Cynefin diagrams now have a text-based DSL, the first one anywhere (that I know of).

My PR to add Cynefin framework support to Mermaid.js just merged. That means Cynefin diagrams will soon render natively in GitHub READMEs, GitLab, Notion, Obsidian, and every other tool that supports Mermaid. Version-controlled. Diffable in PRs. No screenshots. No drawing tools.

Years ago, my Director at the Wikimedia Foundation, Faidon Liambotis, introduced me to the Cynefin framework as a tool to map and manage complexity. He was right. It changed how I think about problems and I became a big fan.

So when I found myself contributing diagram types to Mermaid and realized nobody had ever built a text-based DSL for Cynefin, the two threads came together. Complex systems thinking and open source, two of my favorite things.

Huge thanks to Knut Sveidqvist (Mermaid’s creator) and Ashish Jain for thorough, constructive reviews across four rounds that made the code significantly better. Open source works when maintainers invest in review quality, and they absolutely did.

If you use the Cynefin framework in your work — strategy, incident management, org design, agile coaching — I’d love to hear how you’d use text-based diagrams. The syntax is in beta and community feedback shapes what comes next.

Full write-up: https://leomata.com/blog/cynefin-shipped/

#cynefin #mermaid #opensource #strategy #devtools