I recently had the pleasure of co-presenting to a group of senior marketers with Scott Brinker—in the session he introduced the group to the Cynefin Framework by way of explaining why Agile is increasingly being adopted for marketing. I’ve made other arguments for this in my book but I was immediately struck by the usefulness of this framework and am writing to share information about it here.

Scott’s central insight is that marketing as a discipline is shifting from the complicated to complex quadrants. This is because we are managing more experiences across more channels with more interactions between channels and with more technology in play.

In short, it’s no longer possible to gather the data and fully understand/predict what’s going to happen. Instead we must “probe” or run tests to identify promising directions which we’ll pursue. That’s just where the Agile approach fits in. Here’s a great short video that walks through the Cynefin Framework:

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