Dave Snowden  Thinking
Dave Snowden
I spent most of yesterday’s post using the apprentice/craft hall set of practices to illustrate the unique ability of humans to create social mechanisms that transfer and enhance knowledge transfer between generations and also communities.  I’m using knowledge there in a general sense that includes practice as well as theoretical knowledge.  Today I want to […]
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Dave Snowden
So I’ve now flagged up religion and narrative as distinct aspects of human systems, and note they are both collective in nature something that with the overall function of reducing energy costs will be a theme throughout this series.  Humans like most animals to varying degrees operate best in groups, social interaction is a part […]
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Dave Snowden
The importance of narrative in understanding human systems has been a large part of my work for over twenty-five years.  In the Twelvetide series of 2020, I looked at the history of our use of narrative and some of the current applications.  You can find the first of those posts here.  I don’t plan to repeat […]
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Dave Snowden
For the first substantive post in this series, I wanted to pick up one of the more controversial elements of human systems namely the pervasive nature of religious ideas/ideology; which is not the same thing as a formal religion.  There are arguments in evolutionary psychology (I’ll try and find the paper and reference it later) […]
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Dave Snowden
The emerging plan for this year’s series was to look at the various unique aspects of human complex systems: a working title would be humans are not ants.  As I started drafting the opening blog yesterday I decided it was time to summarise the various Christmas, now Twelvetide, blog series I have been writing since 2009. […]
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Dave Snowden
So its time to conclude this series on the nature and management of ritual and habits. I’ll confess at times I thought I might not.  I took on the subject as a means of exploring something which I knew was important but which I could only see through a glass, darkly (1 Cor 13:12 KJV).  I […]
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Dave Snowden
I promised in the last post that I would look at practice theory which could easily lead into a discussion of habitus (Bourdieu) and Daisen (Heidegger) worthy of a thesis in its own right.  Other people have made stronger links to the wider field of naturalising sense-making with SenseMaker® being described as a practical implementation of […]
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Dave Snowden
Mapping and the need for maps underpins a lot of this series of posts – both in terms of understanding rituals & habits as well as my more discursive comments in the footers that explain the banner images.   I should also say that I am always slightly nervous talking about mapping as its one […]
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Dave Snowden
There is some debate in the literature as to the difference between repetitive actions and ritual acts, the argument being that the latter will also contain some symbolic aspect, in the object or what the object means.  In a sense this brings us back to an older difference between the sacred and the profane, words […]
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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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