A couple of things came together to stimulate writing this post. One was thinking about issues of management and control within organisations and the other was the recent BBC series Germany: Memories of a nation. One of the key messages from the BBC series was the way in which the evolution of the Holy Roman […]
One of the key things in understanding and managing a complex adaptive system is getting the granularity right. Things that are too chunked are too big to change, to allow combination and recombination; too small and any such combination is not going to be visible or significant. Granularity is one of the key factors in scaling […]
As I described yesterday, my use of narrative started with the need to discover decisions and their nature as part of creating a bottom up approach to knowledge management strategy. Decision mapping has high utility in its own right as, done properly, it reveals the true nature of activity in an organisation. That can then […]
A very satisfying first day in our Small Countries Big Ideas programme held overlooking the harbour here in Caernarfon. The turn out has been good with a lot of potential synergies between the participants' potential projects. Today we focused on the intractable problems and issues faced in government as well as a range of […]
A good conversation in Moscow this morning with David Anderson around and about the issue of managing a complex system and as is the way with discussion a half formed idea or two coalesced. I've been teaching how to intervene in a complex system for years, developing and then using the ABIDE perspective question […]
I had to get up at 0400 this morning to make the morning flight for Berlin. The reason was that I had an indulgent thirty hour period which stated on Friday night with a Blues match at the Arms Park, followed yesterday by a walk on Pen-y-fan followed by a performance of William Tell by […]
Last month Paul Tudor alerted me to a 2012 McKindsey report Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value. I pulled it out yesterday as I wanted to read it for my opening keynote at the Global Scrum Gathering in Berlin next week. In that keynote I plan to talk about issues of […]
his blog is being posted on behalf of Thomas Townsend. Thomas will be teaching our newest course – Cynefin & Policywith Tony Quinlan in Ottawa on Oct 2-3. Some 10 years ago now when I first became interested in how complexity science might be used in public administration there was a body of thinking but relatively […]
Probably the most important phrase in The Children's Party Story is the conclusion: We manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries. That simple phrase packs a lot of meaning and potential. Key to it is the idea of managing the situated present. To unpack that a bit I am using situated in the sense […]
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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