For the last two years we have been working with our network members and clients in the NHS, the Royal College of Nursing and beyond to try to make sense of the pandemic and how its impacting healthcare professionals, leaders and patients and their families/carers. As Covid cases begin to rise once more and various […]
New uses for sensors are being created all the time; from marinas using them to increase safety by guiding yachts boats into place to monitoring the flow of taps in public toilets. Animals are also being used as sensors. There’s a type of bird whose migration pattern can predict when hurricanes will hit months in […]
I talked yesterday about metaphor-based languages and used Winnie the Pooh as an illustration. That was part of a loose set of posts starting to develop and codify a more general theory of leadership from a sense-making and anthro-complexity perspective. One of the key components of that theory is the idea of communication through engagement. […]
That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a “wave of materialism’ is related to what is called the “crisis of authority.” If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from […]
In yesterday’s post, I was concerned about both the abuse of power, and the effectiveness of confessional use of language. The desire to compel people to put into words (generally the words of power in the facilitator’s culture and/or ideology) learning is problematic to say the least. And the excuse of no one is compelled to […]
Two days ago I wrote a post that looked at what leadership theory is not indulging my love of language to introduce the word apophatic to a wider audience. Today I want to look at the more positive aspects, the positive things we can say, and do, hence the word kataphatic. But in simple form the last […]
There is some continuity here with yesterday’s post on the mystical, or ineffable aspects of human sense-making. apophatic theology is a form of knowledge by negation, a via negationis in which we can know what something is not but not truly what it is. To quote Aquinas “Now, because we cannot know what God is, but […]
My post of yesterday put forward the position that while the nature of the system acts as both a constraint and as an enabler of what is possible, individuals can and do make a difference. The fact that there have been few if any human societies that didn’t have some form of leadership should tell […]
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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