outcomes can’t be predicted.
- Chaotic: where there’s no time for analysis; action must come first.
- Confused: where it’s unclear which domain you’re in.
Instead of rushing toward answers, this framework steers us toward better questions about context, dynamics, and what kind of leadership is actually needed.
Most of the work I’m doing now lives in the complex domain.
That’s the space where the relationship between cause and effect is only clear after the fact. This means you can’t just plan and execute; you have to probe, sense, and respond. It’s uncomfortable terrain for many leaders, especially those trained to seek certainty, drive clarity, and “get things done.”
Case in point
Recently, I’ve been working with a leadership cohort inside a global media company (you can see the full case study here). They’d been through a major merger: two distinct organisations, each proud of its legacy, moving into alignment under significant industry pressure. Like many mergers, the challenges were numerous – layoffs, restructuring, culture clashes, exhausted teams.
We noticed a lot of signals common to complex environments:
- High interpersonal sensitivity, but low feedback flow.
- Passionate commitment to work, but internalised stress and self-doubt.
- A strong sense of individual purpose, but limited alignment to wider strategy.
From complicated to complex
In Cynefin terms, they were trying to apply complicated solutions (expert-led ‘fixes’) to a complex problem: team cohesion, leadership influence, and cultural evolution in a system still reshaping itself.
So we shifted the questions away from “what’s the answer?”, towards:
- What are you sensing in your teams?
- What small actions could you try, to see what shifts?
- Where do you need to let go of control and build trust instead?
We moved from solve and deliver, to sense and adapt; from certainty and heroic leadership, to curiosity and shared ownership.
A frame, not a formula
The real terrain of human systems is always more complex, more nuanced, and more unpredictable than any single framework can capture. But models like this one give us a way in.
It invites us to treat complexity not as a problem to be solved, but as an environment to work with. In that kind of landscape, leadership becomes a practice of cultivation – creating the right conditions for insight, alignment, and movement.
I’ve seen it shift the tone of leadership conversations from control to curiosity, from reaction to reflection. And I keep coming back to it, especially when the path ahead isn’t obvious.