Can Cynefinlytics Help You Understand and Manage Complexity?

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Artificial Intelligence   Complexity  

To begin with, all I had was the germ of an idea: to find out what role (if any) perception and pattern recognition had played in the development of artificial intelligence.

That process—of finding out—often feels like I am traversing a labyrinth in which I know the general direction I want to move in, but am forced to meander around the periphery, circling back on myself and being confronted by dead ends before finally threading a path to the center of the maze and finding an answer (though not always the one I was expecting to find there).

In developing this idea (you can read the results in The Perception of Complexity), I wanted to find examples of how AI capabilities have been incorporated into applications that are specifically designed to help project managers understand and manage complexity in their projects. To assist me in this task, I did what many of us are doing these days: I went online and started a conversation with Bard, a popular generative AI chatbot developed by Google.

Despite the sometimes-beguiling fluency with which large language model (LLM) chatbots can converse with us, we always need to keep in mind the fact that we are interacting with a sophisticated search engine interface that synthesizes its responses to our questions from the very large datasets on which it has been trained. For us to trust in the veracity of those …

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