Positive deviance is a concept that emerged in the field of development aid during the 1960s, and it found its initial expression among nutrition experts who wanted to find out why the children of some families were much healthier than others in a given village though they were subjected to the same poverty and the […]
One of the critical approaches we developed with narrative, initially in workshops and then at scale with SenseMaker®, was to take people through parallel processes of interpretation and then get the two groups to compare the results. That work is three decades old in some forms, and the underlying principles have stood the test of […]
There are two major forms of stupidity on the various debates that sprint on social media from time to time. The first is the assertion that because complex systems have no linear material causality that all forms of root cause analysis should be abandoned. the second is to assert that root cause analysis (RCA) is […]
In the course of writing my Christmas series I came up with a throw away comment about the 3Cs of research. I made that comment in the context of the way in which so called research is used to support stories people want to believe and yes, I was being negative. It got retweeted a […]
Reactions on how to solve the financial crisis of 2008/2009 produced no real, innovative solutions – just more of the same. Most of the proposals aimed at solving the dilemmas caused by the crisis can be reduced to two basic solutions, the first being more rules, better rules and new rules, to control those now […]
I appreciate the opportunity to be the guest blogger on this site the past two weeks. The comments from the readers have been excellent! We need to make sure that ideas of Cognitive Edge are made known to the individuals in health care who now stand at the brink of making significant improvements in the […]
Marian Zeitlin, Jerry Sternin and his wife, Monique are, without a doubt, true geniuses. I would urge all of you to read their stories: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/41/sternin.html They are stories of simple realizations that, once implemented, had massive nonlinear results. To anyone interested in understanding an “attractor” and how amplification of a positive attractor can have immense […]
I hope to have encouraged many of you to view health care as a Complex Adaptive System. In such a system, multiple independent self-selecting agents interact with each other and the system in ways only partially predictable. The agents and the system coevolve, according to relatively simple rules, with nonlinear outcomes produced at inflection points. […]
In my last post I suggested that building capabilities in an organization and in individuals is a necessary step to enable the growth of authority. Building capabilities also underpins any meaningful response to the Horsemen of Famine and Death. Both horsemen preach despair – indeed the lethality of Famine is that it first removes the […]
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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