Systems Learning Series
In February, CBODN is excited to host Dave Snowden and his session entitled "From Inner/Outer to Entanglement".
Dave Snowden is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co. and Director of the Cynefin Centre for Applied Complexity. His international work covers government and industry, looking at complex strategic, organisational, and decision-making issues. He has pioneered a science-based approach, drawing on anthropology, the cognitive sciences, and complex adaptive systems theory. This approach, known as naturalising sense-making, has been acknowledged as one of five distinct schools of sensemaking/sense-making.
He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on various subjects and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He is a passionate advocate for recognising the value of human capabilities in decision-making, particularly the differences between the embodied, extended, and enacted capabilities of human communities to make sense of the world and the inference models used by machine processing.
He is the principal author of a joint publication between the Cynefin Centre and the Future Systems Directorate of the European Union: ' Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis—a field guide for decision-makers.’ A review by Durham University identified him as one of the leaders in applying complexity science or organisations.
He has created many methods and frameworks, including the Cynefin Framework. His paper with Boone on Cynefin and Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007. He also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He was an Editor-in-chief of E:CO, one of the first journals to cover applied complexity science. In 2006, he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and, in 2007, was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research. In 2023, he received an award from Hull University for his "Outstanding Contribution to Systems Thinking".
He is the principal designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, developed initially in counter-terrorism and now actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, citizen engagement, attitudinal measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative-based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management.
In 2004 he created Cognitive Edge, now known as Cynefin, which integrates academic thinking with practice in organisations worldwide and operates on a network model that works with academics, governments, commercial organisations, NGOs, and independent consultants.
