Boundaries and context
Every system has a boundary. It may be porous, and indeed a complex system must have “ports” or “dendrites” to interact with the environment. Context is a function of boundaries. Personally I do not like gradients, because soon everything is relative (and nothing has position then) and when that happens anything goes and I do not get closer to solutions either. With ports and dendrites there is no crossing of boundaries, it is what helps the system interact and it can be truncated or extended or narrowed or widened in specific ways to allow for the process of experimentation, which is also core to sense-making.
- Jan Roodt
The danger with boundaries is when people use them to exclude “the other”, to live within boundaries rather than to transcend them. The point of the Cynefin model is to allow people to live on both sides of the boundaries and to behave appropriately depending on context
