David Snowden: Profiles in Knowledge

Originally published on July 11, 2018

38 min readOct 17, 2018

This is the 26th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Dave is a self-described “proud curmudgeon and pragmatic cynic” and the founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company (formerly Cognitive Edge).

I have been quoting Dave in my blog since I started it in 2006. I first met him at KMWorld 2006, and have seen him there most years ever since. If you haven’t heard him in person, you should watch his videos and listen to his podcasts.

Background

1. LinkedIn

Currently working on the application of natural sciences to social systems thought the development of a range of methods and the SenseMaker software suite. Started work in an NGO post University and then moved onto HR & Training in the late 70s when he started working with computers. That together with a diploma from The Certified Accountants got him a job as Development Accountant in the same firm where he headed up the Treasury function and was responsible for computerization. An MBA in financial management saw him move into consultancy and software designing decision support systems in what became Data Sciences where he became a General Manager (creating MURCO) and the Corporate Business Development Manager where he created the Genus Program (and integration of JAD/RAD, Object Orientation and Legacy Management) which was one of the main components in the turnaround of that company. IBM acquired the company 1997 and after that his more public career started.

Specialties

Sense making
Knowledge Management
Complexity Science applied to organizations
Narrative

Experience

The Cynefin Company (formerly Cognitive Edge)— Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, 2004 — Present
Cynefin Centre IBM — Director, 2002–2004
IBM, Director Institute for Knowledge Management, 2000–2002
Data Sciences, 1984–1997

Education

Middlesex University — MBA, Financial Management, 1985
Lancaster University — BA, Philosophy, 1975

2. Wikipedia

Worked for Data Sciences Ltd from 1984 until January 1997. The company was acquired by IBM in 1996. The following year, set up IBM Global Services’ Knowledge and Differentiation Program.

While at IBM, researched the importance of storytelling within organizations, particularly in relation to expressing tacit knowledge. In 2000, became European director of the company’s Institute for Knowledge Management, and in 2002, founded the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity. During this period, led a team that developed the Cynefin framework, a decision-making tool.

Left IBM in 2004 and a year later founded Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd, a management-consulting firm based in Singapore. Associate professor extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, and honorary professor in the school of psychology at Bangor University.

3. The Cynefin Co.

Dave is the creator of the Cynefin Framework and originated the design of SenseMaker®, the world’s first distributed ethnography tool. He is the lead author of Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision-makers, a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, and the Cynefin Centre.

He divides his time between two roles: founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the founder and Director of the Cynefin Centre. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. Using natural science as a constraint on the understanding of social systems avoids many of the issues associated with inductive or case-based approaches to research. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.

Dave holds positions as an extraordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch as well as visiting Professor at the University of Hull. He has held similar positions at Bangor University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Canberra University, the University of Warwick and The University of Surrey. He held the position of senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period in Nanyang.

His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge management. He is an editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in the field of knowledge management and is an Editor in Chief of E:CO. In 2006 he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and in 2007 was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.

He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity; during that period, he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a worldwide advertising campaign. Prior to that, he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector.

Profiles

Articles

1. Cynefin Co.: Our Thinking

2. Knowledge Management Review

Just-In-Time Knowledge Management: Recognizing common KM errors and the progress they inhibit (Part 1)
The Knowledge You Need, Right When You Need It: “Just-in-time” points the way to next generation KM (Part 2)

3. A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making with Mary E. Boone

4. Volunteer not conscript

5. Complex acts of knowing: paradox and descriptive self-awareness

6. KMWorld: Everything is fragmented

Ingenuity and co-evolution Posted June 01, 2009
The art of “ritual dissent” Posted April 01, 2009
An unusual, but effective idea Posted February 02, 2009 — Ten percent of most projects create 90 percent of the grief (change the percentages to suit your own experience), but you can handle that difficult portion using a technique known as social network stimulation.
The core principles Posted January 02, 2009 — In an earlier column, I wrote about the science of complex adaptive systems (see Nov./Dec. 2008 KMWorld), which is a key piece of underlying theory to help us comprehend the increasingly interdependent and co-evolving worlds of knowledge management, social computing and learning.
Complex adaptive systems at play Posted November 03, 2008
Managed serendipity Posted September 29, 2008 — Technology developed for one application frequently becomes more useful for something unexpected. It’s called a freeloader in evolutionary psychology.
Blog storming in six stages Posted August 31, 2008
Building CoPs for knowledge flow Posted July 11, 2008 — As promised, I am presenting a step-by-step approach to a low-cost knowledge management (KM) program using social computing, and will focus on the functionality that has been touted but rarely delivered by communities of practice (CoPs).
The safe-fail approach to KM Posted May 30, 2008
Now, everything is fragmented Posted May 01, 2008

AOK Discussions

January 2002: Third Generation KM: Separating Content, Narrative, Context

KM Generations

The first generation of knowledge management is the period prior to 1995. Here “knowledge” as a word is not problematic, it is used without conscious thought and the focus is on information flow to support decision makers. Executive Information Systems, Data Warehousing and Process re-engineering dominate this period.

In 1995 Nonaka and Takeuchi publish the Knowledge Creating Company and for the first time on common business language the words tacit and explicit are introduced, although Polanyi had explored the subject in more depth in the 1940’s. This publication with its SECI model defining four transition states of tacit-to-tacit, tacit-to-explicit, explicit-to-explicit and explicit-to-tacit proved decisive and was broadly taken up by consultants and software vendors, both groups seeking to drive revenue through the rapid growth of collaborative technologies.

The pioneering work of practitioners such as Buckman, Edvinsson, Lank, Saint-Onge and Ward amongst others, provided legitimacy and the second generation with its emphasis on conversation of tacit to explicit was born. For second generation thinkers and practitioners, most notably in central Europe, Probst and his collaborators, the function of knowledge management is to convert private assets into public assets, though the extraction of that knowledge into codified form. I have argued elsewhere (Snowden 2000a) that this approach unnecessarily focuses on the container rather than the thing contained, and this view has been strengthened by the increasing recognition by practitioners that there is much tacit knowledge that either cannot, or should not, be made explicit.

As we move into the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in which we focus not on the management of knowledge as a “thing” which can be identified and catalogued, but on the management of the ecology of knowledge. Here the emphasis is not on the organisation as a machine with the manager occupying the role of Engineer, but on the organisation as a complex ecology in which the manager is a gardener, able to direct and influence, but not fully control the evolution of his or her environment. We are also seeing a refreshing move away from programmes which seem to manage knowledge for its own sake, to those that tightly couple knowledge management with both strategic and, critically, operational priorities.

“I always know more than I can say, even after I have said it, and I can always say more than I can write down.”

This is one of the basic operating principles of knowledge management, regrettably not fully understood in the second generation. The process of moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably involves some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss of context. Once we recognise this we can start to rethink the nature of knowledge management. Most second-generation approaches are to all intents and purposes content management; they focus on documents containing structured and reflective knowledge that is disconnected from the knowledge holder, diffuses easily and is formal structured.

What we can say and what we know are respectively covered by Narrative and Context Management. Context management in contrast focuses on connecting and linking people through, for example, expertise location, social network simulation, apprentice models of knowledge transfer and the retention strategies for key staff. Managing context involves the recognition that knowledge cannot be disembodied from human agency either as giver or receiver, content is the exact opposite. Context Management takes control of what we know, but cannot fully say or write down. Content Management organises that which can be written.

Narrative Management lies somewhere between the two and is the focus of this chapter, it manages what we can say in conversation and in declamation, it is also cheaper and less onerous as task to capture than written knowledge and its use is closer to the natural patterns of knowledge acquisition in organisations because:

it is easier and less onerous to capture, because I can record to a video camera in ten minutes what it will otherwise take two weeks to get round to spending a hour or so writing up;
it is a natural process, in that when we face a new task, or encounter a problem we go and find people to talk to, to ask questions to provide context sensitive answers and advice that cannot be provided by past project reviews and idealised statements of best practice.

The separation of context, narrative and content management in third generation approaches in turn makes each more effective. By understanding the imitations and capabilities of each medium — head, mouth and hands — we make each more effective and the combination of the whole is accordingly greater than the sum of the parts.

2. June 2004: Comparing and Contrasting Corporate and Personal KM

Preparing for Conversations with Steve Barth and David Snowden

3. March 2005: Complexity: The Next Big Thing After KM

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.

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 systems, 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 thus 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.

Blog

Cynefin as a framework has its origin in knowledge management, in part as a reaction against Nonaka’s SECI model and was initially stimulated by Boisot’s I-Space. The SECI model focused on tacit to explicit knowledge conversion running through four transitionary states. Observation and participation is a form of socialisation [S] allows for externalisation [E] of knowledge (from tacit to explicit) and its consequent codification [C] would then allow internalisation [I], namely the conversion of explicit knowledge to tacit. The constant flow over those spaces was designated as the knowledge creation spiral and was used to explain the process of idea conversation into products mainly in the manufacturing sector. It later became known as BA.

At the time I had just started working for IBM and was observing the way in which informal networks and communities were critical the effective functioning of the formal or explicit system. I was also being asked to codify material into the IBM intranet so that other colleagues could use the material without my engagement. Now this created significant issues. Firstly (adapting a phrase from Polanyi) I always know more than I can say, and I will always say more than I can write down; in consequence codification involves significant loss. Secondly there were some people I trusted with my knowledge at varying levels of abstraction, there were others who had proved untrustworthy. If I codified by knowledge and they used it I knew that I would not be credited if it worked and blamed if it didn’t. So I would share material in private group, knowing that people would come and talk with me before using something and would be prepared to undergo an apprenticeship. Third, there were many things that I knew, but only when I needed to know them. Context triggered application, and more critical radical repurposing. In a specific context, especially under pressure I knew things then then I would not have been aware of in some prior act of codification.

As for much of Cynefin, as I delved into cognitive science I discovered reasons for these issues, anthropology taught be more as did my original degree in Philosophy. I started to use natural science (I also studied Physics at University) to inform social practice rather than relaying on observation and interpretation of practice. That allowed me to limit issues of confirmation bias and in attentional blindness.

With that scientific enquiry I got to know Max Boisot who introduced me to complexity theory, and many other things before his tragic death a few years ago. Complexity is sometimes known as the science of uncertainty, of systems where there is no repeating relationship between cause and effect. Complex adaptive systems comprise many, changing agents with so many interactions that at best you can make statements about a systems dispositional state, about its inclinations but you can’t define outcome and there is no repeatability. What worked last time may not work this time; small inputs produce magnified changes overall and the system has properties that are not the sum of its parts. I’ve also called complexity the science of common sense and illustrated its nature by talking about how you would manage a childrens’ party. Complexity provided then, and still provides a scientific explanation for things that anyone with any real experience already knows. That for me was a critical insight and was the trigger mechanism by which Cynefin evolved from a basic two by two matrix looking at culture and codification to its current five domain form.

At the heart of Cynefin is an argument against universal approaches, in favour of using a contextually appropriate solution. It frankly amazes me that this is considered novel or revolutionary in nature. There is a British phrase that is appropriate here: horses for courses. Before placing a bet you check out the track record of horse on different ground. Some do better on heavy, some on dry and so on. Different things work or don’ t work in different contexts. Over the years I have been increasingly frustrated by advocates of valuable new things who feel that their enthusiasm should be shared by everyone else, be universal in application and involve the ritual burning of all that has happened in the past; a bonfire of vanities. Over the decades I’ve seen it with successive management fads, some of which have high utility some little, but all appropriate in context. Business Process Re-engineering provided value, but it claimed universality and failed, Six Sigma was a let’s do it harder and see if it works this time attempt to overcome that which of course made things worse. We had the Learning Organisation, Blue and Red Oceans, Balanced Score Cards and now Agile. All devoid of underlying theory other than in retrospect, mostly providing value, but only within context despite the claim of Universal application. Each fad then attracts its own followers, masters of retrospective coherence who ride the waves of fashion.

Cynefin is about saying that, in the main, most things had value within context and started to fail when they moved outside of that context. Often advocates simply failed to understand that and were more concerned to condemn heretics that to create something of lasting value. They avoided the very simply truth that condemning what went before does not of itself legitimise what you propose as an alternative. This approach also allows for change and movement between applications as a field emerges and the entry of new ways of thinking under conditions of uncertainty.

Cynefin Framework

Articles by Others

Dave Snowden interview by Lilia Efimova
Dave Snowden Keynote: Big Data vs Human Data by Mary Abraham
A Different View on Knowledge Management by TallyFox
Dave Snowden on Knowledge Management by Dave Pollard
Turning KM strategy on its head — Dave Snowden by Ian Thorpe
What Happened to Knowledge Management? by Stewart Mader — Euan Semple points out two articles that examine the state of knowledge management. In Whence goeth KM? (and Part 2), Dave Snowden concludes that knowledge management is on its way out because it has changed so much since it first appeared in the early 1990s. (The other article)
Patrick Lambe guest blogged the following in Cognitive Edge — Dave Snowden is particularly scathing about Appreciative Inquiry as a technique, because he sees it practiced in an (in my terms) apocalyptic/bipolar vacuum, in a “happy-clappy,” “fluffy-bunny” denial of the negative that would correspond to the manic phase of bipolar disorder. There’s no engagement with the real problems of real life, and therefore it can be at best distracting and at worst delusional, magical thinking.
Dead KM Walking by Patrick Lambe — A fascinating, robust and sometimes sharp discussion with Larry Prusak and Dave Snowden on the topic “Is Knowledge Management Dead?” They think that KM as a field has been irredeemably corrupted by the many false plays and hijacks it has been subjected to, while I still have hope. Watch the podcast for the full story, and a million thanks to Larry and Dave for a great conversation.
KM thinkers by Denham Grey — Dave Snowden has a good grasp of KM & complexity, appreciates the role of tacit knowledge, makes sense of the domain

Dave as Quoted by Me

1. Analytics and Business Intelligence

KM and big data/analytics — interview with David J. Pauleen — Analytics in the form of algorithms are imperfect and can only to a small extent capture the reasoning and analytical capabilities of people. For this reason, while big data/analytics can be useful, they are limited and must be used in conjunction with human knowledge and reasoning.
The whole big data idea is being over hyped — Too many of the big data guys are just assuming that information will come to them from the misty mountains of the Internet that they can process without human engagement to reveal all that is needed. The simple act of putting human sensors into the system escapes them. Solutions for nerds, by nerds that will dumb us all down to the intelligence of nerds.

2. Archiving, Document Management, and Records Management

Complex Adaptive Processes on a Wiki?

The problem with wikis has always been the collapse of two essentially different operations: Save and Publish. You edit and save a page. What happens? You publish to the world. No approval. No chance to ensure it marries up with process changes made elsewhere, compare to compliance or governance regulations, to get it buy-in from stakeholders or to get legal approval. As a rule Wikis omit Content Management and Workflow capabilities and, because they don’t deal with Approved Records, they also lack Records Management and Records Retention facilities.

3. Expertise Locators and Ask the Expert

Kate Ehrlich: Small Blue — It’s not just about just finding an expert, but when you find someone you want to communicate with them, but what if they don’t want to talk to you? By definition any expert location system is about communication with strangers
… and nearer to the Dust — Companies were experimenting with expertise location based on tracking key phrases in emails and the like. Team formation became a matter of searching CVs in a database rather than building relationships over time. The value of experience was derided as a simple failure to capture and codify.
Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness — Expertise location systems replace the second-generation technique of yellow pages making connections between people and communities. One example, “Tacit” will trawl e-mail records to identify where expertise lies, but allow the individual knowledge holder to determine if his or her expertise is to be public, which has many advantages in building context and trust.

4. Repositories and Knowledge Bases

How does an organization know what it knows?

How does an organization know what it knows? That question drives a lot of interest in knowledge management. It drives a lot of spending on consultants and technology. It drives a lot of effort trying to extract the “knowledge trapped inside people’s heads” with explicated and documented content in searchable repositories.

Disconnecting knowledge from its source, in terms of people and places, will remove from that knowledge the very context which infuses it with life. Because indigenous knowledge is continuously generated and renewed in the living practices of people, archiving in isolation from practice removes its ongoing relevance.

5. Storytelling, Business Narrative, and Anecdote Circles

Anecdote Circles

An anecdote is a naturally occurring story, as found in the “wild” of conversational discourse, usually about a single incident or situation. An Anecdote Circle is a way of capturing these. It is a lightly facilitated, group based Method. People are selected that have some form of common or shared experience. As an example, they will be prompted to “Share either a good or bad experience when…” in relation to this common or shared experience. Anecdotes can then be applied across a wide variety of organizational endeavors, from culture to strategy. They may also later be tagged or signified and placed in a Narrative database. The general operating principle of the anecdote circle is this. Because “you only know what you know when you need to know it”, it is difficult to get at aspects of knowledge, values and beliefs that are held in common but rarely talked about.

When people tell each other stories about their experiences, the social negotiations that take place create conditions which recreate to some extent the feeling of being “in the field under fire”, or, in the state of “needing to know”. Thus, hidden knowledge surfaces and becomes available in ways it could not otherwise do so. Anecdotes are usually short and about a single incident or situation. Contrast this with a purposeful story, which is long and complex as well as deliberately constructed and told (usually many times). Some people tell purposeful stories often; others don’t. What you are after in the anecdote circle is not purposeful stories, which are indicative of what people believe is expected of them, but anecdotes, which are more unguarded and truthful. For sense-making and knowledge sharing anecdotes are priceless. They can answer many questions that direct questioning cannot. Telling stories allows people to disclose sensitive information without attribution or blame, because the inherent distance between reality and narration provides safety for truth-telling.

6. KM Metrics and Reporting Process

How do we measure experts? What we could expect from expert KMs? Here are some potential metrics:

Sensemaking metrics such as the accuracy of the predictions they make about users’ preferences and practices, sophistication of their explanations for user behaviors, speed and accuracy of spotting anomalies.
Data gathering strategies — their power and efficiency.
Range and sophistication of mental models.
Ability to make important discriminations, see cause-effect links, discount spurious cause-effect links.
Declarative knowledge. Just the collection of facts they need to know.

Things a leader can do — Start thinking about shifting to VECTOR measures rather than outcome based targets. Vectors define direction and speed of travel from the present and allow novel discoveries that are often ignored in the focus on explicit targets (which we know destroy intrinsic motivation). Stop managing by spreadsheet!

7. KM’s not dead, but talking about its ROI should be

Selling new ideas to an organisation

“Funding is linked to delivery of projects and projects come into two main categories: safe-fail low cost experiments and fail-safe conventional ones. More fully described these are linked to a specific issue/opportunity/problem where the new concept can be show to have a positive impact on a business process or other objective, and where the impact of that initiative can be measured (either by positive impact or by the cost, opportunity or otherwise of not carrying out the work. ROI, EVA (Economic Value Added) and other accounting measures can work here and you will need to understand them and their application.”

8. Can you lead without being the master of a domain?

Then kill the messenger…

One of the main enemies of all of this is time and capability or understanding. I am writing this after coming off a three hour conference call trying to dumb down a complex message to the point where the CEO of a major international corporation might understand it enough to pay attention. Now that has been a depressing experience as it requires sound bites, pain points and a recognition that anything which requires thought is unlikely to succeed. Now I want this deal to work and I have good coaches but it is a depressing process.

So a final plea to senior decision makers, and a pretty direct attack on common practice. If you allow yourself to get caught up in meetings, decision making and the like to the point where you no longer have time to think and reflect then you have damaged yourself and downstream the organisation that you lead. It also shows you are not leading well as you have too little time. Paying attention is not the same thing as being busy. Some of the best executives I know have brains that can sense there is something they need to spend time on. Some of the worst make a virtue of ignorance.

Indeed the celebration of ignorance, the anti-intellectualism that dominates too much management thinking represents the immanence of death during dynamic shifts or paradigm changes. It’s not enough to simply act, you also have to think. It’s not enough to think you also have to act. They go together and the more senior you are the more you need to be comfortable with both; neither can be fully delegated. So if someone comes along and offers you a solution that doesn’t require you to think then kill the messenger.

9. 30 Knowledge Management Insights

Complex Acts of Knowing — Paradox and Descriptive Self Awareness describes three generations of knowledge management:

First generation focused on timely information provision for decision support and in support of business process reengineeering initiatives.
Second generation focused on tacit-explicit knowledge conversion.
Third generation requires the clear separation of context, narrative and content management.

— Complex adaptive systems theory is used to create a sense-making model that identifies a natural flow model of knowledge creation, disruption, and utilization.

— Knowledge is seen paradoxically as both a thing and a flow requiring diverse management approaches.

Rendering Knowledge lists 7 Principles of KM:

Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.
We only know what we know when we need to know it.
In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
Everything is fragmented.
Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down

10. 12 Shibboleths of Christmas

Breaking Goodhart’s Law: The Strathern variation — Anything made explicit will sooner or later be gamed for survival purposes and that need will corrupt practice and people.
Confusing correlation with causation and the paucity of good data: Statistical tails wagging the dogs of truth — We can’t trust the data, but neither can we trust the correlation other than as an indicator of something we should pay attention to.
The old ways are evil, I bear the torch of truth and enlightenment: The Popinjay — Condemning past or future practice based on evidence or theory is valid; so is offering a new way of thinking. The objection is to creating a dichotomy between the two and being highly selective in picking cases (without doing other than book or Internet searches) to support a simplistic proposition.
Anything requiring you to attain levels of enlightenment: The Cultists — True religious enlightenment is achieved by years of dedication, it cannot be acquired in a simplistic training program. Scientific insight and understanding is similarly the product of years of study and practice. Both take part in a social setting that welcomes criticism and while rewarding status does not allow that status to prevent learning. The various popular management movements that attempt to ape either or both to generate training and consultancy revenue should be wholeheartedly condemned.
Taking something of value, but then seeking to industrialize it: Industrialization of the craft — Development of skill takes time and effort. Tools can be industrialized; people interventions involving judgement cannot be.
Using language without meaning: A lick of new paint — The addition of key words that appear to have symbolic power as tokens of meaning. The big one at the moment, especially in Agile circles is the use of the word “Lean” as noun, pronoun, adjective and even verb and adverb.
The dangers of categorization: Little Boxes — Creating simplistic categorizing models is cool in stable, fully-known situations, but in complexity or uncertainty environments it is dangerous. With people, it means we can damage personal development, and we can also miss completely capabilities that we didn’t know we needed at the time of the categorization. Myers-Briggs has little academic credibility, but provides the same utility as astrology.
Issues of evidence and judgement & a false dichotomy: Trials need tribulations — A single intervention using a novel approach with a lot of attention is never going to scale and it does not constitute evidence. Trials that are reported to have worked, in the main, have suffered insufficient tribulation to be resilient.
Against essentialism, defining potential through action: ‘Essential’ flows — In managing culture, we are not creating, designing or determining an essence that will give us predictive or controllable behavior. Attempts to do so will drive the real culture further underground, with the surface manifestation repeating back to you the platitudes of your value statements. Humans are very good at appearing to confirm with the verbiage of power while continuing to practice what matters to them. In practice companies depend on this authentic inauthenticity to survive. The irony is that if it wasn’t for people’s willingness to work for customers and for colleagues despite the process, not because of it, most companies would fail a lot faster.
Trying to get to a single causal line of reasoning: Roots determine routes? — Let’s assume we accept that statins reduce the risk of heart attack; cool, take them. But we also know that Type II Diabetes is one side effect of statin prescription, and we know one of the reasons for that is the way statins work on the pancreas. Now if you have Type II, then you are at increased risk of heart failure, so guess what happens? You get prescribed statins. Each individual causal pathway creates a prescriptive guideline. What is really needed is an artisan approach in which the multiple interactions between patient support groups and medical staff are taken into account.
You can’t reduce or aggregate a complex system and trying is wrong a priori: Deal with the system as a whole please — SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is not exceptional. It’s simply following in the same path as balanced score cards; KPIs; mergers based on structure, not people; etc. The automation and mechanization of the engineering metaphor has dominated thinking for the last few decades and it is predicated on aggregation and reduction. Things like SAFe and Six Sigma are simply the last attempts to get a tired and inappropriate philosophy to work, but doing things that have failed with more intensity in the hope that this time they will work.
Avoiding uncertainty and anti-intellectualism: Then kill the messenger … — A plea to senior decision makers, and a pretty direct attack on common practice. If you allow yourself to get caught up in meetings, decision making, and the like to the point where you no longer have time to think and reflect, then you have damaged yourself and downstream, the organization that you lead. It also shows you are not leading well, as you have too little time. Paying attention is not the same thing as being busy. Some of the best executives I know have brains that can sense there is something they need to spend time on. Some of the worst make a virtue of ignorance. It’s not enough to simply act; you also have to think. It’s not enough to think; you also have to act. They go together, and the more senior you are, the more you need to be comfortable with both; neither can be fully delegated. So, if someone comes along and offers you a solution that doesn’t require you to think, then kill the messenger.

11. 10 Types of Knowledge Management Strategies

Sense-making is the way in which we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. Dave Snowden describes technologies that process large volumes of data with a view to weak signal detection and pattern recognition. Another kind is naturalistic sense-making, derived from an understanding of the cognitive processes that underpin human decision making.

12. Yet Another Myth: The DIKW Pyramid Scheme

What is Sense-making? — How we make sense of the world so we can act in it
The endless cycle of idea and action

13. Are you certifiable in knowledge management?

14. Black Swan

Fooled by Randomness was a timely book, well written and useful, but then we got Black Swan which again has good examples but over generalizes its theory.

15. Citizen Journalism and KM

Whence Goeth KM? — commented on by Bruce Karney

Comment by Bruce Karney: You listed two purposes of KM (To support effective decision making; To create the conditions for innovation) but left out two that I think are even more important:

To accelerate the spread of useful innovations
To allow people to solve problems more quickly by using KM tools to find answers or experts

Decision-making and problem solving are similar, so let me focus on spreading innovations. In KM efforts I’ve seen, a leading indicator of success is some sort of “pushed” newsletter, e-mail to a distribution list, or blog that informs an interested audience of important news and ideas. In my opinion, citizen journalism will be one of the lasting legacies of KM, whether KM itself lives or dies.

Reply by Dave Snowden:

Accelerating the spread of innovation is obviously a good thing, but I would subsume it in creating the conditions. If you don’t have an adoption policy (which may include distribution) then you are not creating the conditions in the first place. In respect of using KM tools, well I think that is a means to an end, not an end in itself. KM tools may be the right answer, but a fair number of them prevent effective knowledge flow. The danger is if you start to add in means, you end up with a long list and you prejudge the solution.

I agree that blogs, newsletters, etc. can be (but are not necessarily always) useful in KM. However again they are a means to and end.

16. Connection and Collection

Many years ago I formulated three rules or heuristics of Knowledge Management:

Knowledge will only ever be volunteered it can not be conscripted
We only know what we know when we need to know it
We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down

The first of these reference the fact that you cannot make someone surrender their knowledge in the way that you can make them conform with a process. It was originally coined in reference to individuals, but I have come to realize that it also applies to organizations… So a new formulation, or possibly extension of the first rule would be:

If you ask someone, or a body for specific knowledge in the context of a real need it will never be refused. If you ask them to give you your knowledge on the basis that you may need it in the future, then you will never receive it.”

17. Learning Lessons or Lessons Learned

Learning lessons or lessons learnt?

Five statements:

If you start to talk about creating a knowledge sharing culture, or ask for advice on how to get people to share what they know you are missing the point.
The issue is not to work out in advance what you might need to know, but rather to ensure that you can connect with people and knowledge objects in the context of need.
Lessons learnt systems are not about truth — they are about meaning.
The way people recall the past differs from the actual events.
The more that material is improved, refined, and linked to established practice, the less valuable it is.

There is an underlying assumption here: that narrative material, anecdotes, pictures, fragments of stories is more valuable than structured documents and closer to the way we naturally share and create knowledge and learning.

Four suggested ways forward:

Capture material at the right level of abstraction that’s not too difficult.
Get people to record things as they do them, and then index the resulting material so the raw material is interpreted by those who created it.
Allow people to talk about failure by allowing them to avoid any attribution of blame.
Make capture continuous and a part of the job, not a post-job after-action review.

We need to be learning lessons continuously, not documenting lessons learnt.

18. Cognitive Edge Recommended Books

Library

Presentations and Podcasts

1. SIKM Leaders Community, July 2019: Let’s start to manage knowledge, not information

Let's start to manage knowledge, not information

Let's start to manage knowledge, not information - Download as a PDF or view online for free

www.slideshare.net

2. SlideShare

3. Understanding complex organizations: The Cynefin Model by Keith De La Rue

Understanding complexity - The Cynefin framework

Understanding complexity - The Cynefin framework - Download as a PDF or view online for free

www.slideshare.net

4. Podcasts

5. KMWorld

2023

2022

2021

2020

Closing Keynote — The Role of Knowledge & Information in Crisis Management

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

Keynote: Innovative Enterprises: Leaders’ Visions & Stories with Cindy Gordon — Leaders in the field describe one strategy, one tool, and one innovative organization in action. Hear experienced storytellers capture their visions and insights in vibrant, information-rich stories.
A301: Controversies & the Future of Knowledge Management

2005

Closing Keynote: From KM to Sense Making: From Efficiency to Effectiveness — The journey to sense making from knowledge management, represents a desire to return to the basic driver of early KM, before installing a portal was the magic key, focusing on making better decisions and creating the conditions for innovation. Drawing on theory and practice in sense making and KM, as well as highlighting patterns from stories captured from KMWorld attendees, this talk focuses on five aspects of the way we perceive the world:

The nature of the physical world, chaos, complexity, and order
The nature of the way we have knowledge of the world and, in particular, the role of narrative
The nature of the way we perceive the world, the pattern basis of human intelligence, and its consequences
The nature of the way in which we assume and create identity structures to exist in the world
The way that we exercise and are the subjects of the exercise of power

Snowden provides examples of how KM practitioners can capture the high ground of strategy in an organization and shift from the electronic storage of knowledge to its deployment and creation to enrich human decision making.

2004

KMWorld Opening Session & Keynote: Decision-Making & Innovation: The Real Function of KM — As KM moves into its third “post-Nonaka” generation, it is leading a new organic approach to organizational design and has the potential to become a key part of the strategic agenda. Using real examples from Asia Pacific and Europe, our entertaining and knowledgeable speaker focuses on how KM can improve decision-making and innovation within complex organizations.
Workshop 1: Organizational Storytelling & Narrative Patterns Master Class with Steve Denning — This interactive, full-day workshop taught by two well-known and entertaining experts, reveals insights, material, and trade secrets on the use of narrative and storytelling as a tool for management and leadership in organizations. Designed for change agents and knowledge managers, it demonstrates how stories prove to be an effective way to understand, direct, and influence your organization’s culture — essential for effectively communicating knowledge and associated learning for organizational performance and productivity. Denning shares his experience of knowing when to create and tell a story to achieve the desired response and, ultimately, the right business results. Snowden explains some easily learned techniques for anecdotal elicitation and discusses the nature of interaction in understanding the cultural attitudes of those interactions within each community of practice. The highly regarded workshop provides tools, techniques, and exercises for creating different stories and approaches to narrative for business.

2003

Session C102: Tools for Putting Organizational Stories in Context — More than storytelling, dealing with narrative in organizational settings is becoming critical to decision making and innovation. Organizations are complex, each with its own culture, and focusing on narrative systems can help. This session describes tools and techniques used in building narrative databases which can fuel the engines of decision making and innovation. Using real-world examples, it illustrates the impact and value within complex organizations — those populated with people!

2002

Evening Networking Event: KM Stories @ the Pub — Join Dave Snowden, Director, Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity, IBM Global Services, and Steve Denning, author of The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations, conference speakers, other storytellers, and attendees for an informal, interactive networking program that brings together experts and novices for an evening of fun and learning. Participate and take away ideas to use in your organization to assist in managing change and knowledge transfer, techniques to practice to have a positive impact on your organizational culture, and more.

2001

Workshop 1: Corporate Storytelling — The ability of a story to transmit a powerful meaning with intensity has enormous significance for performance in communication, knowledge facilitation, cultural change, and cross-cultural understanding. Organizations such as 3M, Xerox, IBM, NASA, The World Bank, Intel and Microsoft are actively using story techniques to handle complex management issues. Storytelling already exists as an integral part of defining what the organization is in terms of culture and purpose. This workshop provides an opportunity to understand the rich opportunities for the use of storytelling in your organization.