Dave Snowden  Thinking
Dave Snowden
In this final section, I want to bring together the various thread into what I called naturalising sensemaking.  I define sensemaking as how to we make sense of the world so that we can act in it and this definition carries with it a sense of sufficiency and this also incorporates a sense of how do I […]
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Dave Snowden
I think a lot of people don’t realise how novel the complexity stuff still and how threatening (needlessly) it is to established management practice.  Those of us engaged in taking a more humane perspective a decade or so ago were a merry band of mavericks from many different backgrounds. I still treasure the various meetings […]
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Dave Snowden
Yesterday’s opening post in this series provided a background to the initial sources and contacts I used as I started to take complex adaptive systems as the major focus, in effect pushing knowledge management into the background and using narrative as a tool to understand the nature of complexity in human systems.  Cynefin shifted into […]
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Dave Snowden
I can’t remember when complexity science came into the picture – it was in the fairly early days of my knowledge management work.  I got started with what is still a good introduction namely Axelrod and Cohen’s Harnessing Complexity.  It is a small book but was the first to take a scientific approach to the implications […]
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Dave Snowden
A lot of the early work on narrative, which I summarised yesterday was largely based on instinct and common sense.  There was background theory – I focused on aesthetics and ethics when I studied Philosophy and I was formally trained in rhetoric at school and carried that forward into competitive debating at University and beyond. […]
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Dave Snowden
As I indicated yesterday my group in IBM UK got into the wider field of narrative through the process of knowledge discovery.  We found that collecting stories around decisions made allowed us to more effectively may what people knew by creating a meaningful context.  We also discovered that people journaling that experience was more effective […]
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Dave Snowden
In this second section, I am moving on to the wider field of narrative.    I wrote a paper on narrative and phenomenology while at University for a college seminar on feminism which got me into an over-intensive library period looking at archetypal story forms in different societies.  That involved a mixture of fascination and […]
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Dave Snowden
I’d been working on knowledge management for some time and have come across Boisot’s book Knowledge Assets.  Yasmin Mirali, then at Warwick University introduces us and organised a joint seminar and a lot of things came together.  I talked about the role of Max as a mentor, protagonist, and friend on many an occasion and the […]
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Dave Snowden
In this second post within the knowledge management section, I want to summarise some of the material on human cognition and decision making that I and others rely on within the wider field of sense-making.  The third post I intend to largely devote to the work I did over the years with Max Boisot 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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