Same thing. Different rooms.

I've been working through Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework this week. It's dense, precise, and worth the effort. But the concepts started clicking for me when I stopped trying to understand them on their own terms and started finding them in places I already know.

Like improv.

Attractors are things you create, or that emerge which bring agents together at a local level. In a scene, that's entering with a point of view. Or better yet, allowing one to develop as you sense and respond to your scene partner. You don't force it. You notice what's gathering and you move toward it.

A beneficial attractor in improv is "yes, and." It's giving gifts to your partner — offers that open the scene rather than close it. Everyone in the scene, and everyone watching, is drawn toward that energy.

An unbeneficial attractor is a scene partner trying to control or direct. Or denying the reality that's being established. The scene collapses around it. Agents (the performers and audience disengage).

Beneficial coherence is what's good for the agents in the system and the system itself. In improv we don't ask "how can I be funny?" We ask "what does the scene need?" Trust in that and the funny follows. So does everything else worth having.

Boundaries are the flexible container that holds the agents within the system. In improv, that's the scene. In long form, it's the form itself such as the Harold, the Armando, the La Ronde, a Monoscene, etc. Here's the thing: the audience doesn't come for the form. They don't need to know its rules. The boundary exists to create the conditions for something to emerge within it. The boundary doesn't have to be started or described. It's to hold the space.

Workshops

In a workshop, the same dynamics play out. A well-designed agenda isn't a script, it's a boundary. It holds the space without determining what happens inside it. The facilitator's job is to notice what's attracting energy in the room and move toward it, or away from it, depending on whether it's serving the group. 

• A breakthrough conversation that pulls everyone in? A beneficial attractor, so you feed it. 
• A participant who keeps reframing the problem to center their own agenda? An Unbeneficial attractor, so you do not feed it, but name it, redirect it, or dissolve it.
  
  Beneficial coherence in a workshop looks like a room that leaves knowing something together that none of them knew alone. You don't manufacture that. You create the conditions for it to emerge.

Dave Snowden's summary line is: we manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors within boundaries.

My improv translation: create the conditions, give good gifts, ask what the scene needs, and trust what emerges.

Same thing. Different rooms.

Chad Moore is a facilitator, graphic recorder, and improv performer building a practice called Playing with Complexity at the intersection of complexity science, experience design, and applied improv.