Overview

This method - also known as the Cynefin framework - has been designed and used as a multi-ontology decision-making framework for understanding and action taking in different types of systems and contexts confronting decision-makers. From the perspective of methodological agility, adopting and adapting this framework for research purposes is particularly important, since it enables researchers to achieve two objectives, namely for: (a) situating and embedding their own research work in different kinds of contexts and (b) facilitating real-time methodological decision-making about when and how to switch both between (inter-) and within (intra-) the four methodologies - mono-, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity - if called upon to do so by any perceived or real contextual changes taking place, in which the research is situated.

For a more systematic explanation of how this exercise of adopting / adapting the Cynefin framework for research purposes has been conducted at the theoretical and conceptual levels, please see the article (in press) by Van Breda et. al available on the Articles sub-page below.

Features and uses

Four Domains Contextualisation is a lightly facilitated workshop based method which has been used in various methodology training courses to introduce researchers and their supervisors to address the challenges of emergent research design and real-time methodological for decision making in the following ways:

• Sensitising research teams for boundary transitions and improving anticipatory awareness – i.e. alerting research teams to the reality of changing circumstances (formative contexts) and the need for performing methodological switching;

• For developing a new shared language with which to: (a) support possible actions and decision-making processes of decision-makers, and (b) coming up with new dynamic epistemic objects (problem statements and research questions);

• As an alternative to traditional strategic planning which place excessive emphasis on ideal future states - aka rational-teleological thinking and planning - for focusing more on the next step(s) of what is plausible and desirable in / under the contextual circumstances of the current situation;

• As an aid in conflict resolution both within research teams and between research teams and their stakeholders with opposing viewpoints, perspectives and interests in the problem situation at hand - to constructively manage conflict and bring about consensus, without necessarily 'removing' conflict;

• An effective way of building agile research teams for inducting new recruits - both researchers and community co-researchers - into the research process;

• As an effective means of ensuring some sense of coherency and continuity in the research process as researchers and co-researchers enter and exit the research process at different times and stages of the research process;

• As a sensemaking framework for: (i) talking about the different ways of interpreting the current conditions based on gathered data, and (ii) evaluating strategic interventions - Note: the process of co-constructing a 4 Domains Contextualisation framework is in itself an intervention;

• This approach be used as an individual - standalone - synergic method and/or using it synergically together with some of other methods. For example, using community members' lived experiences of their changing situations as a means of co-constructing the different contexts of the 4 Domains framework - for more on this, please go to the Anecdote circles and narratives sub-pages below.

Frameworks vs. models

Frameworks are radically different from models in that frameworks are useful heuristics for decision-making purposes whereas models tend to make ontological claims about the structure of reality they represent - the double helix model of the DNA structure of living organisms is arguably one of the best examples in this regard. Both the Cynefin framework and its Four Domains derivative above do not have or make any such ontological claims to somehow represent the structure of ever-changing socio-institutional formative contexts, for example, and should, therefore, be considered and approached fundamentally as sense-making and decision-making frameworks - which means that their value is not so much in logical arguments or empirical verifications as in its effect on the sense-making and decision-making capabilities of those who use it.

Co-constructing 4 Domains Contextualisation Frameworks

In training sessions with various groups of post-grad students and their supervisors for contextualising and operationalising their own research work: