Dave Snowden  Thinking
Dave Snowden
Actant, a significant term in our work, is not just about humans but takes a broader concept of agency.  Its origin lies in Greimas’s structural semantics and narrative theory, and it builds on early work, including fascinating material on the morphology of folktales.  It is part of a body of work that builds on structuralism […]
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Dave Snowden
Peder Söderlind pinged me on a LinkedIn post, which picked up a fair following, in part because of its very intriguing opening sentence: Doing my best to be a bit braver and trust my own thinking.  The link takes you to an article that seeks to view curiosity as a collective movement.   It coincided […]
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Dave Snowden
Some years ago, I picked up Jeremy Lent’s book The Patterning Instinct: A cultural history of humanity’s search for meaning largely based on the title and the fact that it had an introduction by Fritjof Capra.  As a book, it seeks to break the pervasiveness of Cartesian Dualism and “the tired clichés of the science-religion […]
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Dave Snowden
I’m taking a five-day break between conferences to catch up with my good friends Paul and Brenda, walking in the Mournes. Yesterday, it rained, and the Mourne Mountains were swathed in clouds. The forecast warned of wind strengths that would make walking impossible, and even with the best equipment, attempting anything more ambitious than a […]
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Dave Snowden
So, Monday and Tuesday of this week were devoted to the first edition of the Knowledge Summit in Dublin, with a strong AI theme, a pattern we saw last year at KM World.  It was held at Trinity College Dublin, and I could visit the old library, pictured to the left, along with the Book of […]
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Dave Snowden
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time over the last month stabilising the current version of Estuarine Mapping ready for the Hexi kit version, but I have also been looking at some of the work that needs to be done to embed it into a broader framing of strategy.  This has focused on questions […]
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Dave Snowden
I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickring out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.’ […]
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Dave Snowden
Earlier today Nigel Thurlow and I were involved in a workshop with Scrum.org, hosted by Patricia Kong, to launch the new Scrum hexi kit.   It was recorded so I don’t intend to replicate material from Nigel’s presentation – I was there to present one slide (see the header) and also to be involved in […]
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Dave Snowden
This final post in the annual update series has a flavour of putting things together and tying up some loose ends.   When I started the series I listed seven frameworks; three are stable or have only recently been updated, so other than listing them, there are no updates.  Those are Cynefin, Flexuous Curves and […]
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About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
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