We now have the events confirmed for Dave and the Cynefin Co’s upcoming South Africa tour this August, with Meetups scheduled for Pretoria, Cape Town and Stellenbosch. This is the final call for registrations to the following workshops, meetups and discussions… please forward this to your friends and communities!
MASTERCLASS: Advanced Cynefin & Sense-making Intensive
Join Dave Snowden, Donna Glanvill and the Cynefin Co team for a 2-day intensive Advanced Cynefin and Sense-Making workshop, offering a deep dive into our theory, practice and tools. More information here: Advanced Cynefin & Sense-making Intensive, South Africa
Date: 1 & 2 August 2024
Time: 9:00am – 17:00pm
Venue: Kleinkaap Conference and Hotel – 87 Jim van der Merwe, Clubview, Centurion |
GAUTENG MEETUP
Join us for an informal community meetup, networking and community-building time with other local community members. Please let us know if you will join us!
Note: If you attend the 2-day Masterclass, the meetup is complimentary.Date: Thursday 1 August 2024
Time: 18:00 – 21:00
Venue: Kleinkaap Conference and Hotel – 87 Jim van der Merwe, Clubview, Centurion |
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT & AI WORKSHOP
This condensed Triopticon-style event will explore Knowledge Management and AI: a dialogue in a new reality – with Dave Snowden, Martie Mearns and Shawn Cunningham as our eagles, sparking rich discussions. More information here: Knowledge Management and AI: a dialogue in a new reality
Date: 07 August 2024
Time: 8:30 am – 13:00 pm
Venue: Tswelepelo, IT Building-Floor 4-64. Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria
Registration: AI & KM 7 August 2024
MONITORING, EVALUATION AND LEARNING (MEL) – Making sense in complexity
Join Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Co team for a half-day workshop on to revisit MEL and strategy planning from a complexity-informed and complexity-aware perspective. More information here: Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) – making sense in complexity, South AfricaDate: 08 August 2024
Date: 08 August 2024
Time: 9:00 – 13:00
Venue: CSIR in Pretoria: Meiring Naudé Rd, Brummeria, Pretoria, 0184
STELLENBOSCH MEETUP
Join us for an informal community meetup, networking and community-building time with other local community members. Places are limited – please RSVP to let us know if you will join us!
Date: 13 August 2024
Time: 15:00 – 17:30pm
Venue: Tokara Winery, Stellenbosch
Contact: training@thecynefin.co to confirm attendance
CAPE TOWN MEETUP
Join us for an informal community meetup, networking and community-building time with other local community members. Places are limited – please RSVP to let us know if you will join us!
Date: 14 August 2024
Time: 15:00 – 18:00pm
Venue: Ideas Cartel, Claremont
Contact: training@thecynefin.co to confirm attendance
We hope to see you there!
Thanks and regards,
Donna, Dave, Elmi and Chanre – the local team
The pictures here are from the first ever Cynefin Retreat in Snowdonia last year; our fourth retreat, the third of 2018 will be in the same location in a few weeks time. Last year we put together some interesting people and just let things happen; this year we have been more structured. In Whistler earlier in the year we looked at the wider question of design and moved on in Tasmania to examine design in the context of resilience. In the final retreat of the year we continue the theme of design but this time with a wider focus on value. The forecast is for better weather than last year as well! So my plan for an (optional) dawn walk up Y Garn with head torches to see the sun rise over the Ogwen Valley will stand and even last year we managed two short walks between downpours!
The retreats are at the cutting edge of the intersection of theory with practice and we are developing them so that each year has a theme. This year that theme has been design both as a process but also in the context of resilience and sustainability in society. In the final retreat we will bring a lot of threads together and aim to launch some new initiatives and opportunities for participants and the wider network.
So, for October 14-18 2018 (yes it is that close see PS at end for apology) we have two areas to work on and one process:
There are still places and we have special rates for those who want to attend both events (or who have already attended a retreat) as well as bursaries for those in the NGO sector. We’ve also got some options based on sweat equity so if you want to come but feel you can’t afford it then please get in touch but do so now! We keep these events small to maximise interaction.
For this retreat the plan is to increase the time the participants spend working while also increasing the stimulation of ideas. In the previous retreats three speakers exchanged ideas and then the group took the subject up. That worked well and will repeat next year. But this time round we have three faculty members at the event, and three providing virtual input to stimulate the group. It’s a really impressive lineup and you wouldn’t get it at many a conference let alone one with small number dynamics for the participants. Also this time I’m going on faculty rather than facilitating.
So I’ll let the faculty speak for themselves (listed in alphabetical order):
Kate Raworth is an Economist and a Visiting Research Fellow, Tutor and Advisory Board member of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. She worked for the UN and Oxfam for 20 years. in 2017 she published Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, which is a counter-proposal to mainstream economic thinking that formulates conditions for a sustainable economy. In this book she advocates reconsidering the foundations of economic science. Instead of focusing on the growth of the economy, she focuses on a model where there can be ensured that everyone on earth has access to their basic needs, such as adequate food and education, while not limiting opportunities for future generations by protecting our ecosystem
Richard Sandford is Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy at the University College London Institute for Sustainable Heritage. He works on future trajectories and threats to existing heritage and the nature of new forms of heritage engaging with engineers, artists, designers and technologists and will articulate the need for policy-makers and heritage managers to develop ways of working with new forms of data and evidence and establish authentically participatory approaches to working with communities, volunteers and wider publics. He has been working at the intersection of foresight, policy and research for the last fifteen years. In the UK Civil Service, where he worked with strategy and policy teams across government to develop their capacity to engage with social and technological risks and issues emerging over the long term. Before joining the civil service Richard was based in Singapore, where he designed and facilitated foresight workshops on the future of work, education and innovation across Asia, the US and Europe, for government agencies, NGOs, and private companies. .Richard leads the innovative Future Heritage research strand in UCL ISH, in partnership with Historic England, exploring the ways in which the role, practice and meaning of heritage may evolve into the next century, and developing practical tools to support heritage professionals to engage with the future in their work.
Mark Whitehead is a Professor of human geography whose research interests span urban studies, sustainability, and the impacts of the psychological sciences on public policy. Mark has authored and edited 10 books (Including Neuroliberalism), has written for The Guardian and Western Mail newspapers, and has blogged for the Psychology Today magazine. Mark holds an Award for Teaching Excellence from Aberystwyth University (2004), and in 2017 was named Lecturer of the Year by Aberystwyth University students. Mark has supervised twenty PhD students on topics including eco villages, renewable energy, urban governance, camouflage, mindfulness, climate change, drones, arctic geopolitics, eco-gentrification, sustainable citizenship, and water politics. He graduated with First Class Honours in 1997 and was awarded the James Fairgrieve and Gregynog Prizes for Geography. He commenced his PhD, exploring the emergence of sustainable urban development planning in the UK, in October 1997. He is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Environmental Values (a journal he was previously Managing Editor of).
Chris Bolton works for the Wales Audit Office where he runs the Good Practice Exchange and co-founded Good Practice Wales. The WAO stands out amongst audit institutions in that it goes beyond compliance checking and focusses on public service improvement through active knowledge exchange. Chris has used Cognitive Edge methods for over 10 years and has developed SenseMaker work in a wide variety of settings across Wales. This has included significant areas around employee engagement and has extended into things as diverse as improving food waste recycling and reducing antimicrobial resistance. During 2017 Chris was seconded part time to work with the Cynefin Centre, which included spending time with the Wales Centre for Behaviour Change at Bangor University. For an number years he was an Advisory Board Member with Academi, the all Wales Public Services Leadership body, which included facilitation roles at their annual Summer School.of the Welsh Audit Office. He was recently granted a Churchill Fellowship to study co-operatives in Basque County, New England and Nova Scotia. This will be one of the first events at which he will report on his findings.
Rachel Lilley is one of the authors of Neuroliberalism: Behavioural Government in the 21st Century. She has worked for over 20 years in social and environmental change as Director of a social enterprise, trainer, consultant and communications expert. In recent years she has worked in Ceredigion locally on community engagement and domestic energy efficiency. She has developed and delivered consultancy and training interventions for Welsh Government, WWF, Ceredigion County Council, Ogilvy Mather amongst others. Her work and research interests are supporting effective and human centred change through developing the psychological capacity of policy and other change makers and leaders. This includes utilising the capacity and understanding of mindfulness and behavioural insights to support effective decision making and project/policy design.
Ann Pendleton-Jullian is Professor in the Knowlton School. An architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. From a first short career in astrophysics, Professor Pendleton-Jullian has come to see the world through a lens of complexity framed by principles from ecology theory. This, in tandem with a belief that design has the power to take on the complex challenges associated with an emergent highly networked global culture has led her to work on architecture projects that range in scale and scope from things to systems of action – from a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan, to a seven village ecosystem for craft-based tourism in Guizhou province, China – and in domains outside of architecture including patient centered health, new innovation models for K-12 and higher ed, and human and economic development in marginalised populations. She was a tenured professor at MIT for fourteen years. She is also a core member of a cross-disciplinary network of global leaders established by the Secretary of Defense to examine questions of emerging interest. As a writer, she has most recently finished a manuscript Design Unbound, with co-author John Seely Brown, that presents a new tool set for designing within complex systems and on complex problems endemic to the 21st century. She is currently in a visiting position at Stanford University.
PS: Life sometimes gets complicated, yea complex or chaotic and I’ve spent far too much time in recent months dealing with lawyers, business issues and considerable game playing on what should be simple issues. The net result is that this post is a good month late for which apologies. But this is a major event and its worth finding a way to be there. Planning for 2019 is underway and we plan to announce a full programme by the end of the year.
Our first retreat of 2018 explored the general area of design and innovation. It took place in Whistler with an outstanding faculty and a lot of participation from the delegates. Combining the event with our first ever Train the Trainer session also produced multiple benefits. In that linked event we took an approach (that may be novel for some) that the trainer should know more than the person being trained! So we assumed people there knew the basics and we focused on going deeper, teaching more of the underlying theory and, in a series of exercises, testing understanding of the application of that theory to practice; understanding the why as well as the how. For the retreat, the theme of design was always there from the initial conception, but the increasing commoditisation of design into the linear process of much design thinking creating a context for the programme. We need to look at a non-linear process, one which engages a wider group of people. We made good progress, and retreats are designed to be cutting edge; the point where theory first interacts with practice. But I ended up a little frustrated that an open process didn’t lead to to methods there and then, although it did lay the ground rules. The other thing that worked well was the Tricopticon process; a half way house between a formal conference and the more unstructured unconference. Well to be more accurate it worked better on Day two when I varied the sequence of events.
For all those who keep emailing me asking when I am going to teach a course again (especially those from Australia and New Zealand) then this is the opportunity. Train the Trainer not only authorises you to run the Foundations Course with our brand, but it is an advanced course on Cynefin in its own right. Coupled with the creation of a complexity based approach to design and you have a golden opportunity here!
I ended up convinced that design needs to be the theme of the remaining retreats for next year. So I reoriented the next one (in Tasmania in a few weeks time) to look at design for resilience, rather than just resilience. The final 2018 event will also be a design for theme around value and change with a more economic bent. I’m going to blog about resilience tomorrow to provide more context. However readers might like to look at the coming retreat. For anyone in Asia Pacific its your local event for this year. For anyone outside of that geography, we know its short notice (work on the merger have taken a lot of my attention the last few months) but it might event be cheaper to fly to Australia for this one and Tasmania is a wonderful site! For anyone in the network who has been through the various foundations courses over the year we have a special bundled price for the Retreat and the Train the Trainer event so leave a comment with your email or contact us by the web site and we’ll let you have a discount code.
I’m really excited by the Tasmania event, and the faculty. The plan is to take a lot of the output from Whistler and focus it on organisational, personal and society resilience. By the end of the session we should have a more fully developed method that attendees will be in a position to take to their organisations or markets – first mover advantage on a whole new approach to distributed ethnography and ideation and provides ongoing benefit to organisations. Finding ways to understand the current nature of the system, its vulnerabilitues and the opportunities for short and longer term innovation will be a focus. Resilience is (in my language) surviving by adaptation and also exaptation; maintaining continuity of identity by managed change. In an uncertain world that is a key skill.
More on the underlying theory and principles tomorrow – but this blog post is an unashamed pitch for you to join us in August for a winter retreat in Tasmania. We’ll also be using Port Arthur to explore aspects of resilience so this will be physical as well as mental in nature.
The opening picture is of a salt march taken by Sarah Foulwetter and used under a creative commons license. A salt marsh works to prevent flooding by changing its character and continues to provide utility even when exhausted. It serves as an illustration of a resilient system. Contrast that with a sea wall, which is robust and has high utility until it breaks. At that point it would be better if it had not been there in the first place. The in text picture is from the Whistler retreat at the train wreck site, where a tragic accident has not created an art work within the forest. At Whistler we looked at the role of aesthetics in design so it was a good field trip. That learning will be taken over into the Tasmania retreat.
One of the aspects of sense-making we emphasize in all our training programmes is the value of contrast. Since complex systems are inherently unordered, without any underlying repeating structure, their is no absolute baseline or reference. Hence contrasting from differences in the system (I.e. perspective, context, location, etc.) provides an effective means of making sense.
So what does this have to do with the title of this post? Well if you are wondering where Whitehorse is its in northern Canada in the Yukon territory neighbouring Alaska. Although Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon, it is sparsely populated (moose out number people more than 2:1) and very remote. Arguably there is no other urban mega-city than New York which reflects the complete opposite on the scale of cities. Now Whitehorse is larger than a village or small town but the contrast with NYC is immense.
In February Dave will be delivering two Cynefin & Sense-making training courses in North America – New York City (Feb 8-11) and Whitehorse, Yukon (Feb 15-18). I’ve been given the honour of supporting him in Whitehorse! Both locations have active Cognitive Edge practitioners engaged in applying Cynefin and many using SenseMaker®. The diversity of the projects and people attending our training courses gives great contrast value in learning the application of complexity, Cynefin, and sense-making. The benefit of us instructors delivering in different locations and cultures is it keeps the material fresh with new ideas and refinements to the approaches. Both the NYC and Whitehorse training courses are positioned to offer an excellent curriculum of the most current CE thinking and application with unique backdrops!
So please join us either in NYC or Whitehorse in February. For all our American friends I must say the Whitehorse session has just recently been further discounted due to the currency markets and devaluation of the Canadian dollar. And accommodations and expenses are very reasonable compared with the big apple!
Anyone interested in attending both sessions please send us an email and we would be happy to offer an attractive bundle discount. If we talk with our CE friends in the Yukon we may even plan a unique outdoor experience but warm clothing will be a must!
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