In 1949 George Zipf, a Harvard linguistics professor, published Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. What became known as Zipf’s law inversely relates the ‘size’ of an occurrence of an event to it’s ‘rank’. For example, he sought to determine the ‘size’ of the 3rd or 8th or […]
I have been helping to prepare a workshop that will be held at CERN just outside Geneva in mid November. CERN, you will recall, is where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator that is 27-kilometer in circumference, is being built in order to test for the existence of a tiny and elusive particle, […]
I often drop in at the Gran Sitges Hotel for a drink. The hotel is conveniently located at the foot of the hill on which my house is located. Three days ago, I went into the bar and asked for Diet Coke. I was told that there was none and was offered a Diet Pepsi […]
I often write papers with my friend Bill McKelvey, professor of strategic organizing at UCLA. It works like this. He flies into Barcelona and stays with my wife and me for a few days. He admires the view of the sea from my terrace and we go for frequent walks. The view from my terrace […]
I have always been interested in the nature of codification, the process in which phenomena are assigned to socially agreed upon categories. Codification is typically presented as a quintessentially soporific activity. Under the tyranny of codification, the habitual insomniac, instead of just counting the sheep jumping over fences to get herself to sleep, is required […]
My 19-year old son tells me that I am immature. At his age, my eldest daughter – now 38 – said the same thing. That was nineteen years ago. I have had nineteen years to mature and now appear to have passed up the opportunity. So either my kids misunderstand me or I am an […]
The other day I found myself being reprimanded – ever so nicely – for queue jumping. I was heading for a specialized department in a London hospital. At the entrance to the building five people were standing around in no particular spatial configuration and clearly de-coupled from each other. The door was already open so […]
I am a novice blogger. Dave Snowden invited me to blog for a couple of weeks on this website and I decided that I would try it out for fun. However, I feel a bit like a country cousin from Iowa gate crashing a New York fancy dress party. I am hoping that people will […]
One of the Cognitive Edge methodologies that Sonja and I (Aiden) have found to be building up a nice head of steam in South Africa is ASHEN. The process of eliciting the Artifacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience and Natural Talent in the Knowledge Transfer realm has been very valuable – especially when one considers the challenges […]
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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