Dave Snowden  Thinking
Dave Snowden
The Anthropocene is generally dated from the Trinity Test – the first explosion of a Nuclear Bomb which tool place in 1945. It is the point at which humanity had significant impact on the geology and ecosystems of the world. It could be dated much earlier, for most of our existence as a species we […]
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Dave Snowden
One of the more fascinating aspects of human systems, and one of the most significant differences with the wider field of complexity is that of identity. Humans beings rarely have single agency. Not only that our identities can flex and change instantly and in context. Identity switches also change the way we perceive the world, […]
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Dave Snowden
You see conflict and care in all systems but humans are pretty unique in allowing both to exist outside kinship growth and for abstract ideas and values. Not only that we create rituals around both, we train people in rhetoric, we see conflict as an essential part of a good story. Many moons ago when […]
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Dave Snowden
One of the most important things to grasp about a complex adaptive system is that, at a system level, we have no linear material cause but instead we have a dispositional state, a set of possibilities and plausibilities in which a future state cannot be predicted. Now I’ve always found this easy to grasp but […]
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Dave Snowden
I’ve spent a fair amount of my time in the mountains working within a general sense of direction but adjusting goal to fit the context. Sometimes that has been by necessity; the sudden descent of fog or strong winds that render a ridge walk unsafe. Sometimes it is by choice; sensing a possible path, an […]
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Dave Snowden
The third aspect of anthro-complexity I want to discuss is the complex and problematic issue of scaling. Now this is something I have written a lot of posts on (one extended 2014 series here), but I am still refining the message and my own understanding. So read the prior posts but I am not going […]
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Dave Snowden
The next aspect of uniqueness in human systems that I want to address is that of proximity. In ‘standard’ complexity agents receive signals from other agents in close proximity but don’t have knowledge of the wider system. Now this is true and no true of human systems. We are profoundly influenced by the proximate narratives […]
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Dave Snowden
Yesterday I used Paul Cilliers list of characteristics of a complex adaptive systems to introduce the idea that complexity in human systems – anthro-complexity – has many distinguishing characteristics. I plan to run through ten of them starting today and will do so in a discursive manner. This is an exploration of the subject not […]
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Dave Snowden
One of the oddiities of our increasingly digitial world is the way that birthday and other reminders pop into view for old friends who are now dead. Paul Cilliers, author of Complexity and Post-Modernism and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch died on July 31st 2011. Max Boisot also died in September of […]
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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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