Dave Snowden  Thinking
Dave Snowden
In my last post, I promised to address the two elephant metaphors used by Peter Senge.   As a reminder we have the idea that if you break an elephant into two you don’t get two elephants and the second is the cliché of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and seeing different […]
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Dave Snowden
As a warning, in keeping with its title, this post is a rambling one.  It sets the scene for more structured stuff that I hope to post daily over the next couple of weeks while on an extended Asia-Pacific tour.  It also flags up various public events during that tour a few paragraphs down. One […]
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Dave Snowden
I’ve never liked the whole-body metaphors that are used by Senge and others in Systems Dynamics, especially as they are framed in Cartesian terms with the brain providing direction.  It allows people to be placed in the category of muscles and god help us, the heart.  I notice the kidney and spleen are less attractive […]
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Dave Snowden
Several interactions over social media have left me somewhat frustrated by the inability of several people who could know better (I exclude the odd attention-seeking troll from this) to understand one of the key aspects of complexity namely managing the nature of a system to encourage emergence.  The minute you imply any intentionality they immediately […]
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Dave Snowden
One of my favourite books in the Swallows and Amazons series is Great Northern in which our heroes ultimately save the eggs of a pair of Great Northerns from a malicious egg collector.  The final scene in which TItty and Dick return the eggs to their parents is especially poignant.   Those two characters are […]
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Dave Snowden
I’ve talked about granularity on many occasions and looking back to my original knowledge management work the idea was there as well – collections of micro-narrative not stories, multiple small projects with coherence rather than a grand strategy and so on.  That was during the period when complexity theory was starting to appear on the periphery […]
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Nina Abrahams
Catholic Relief Services [CRS] started piloting SenseMaker® in 2015, and has a wealth of knowledge, experience, and implementation advice that they will be sharing with us. They have travelled the world and worked with people most in need. The journey has not always been easy, but, in the words of Dr Maria Veronica Gottret, Senior […]
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Nia Williams
The Cynefin Co, Complexability and The Cynefin Centre Australia are excited to partner to showcase Complexity in Action.   Through a range of events across the week beginning 7 March you can join global practitioners as they share their learnings, experiences, adventures and misadventures! This week is about offering an opportunity to explore and share […]
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Anna Panagiotou
Unless this is the first time you have stumbled across this blog by accident, you might have come across the idea of “the Wiki”. This usually does not refer to The Big Wiki but to the Cynefin one, which is a labour of love by many in the community and an attempt to ensure openness, authenticity, and rigour […]
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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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