Cynefin by Dave Snowden is a framework for categorising work based on their characteristics into four domains/categories
- Clear, represents the “known knowns”. This means that there are rules in place (or best practice), the situation is stable, and the relationship between cause and effect is clear: if you do X, expect Y
- Complicated, consists of the “known unknowns”. The relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or expertise; there are a range of right answers.
- Complex, represents the “unknown unknowns”. Cause and effect can only be deduced in retrospect, and there are no right answers.
- Chaotic, represents disorder, or even evil—the primordial darkness before order (light) is imposed. Survive, adapt, run. “In the chaotic domain, a leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to staunch the bleeding.”
and a metacategory of confusion when we don’t know which of the four domains work belongs to.
Software is complicated
xkcd #1425: Tasks describes so well how arbitrary and hard to estimate it can be to figure out where tasks in software development land. It can become quite a nasty intersocial problem if people related to the same problem are not on the same page of which domain it falls into.