Reflections

Chaos & disorder

By Dave Snowden  ·  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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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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Knowledge has to be situated

By Dave Snowden  ·  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

By Dave Snowden  ·  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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