Managing in complexity – an interview with Prof. Dave Snowden – Richard Atherton

[This should be interesting – I haven’t had time to watch yet but I bet it is good and entertaining, and as one who might have used the ‘curmudgeon’ (and other) tags for Snowden, it will be interesting to see his response. He also looks increasingly like Mandy Patinkin playing Saul Berenson in Homeland]

By Richard Atherton on 17 June 2018

In this interview, FirstHuman Partner Richard Atherton takes a walk and a tea with Professor Dave Snowden.

Dave Snowden is the creator of the Cynefin complexity framework. His Harvard Business Review paper on this topic is one of the most downloaded HBR papers of all time. Dave has forged a career through is early non-profit work to becoming a leading thinker in knowledge management at IBM. He went on to found the company Cognitive Edge, a pioneering firm in the field of ‘sense making’ within organisations and in applying complexity science to organisational challenges.

In this in-depth interview, Dave shares the philosophy underpinning his work. He talks through how people can apply his insights to leading and managing organisations. He also responses to claims that he can sometime to be seen as something of a curmudgeon!

Source: Managing in complexity – an interview with Prof. Dave Snowden – First Human

davidhawk 12:22 pm on June 20, 2018

Complexity? Can someone explain in a non complex manner how complexity gets more air time in organizational leadership then simplicity ever receives? Sure, complexity exist, if you need it to, and many of the CEOs I advise promise me and their boards that it really, really exist and it is growing, and that they need to address it, and then, only they, like Donald Trump, can manage complexity of the day.

I’ve noted it often arises as such leaders are in the process of justifying their need to receive 500 times what the lowest paid employee receives in the organization. Each time I listen I get a wee bit skeptical of what they report from their well-paid consultants on the favored complexity of the day, all while slowly sipping the drink of the day, often bourbon. I mention this for the trivial reason that the president of a major company I used to advise, now the largest in the world in its industry, never mentions “complexity” as a challenge to his leadership. Not sure if its relevant but his company has a rule where the CEO can make no more then 15 times that of the lowest paid employee. He talks of simplicity and what seems obvious to his company and customers, as well as how the obvious changes.

To further confuse I might mention a panel I was on with Carl Sagan in a Canadian meeting in 1981. It dealt with the intellectual complexity of the cosmos versus actual simplicity absence human misunderstandings. He and I suggested that taking the same logic into human affairs we noticed the via legal order things only become more complicated, and in need of more specialized experts with ever more time and writing. Via negotiated order the solution is always systemic and simple, yet not simple-minded. Analytic experts are to be used as plans are used, only for humor. A lady in the audience, Dorothy Maclean of Findhorn, killed the seriousness of our debate. She said: “truth is always simple but humans aren’t.”