Summary
The 3As is a way of reading a situation through three questions: who or what is free to act (agency), which patterns of belief, story and practice have locked together (assemblage), and what the surroundings make easier or harder (affordance). It comes from the Cynefin community around complexity thinker Dave Snowden, as an alternative to talk of changing ‘mindsets’, which it finds too abstract and too individual.
The reasoning is that an emergent pattern can’t be engineered directly, but what shapes it can be adjusted and the direction watched. Snowden on why assemblages matter: “Those patterns trigger an assemblage from which we find it very difficult to escape”.
Rationale
We interviewed Dave Snowden for this inquiry. His 3As swap ‘mindset’ for things that can be changed, the same turn we take in widening attention from what people think to “the wider conditions”.