It’s become a Christmas tradition for me to write a series of posts around a single theme. I’ve covered food, welsh poetry and other subjects and last year I did a general update on the wider body of knowledge which is naturalising sense-making. This year I asked for suggestions in our Cynefin Company internal slack […]
This post is by way of a postscript to the main theme of the series. To be honest, I am never sure if the twelve days of Christmas start on the Day itself or Boxing day, but today is Epiphany when the Magi presented their gifts to the Christ Child and the traditional end of […]
In this twelve-part series, I have been attempting to layout my understanding of the field of naturalising sense-making which I, with the support of many others, have been involved in creating over the last two, possibly three decades. The astute reader will also see that most of my November and December posts have been part […]
The essence of a naturalising approach to sense-making is to use natural science as an enabling constraint. Put simply if know that humans make decisions on a first-fit pattern match then it is foolish to design systems that assume an enlightenment form of rationality. If we know that once you get to a certain level […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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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