A learning approach to community response during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Applying the Cynefin framework to guide decision‐making

INTRODUCTION: The United States has been unsuccessful in containing the rapid spread of COVID‐19. The complex epidemiology of the disease and the fragmented response to it has resulted in thousands of ways in which spread has occurred, creating a situation where each community needs to create its own local, context‐specific learning model while remaining compliant to county or state mandates. METHODS: In this paper, we demonstrate how cross sector collaborations can use the Cynefin Framework, a tool for decision‐making in complex systems, to guide community response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. RESULTS: We explore circumstances under which communities can inhabit each of the four domains of systems complexity represented in the Cynefin framework: simple, complicated, chaotic, and complex, and describe the decision‐making process in each domain that balances health, economic, and social well‐being. CONCLUSION: This paper serves as a call to action for the creation of community learning systems to improve community resilience and capacity to make better‐informed decisions to address complex public health problems during the pandemic and beyond.