Format
We deliver Estuarine Mapping workshops in two formats: as open enrolment courses through The Cynefin Company (in English), and as in-house workshops for organisations and teams, including in German. Open enrolment format: Three 2.5-hour sessions, live online, or in a 1-day in-house workshop. Tailored to your context and team, in English or German. Get in touch to discuss.
A complexity-based method for strategy and direction-setting in complex environments, where traditional goal-setting and linear planning don’t hold.
Estuarine mapping starts from where you actually are rather than where you’d like to end up. It helps you map the landscape of constraints, possibilities and affordances in a situation, and work out what can be changed, what needs to be left alone, and what’s available to act on. The result is a way forward built from what’s present rather than imposed from a plan.
This matters wherever the way forward is unclear and keeps shifting: in organisational strategy, in stakeholder processes, in situations where competing interests make conventional planning a source of conflict rather than clarity.
Estuarine mapping has been gaining traction in industry and government as an approach that allows diverse parties to work on strategy together without needing to resolve their differences first.
Estuarine Mapping
Format
Six 3-hour sessions, live online (14:00–17:00 CET), with a three-day self-directed integration gap after Day 4.
Cohort size 10–24. All sessions recorded with one year’s access.
Certificate of attendance on completion.
Next cohort: 18–26 January 2027
Sense-making for Coaches
We are thrilled about this course: A six-session working lab, delivered live online, co-taught by Complexity Partners and Ellie & Dave Snowden.
This course grew out of a straightforward observation: experienced coaches already work with complexity. You read the layered dynamics in a client’s situation, the organisational pressures underneath, and several things happening at once in a room. What’s harder to find is structured support for that work, rather than carrying it on intuition alone or reaching for models built for categorisation and linear thinking.
Sense-making for Coaches offers that structure. You learn to read context more precisely through the Cynefin framework, to work with constraints (the habits, boundaries and relationships that hold a pattern in place), and to understand which ones can be loosened, strengthened, or left alone.
You work with SenseMaker® and the Coaching QuickSense to surface what can’t be surfaced by asking directly. And you carry that understanding into something concrete through Estuarine and Affordance mapping: a way forward built out of the client’s actual situation rather than a plan imposed on it.
The course also works with a distinction that matters more than it might seem: coaching, facilitating and training are structurally different positions, each with its own blind spot. Knowing which one you’re occupying is part of the work. That’s why this applies as directly to facilitators and trainers as it does to coaches.
COMPLEXITY TRAINING
All our trainings are delivered together with The Cynefin Company or with close collaboration with, and supported by, their core team.
Picture credit: Estuary by Jordan Heath on Unsplash; second picture AI-generated.
The foundational course in Cynefin and complexity methods, is delivered by Anne Caspari and Johann Entz as accredited Cynefin Company faculty.
Base Camp is an immersive introduction to applying the Cynefin framework and its tools. Over four half-day sessions you build the framework from the inside through direct participation, explore how to contextualise problems before responding, and practise core methods for decision-making, strategy and leadership under uncertainty. It suits people new to complexity thinking as well as those who want to refresh and deepen what they already know.
The course runs through The Cynefin Company. Complexity Partners clients can book at a reduced rate.
The Cynefin® BaseCamp
Format
Four 3-hour sessions, live online (14:00–17:00 CET).
Cohort size 12–25.
Pre-work includes video lectures and reading. All sessions recorded with one year’s access.
Certificate of attendance on completion.
Next cohort: 19–22 April 2027
Book through The Cynefin Co · Ask us about the CP rate
We teach Cynefin-based methods and complexity-informed approaches, both through The Cynefin Company and directly to organisations. The courses range from foundational training in the Cynefin framework to applied sense-making for coaches, consultants and facilitators.