Preparing
for Conversations III with Dave Snowden
Complexity:
The Next Big Thing After KM
Dave
Snowden
Director,
Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity
Marlborough, UK
 Introduction
Dave Snowden is
an AOK Dialogue original who is returning to the STAR Seat for
an unprecedented third time. In between Dave has almost always
been 'present' in our virtual discussion space and has contributed
heartily to dozens of our conversations over the past five years.
Until last year,
Dave worked under the auspices of IBM, but decided to leave the
organization, taking the Cynefin Centre -- which he founded --
with him. Without a 'sponsor,' we worried that Dave might not
have the time to volunteer here, but his presence is evidence
he still values our network -- not a small achievement knowing
that Dave does not waste time.
Thanks for being
here, Dave, and we look forward to sorting out the big words
and translating them into words that have meaning to us. Dave
knows we are an audience of great diversity and so he has suggested
beginning with the an article he has written for Management
Today's 2005 Yearbook which starts with a simple story and
some big words. Hopefully the article and the Dialogue will keep
the two extremes of our membership engaged.
As always, please
do your homework. Dialogues always produce better results when
the participants have reviewed the material before the discussion
begins.
Jerry
Ash
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Biography
Dave Snowden has been one of the leading figures in the movement
towards integration of humanistic approaches to knowledge management
with appropriate technology and process design. Well known for
his work on the role of narrative and sense making, he is an
entertaining speaker and a formidable realist, and one of the
few thought leaders who can bring together the academic and practitioner
perspectives into a single, comprehensible purview.
He is Director of
the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity which focuses
on the development of the theory and practice of social complexity.
The Centre spun off from IBM in July 2004 to allow it greater
freedom to explore new transdiciplinary and participatory approaches
to research and the creation of an  open source
approach to management consultancy. The Cynefin framework which
lies at the heart of the approach has been recognized by several
commentators as one of the first practical application of complexity
theory to management science and builds on earlier pioneering
work in Knowledge Management.
A native of Wales,
he was formerly a Director in the IBM Institute for Knowledge
Management where he led programmes on complexity and narrative.
He pioneered the use of narrative as a means of knowledge disclosure
and cross-cultural understanding. He is a leading keynote speaker
at major conferences around the world and is known for his iconoclastic
style, pragmatic cynicism and extensive use of stories to communicate
what would otherwise be difficult concepts.
Tom Stewart, the
new editor of Harvard Business Review, in his latest book states
in the context of tacit knowledge "Dave Snowden, the best
thinker I've found on the subject . . ." although by way
of counter he also comments "he is Welsh and a bit mad."
Dave Snowden has
an MBA from Middlesex University and a BA in Philosophy from
Lancaster University. He is adjunct Professor of Knowledge Management
at the University of Canberra, an honorary fellow in knowledge
management at the University of Warwick, Adjunct Professor at
the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and MiNE Fellow at the Universita
Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore in Italy. He teaches on various university
programmes throughout the world.
He regularly consults
at the board level with some of the world's largest companies
as well as to Government and NGOs and was recently appointed
as an advisor on sense making to the Singaporean Ministry of
Defence. In addition he sits on a number of advisory and other
bodies including the British Standards Institute committee on
standards for Knowledge Management.
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Multi-ontology Sense
Making:
A New Simplicity in Decision
Making
Imagine organising
a birthday party for a group of young children. Would you agree
a set of learning objectives with their parents in advance of
the party? Would those objectives be aligned with the mission
statement for education in the society to which you belong
Would you create
a project plan for the party with clear milestones associated
with empirical measures of achievement? Would you start the party
with a motivational video so that the children did not waste
time in play not aligned with the learning objectives? Would
you use PowerPoint to demonstrate to the children that their
pocket money is linked to achievement of the empirical measures
at each milestone? Would you conduct an after action review at
the end of the party, update your best practice database and
revise standard operation procedures for party management?
No, instead like
most parents you would create barriers to prevent certain types
of behaviour, you would use attractors (party games, a football,
a videotape) to encourage the formation of beneficial largely
self organising identities; you would disrupt negative patterns
early, to prevent the party becoming chaotic, or necessitating
the draconian imposition of authority. At the end of the party
you would know whether it had been a success, but you could not
define (in other than the most general terms) what that success
would look like in advance.
From
The Cynefin Manifesto www.cynefin.net
The purpose of this
article is to introduce a new simplicity into acts of decision-making
and intervention design in organizations. That may seem ironic
given the title, with its use of the terms "ontology"
and "sense-making" which may be unfamiliar to readers;
but new ideas often need new or at least unfamiliar language
and I make no apology for that, although some readers may wish
to skip the remainder of this introduction which may only be
relevant to academics wishing to situate my language. New language
aside, the basic principles that underlie this paper are very
easy to understand and are illustrated by the inset example of
the children's party. Multi-ontology sense making is about understanding
when to use both methods of management outlined in the story,
both the structured and ordered approach based on planned outcomes
and the un-ordered, emergent approach focused on starting conditions
expressed as barriers, attractors and identities.
Ontology is derived
from the Greek word for being and it is the branch of metaphysics
which concerns itself with the nature of things. In this article
I am using it to identity different types of system, and will
later discuss two contrasting types of ontology (order and unorder)
each of which requires a different approach to both diagnosis
and intervention. In practice we need to consider three physical
and five human ontologies. The three physical ontologies are
order, complexity and chaos; in human systems order divides into
visible and hidden forms and we add a fifth state of disorder.
These are more fully described elsewhere (Kurtz & Snowden
2003). For this article I will combine complex and chaotic into
a single category of unorder and ignore disorder.
Sense-making is most commonly associated with the Weick (1995)
and Dervin (1998) and is starting to gain more attention in management
circles. I am closer to Dervin than Weick, and in the context
of this paper I am talking about sense making as the way that
humans choose between multiple possible explanations of sensory
and other input as they seek to conform the phenomenological
with the real in order to act in such a way as to determine or
respond to the world around them. Multi-ontology sense making
is thus a means to achieve a requisite level of diversity in
both the ways we interpret the world and the way we act in it.
Requisite diversity means ensuring the acceptance of a sufficient
level of divergence to enable the sensing of weak signals (terrorist
threat or market opportunity) and avoidance of the all too common
pattern entrainment of past success, while maintaining a sufficient
focus to enable decisive and appropriate action. Above all it
is about ensuring cognitive effectiveness in information processing
and this gaining cognitive edge, or advantage.
The ideas and concepts
may be novel and even threatening to a generation of managers,
civil servants and academics who have been trained in what I
will later define as single-ontology sense making. The dominant
ideology of management inherits from Taylor (1911) a view of
the organization based on the necessity and the probity of order.
In this world things are deemed to be known or knowable through
proper investigation and relationships between cause and effect
once discovered repeat. It is the world of the mechanical metaphors
of Taylor and most management theorists who came afterwards;
it is the Newtonian universe of predictable relationships between
cause and effect which can be calculated; the world of the five
year plan and the explicit performance target; of hypothesis
and empirical proof through observation and explanation of events
in retrospect. This paper challenges that particular weltanschauung
not by denial, but through bounding and limiting its applicability.
By
Permission
David J Snowden
Director, Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity
Management Today, Yearbook 2005, Vol. 20
Link
For
the full article download the PDF
Link: The Cynefin
Centre homepage http://www.cynefin.net/
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