The October 2006 Harvard Business Review has an article by Clayton M. Christensen, Matt Marx and HOward H.Stevenson on “The Tools for Cooperation and Change.” From the title alone, I thought perhaps something interesting on collaboration tools, but from the reading I found something much more compelling. It provides a framework for making sense of the current context of an organization before selecting specific management tools to approach change. It’s about seeing patterns and then acting on the patterns, not unlike the way that we CognitiveEdge (previously Cynefin)practitioners contextualize a situation before determine the appropriate tools for action.

The cooperation and change framework consists of two axes:

• On the vertical, the extent to which people agree on what they want
• On the horizontal, the extent to which people agree on cause and effect

Hence, the dreaded lower left quadrant is that in which there is no consensus about cause and effect nor any agree about what people actually want to have happen. This, in short, is the chaos domain and positioned similarly to that domain in the CognitiveEdge framework. Tools for this quadrant are “power tools”: take action! Coercion, threats, and fiat show up here.

The lower-right quadrant, on the other hand, consists of the “management tools,” with such things as measurement systems, training, SOPs, and so on. The upper left is the domain for “leadership tools, and the upper right contains “culture tools,” including rituals, tradition, folklore and democracy.

The point, of course, is that there isn’t any right way to deal with change, but that it’s important to have a sensemaking tool precede the selection of a specific tool to create change and cooperation. Whatever helps us see patterns that guide toward appropriate action in the complex world of networks and relationships.