OMEGA Seminar: The Cynefin Framework and Megaproject Decision-making

The event will be in person and live streamed via Zoom.

There has always been a recognition that megaprojects are complex and involve significant levels of uncertainty and consequently risk in decision-making. The law of unintended consequences often bedevils projects from planning to delivery, especially in their latter stages with the number of interactions and interdependencies increasing. The timescale of large-scale engineering projects can mean that the problems they were designed to solve change before completion and the political context and policies can shift with reducing levels of consensus between political parties. In software development, the capabilities of technology often exceed the understanding of users to define projects in the first place.

Over the last few decades, a growing body of work has emerged from the field of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory which gives radical new insights into issues of inherent uncertainty. Developments in the cognitive sciences have given us radical new insights into human decision making which challenge the ‘rational’ assumptions that underpin much of traditional approaches to megaproject planning through to delivery. The assumption is often made that better information, better analysis, and better training are the solution to past failures. It turns out that those assumptions and derivates are at best approximations of reality.

During the latter stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, the European Union’s science and knowledge service published a Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and chaos) in Times of Crisis inspired by the Cynefin framework which, for the first time in the EU’s history, lays out a comprehensive set of methods and tools to manage decision-making in complex environments. That Field Guide includes a body of tools and techniques to increase the underlying resilience of systems to more effectively anticipate and mitigate (or exploit) the consequence of unknown ‘unknowables’ in planning. They include the use of human sensors networks, the generation of cross-silo networks for rapid knowledge flow and formal processes that allow the existing capability to be radically repurposed to meet novel needs as they emerge.

More recent developments have drawn on Constructor Theory in Physics that maps the energy gradients of the context in which a project takes place to identify what has the lowest energy gradient, and to change that gradient so that desirable results have a higher probability of emerging. Put simply, if the energy cost of ‘sin’ is lower than the energy cost of ‘virtue’ then no amount of effort can change it, you must first change the underlying dispositional state of the system. This offers an interesting new approach to strategic foresight and anticipatory intelligence in linking policy-making for megaproject development to the management of their delivery. The origins of this work lie in the field of counter-terrorism and weak signal detection along with the design of resilient systems at the societal and organisational levels. In this seminar, the application of those approaches to megaproject planning through to the management of their delivery will be explored drawing both on theory, and critical practice.

Further details about the OMEGA Seminar Programme can be found on the OMEGA Centre’s website. For enquiries and to join the mailing list, please contact Samhan, Hanadi.