Dave Snowden

To the Athens of Latin America

By Dave Snowden  ·  May 2, 2013  ·  Great places

After a long flight via a disrupted immigration line in Miami I made it to Bogota late yesterday.   I've grown very fond of the place over a limited number of visits in the last two years.   From my perspective the climate is perfect, not to hot not to cold and I've got some good friends and partners to work with.  There is an immanence (in the theological sense of the word) to the mountains that surround the city and the banks of clouds that build over them, often sharply illuminated by the sun.  The presence of mountains is...

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Walking & conversation as therapy

By Dave Snowden  ·  May 1, 2013  ·  Diabetes, Great places

I went for a walk with my daughter on the weekend.  Originally she was coming home for the weekend and I was planning a  further section of the North Downs Way to be in the area of Brighton to give her a lift home.  One seizes all chances to spend time with children as they move through University and to their own independent lives.  In the event pressure of time on an essay for her MA meant that she had to stay in Brighton, but she did have time for a shorter walk than the one I planned.

Now Brighton is a good centre for walks so...

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Context, is well contextual

By Dave Snowden  ·  April 26, 2013  ·  Reflections

It's been the best part of twenty years now since I moved out of operational and strategic management  roles and was granted the freedom to play with ideas following IBM's take over of DataSciences.  Not that I hadn't played with ideas before, but I was no longer pulled back by operational needs although IBM bureaucracy had a similar impact until I realised most of it sorted itself out if you ignored it.  Now my background was decision support; I had designed and built systems for that, written my MBA thesis on the subject and...

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Communication

By Dave Snowden  ·  April 25, 2013  ·  Reflections

Nancy Dixon, in response to my keynote yesterday, expressed a preference for getting people together to talk about things rather than gathering narrative into a database which "spits out the patterns".   She argued that Appreciate Inquiry and Future Search, both workshop focused, were techniques able to deal with multiple ontologies.  

The same preference was clear in David Gurteen's slides for his talk today.  There was a picture of excited happy people in a knowledge cafe, followed by one of people slumped in boredom or asleep...

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KM Europe and a respondent

By Dave Snowden  ·  April 24, 2013  · 

A flying visit to Amsterdam (well train in from Nice then a flight home) to speak at KM Europe.  It was good to see Ark bringing this conference back and also that it got a reasonable attendance in the end.  I had the opening keynote and picked up on similar themes to the Agile event the week before in Poland.  The nature of complexity, the complex domain model and the need to use a portfolio of parallel experiments before moving to define solutions.   I also talked about the use of micro-narrative as a non-hypothesis means of...

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