Dave Snowden

Chaos & disorder

May 24, 2013  ·  Cynefin, Reflections

I often get asked about the two transitionary domains in Cynefin and its not in frequent for people to assume they are the same sort of domain.   Now I can see how this happens but  its not the case and the reasons why are important.  At its most basic chaos is a legitimate state, engendered with control it has considerable utility as its the basis for distributed cognition, or Wisdom of the Crowds to use the more popular term.  If you can create unconstrained agents (remember I use the constraint based definition) then you have the...

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To the Athens of Latin America

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

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

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

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

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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Knowledge has to be situated

April 18, 2013  ·  Reflections

My original plan for yesterday was to spend the day walking around Krackow with the camera before getting the flight back to Berlin to run a seminar and pick up again on Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Staatsopera.  When I got the hotel on Monday I looked at the various advertised tours and realised I was near Auschwitz.   I suppose I should have known, but geography is not the first thing that comes to mind when that name comes to mind.  Now I have never been to a concentration camp, let alone an extermination one so I decided it was...

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and so to SCRUM/KANBAN

April 17, 2013  ·  Reflections

Yesterday I updated the Complexity domain model, but left the coherence diagonal for today.  I promised to do this in the context of Agile, Scrum, KANBAN and the like and will do so, although the points are more generally applicable.   I also want to make an important qualification before moving forward.   I know that many Agile practitioners have intuited some of what I am going to talk about, and some have moved onto action.  There are elements of Chris Matts real option theory that I could have more directly referenced for...

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Complex domain: April 2013

April 16, 2013  · 

I've been using the complex domain model for some time now since I first published it.  One of my main aims was to move away from a simple categorisation of methods which is the all too frequent use of Cynefin into a more nuanced and varied understanding of complexity.  There is a lot more to do here, but it's going in the right direction,

Its gone through some minor changes but I don;t intend to repeat the descriptions of the dimensions here - read up on the link.   The main change is to clearly identify the diagonal as the line...

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... when engineers run the world?

April 15, 2013  ·  Reflections

I've fallen behind on this blog over the last week and I have some backfill posts to make on IT Management, the first two parts of the Ring in Berlin and the death of that woman.  But those will come during the week as I have time.  This week I want to focus on issues that relate to the material in our new courses coming up in London, San Francisco and Melbourne.    Today I flew down from Berlin in Krakow where I will keynote tomorrow morning at ACE.  I then get most of Wednesday free as well so I've booked on the Auschwitz tour for...

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