Dave Snowden

It's from a

Welsh.

The name is a

Welsh origin.

Yes.

Yes, yes.

And then I just realized actually this really ties into the systems thinking that I've been digging into and how it all really just everything ties together.

And for me, it's just like, well, hang on, it just makes sense.

But look, I mean, I guess what I would say is I think that's right.

And I think Dave Snowden, who designed the Kinect framework, is bang on to it.

Like that idea that in complexity, what we have to do is experiment and learn is so essential to this time.

But- Particularly with governments, the problem is that this, like I said, that quote from Hamilton, I think is really powerful.

That framing makes me immediately think of the systems thinking work.

So the likes of Dave Snowden and the Knethan framework and where...

What's in the system that I'm going to worry about today, like all the stuff that we can't control and things that, so, um, that I'm not by no means an expert.

I've done some light reading around light.

Sure.

I'm really drawn to Dave Snowden's work with Kenevan.

And when you try to understand complex systems, storytelling and having the system categorize itself and sense make about itself.

And so instead of trying to study it and understand it outside looking in, you should just understand the stories inside the system and then map those to vectors.

And when we no longer know which way to go or where to begin, it may be that we have begun our real work.

Dave Snowden, one of the grandfathers of complexity, I guess, along with Gregory Benson and so forth.

His Kinefin framework is just an evergreen, beautiful model.

I love it so much.

Always scared to reference or evoke Dave Snowden's name because he has Welsh and battler energy.

And I just don't have the, I just don't want to spend that much time on LinkedIn.

battling out things, but I love his contribution to the field.

Confused is like, this is where you're lost and you don't even know where you're lost.

So, but if it's irreversible, then that's when you have to spend time and energy and really go through it.

And, and to me, that's what, what David Snowden calls complex decision-making and which is a process where you need to do what he calls safe-to-fail experiments.

The example that I give is pricing, which isn't completely irreversible, but it's sometimes often hard to really change your pricing once you do it because your customers, you've set an expectation, etc., And I say, well, how do you do your pricing? And they say, oh, well, you know, we do an analysis.

How do you do your analysis? Oh, we look at our competitors and we.

It, it reminded me a lot of, um, the, uh, some other work that I actually am much...

I, I, I am very influenced by, which is like the work of Sidney Dekker and, um, uh, in particular, like his examination of, um, like synoptic legibility and what creates like chaos in systems, and also, um, a guy named Dave Snowden at IBM, his Cynefin framework, and like the relationship between chaos and simple systems and how they, like simple systems when they break, they sorta fail into chaos.

Um, and I think that-

Hmm

It's probably helpful in many ways, and as long as we don't use it as a stick to beat ourselves with, probably cool.

Um, yeah, this question about complicated versus complex, this is, um, a distinction made famous by a complexity theorist named Dave Snowden, who's a Welshman, uh, still writing and, um, thinking about complexity in super interesting and confronting ways.

Uh, his website is called Cognitive Edge.

I think it's cognitive/edge.com, but if you Google Cognitive Edge, you'll get it.

I don't know if you've, you're familiar, but it's this Welsh word.

It's Dave Snowden.

He wrote about it in a Harvard Business Review piece in, like, 2008 with his coauthor, and, um, he talks about how problems in organizations tend to...

It's a sense-making framework is, I think, the term that he uses, and he talks about how problems kind of fall into different domains, and again, nothing's always just one or the other, but there are some problems that are clear.