A very confusing thing happened today

Google alert and a few friends pointed to this interesting Rosetta Stone Language post by Harold Jarche. It picks up on on another post by Clay Shirky (I had the great pleasure of spending a day with him and others in New York a few weeks ago) on the collapse of complex business models. Clay's post is excellent but it uses the word complex where I and others involved with complex adaptive systems theory would use complicated. Now that is common, and the analysis and recommendations in Clay's post are spot on (and I will build on them in a future post). Harold made a similar point on language together with recognising that solutions will involve organisational designs based on simple units, connected in a network. I don't fully agree with Harold's suggestion that this type of structure cannot be managed directly, although at a micro-level he is correct. However, that is for another day. The confusing thing was a comment by Stephen Downes. Harold had used my separation (which I derived from reading Cilliers with his wonderful metaphor of an airplane and a mayonnaise) of complex and complicated from the Cynefin framework. Stephen made the valid point that the term complex can stand on its own without Cynefin; in practice when talking about complexity I only use the framework itself in about 50% of cases. But then he goes on to say: I’m inclined not to cite the Cynefin framework until it gets a proper name. ‘Cynefin’? Really, now. I decided to use a probe (sorry to use Cynefin terminology Stephen) and tweeted Downes has no poetry in soul along with the quote. The resulting exchange was more confusing. Stephen understanding protested my comments on the contents of his soul, but having been given the full definition (something he could have obtained from the Language Learning Software Wikipedia article or any published material) said that "the place of your multiple belongings" was meaningless and its use is just a distraction that it obscures rather than clarifies. Notably he failed to answer my question if he was only prepared to accept English names or acronyms. I didn't ask what type of mental model is required to refuse to cite something because you don't like the name; that would have been unfair.I am grateful to Stephen however, he prompted me to write this in the series on the origins of the framework. Now I originally got the idea of the name from the preface to Kyffin WIlliams: The Land and the Sea (Gomer 1998) and these are the words I used in the first article to use the name: Cynefin is a Welsh word with no direct equivalent in English. As a noun it is translated as habitat, as an adjective familiar, but dictionary definitions fail to do it justice. A better, and more poetic, definition comes from the introduction to a collection of paintings by Kyffin Williams, an artist whose use of oils creates a new awareness of the mountains of his native land and their relationship to the spirituality of its people: “It describes that relationship: the place of your birth and of your upbringing, the environment in which you live and to which you are naturally acclimatised.” (Sinclair 1998). It differs from the Japanese concept of Ba, which is a “shared space for emerging relationships” (Nonaka .Konno 1998) in that it links a community into its shared history – or histories – in a way that paradoxically both limits the perception of that community while enabling an instinctive and intuitive ability to adapt to conditions of profound uncertainty. In general, if a community is not physically, temporally and spiritually rooted, then it is alienated from its environment and will focus on survival rather than creativity and collaboration. In such conditions, knowledge hoarding will predominate and the community will close itself to the Japanese Learning Software external world. If the alienation becomes extreme, the community may even turn in on itself, atomising into an incoherent babble of competing self interests.