Originally posted 17-Apr-25
Dave Snowden is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company. His specialties include Sense-Making, Knowledge Management, Complexity Science applied to organizations, and Narrative.
Dave works on the application of natural sciences to social systems through the development of a range of methods and software. He is the creator of the Cynefin Framework and originated the design of the SenseMaker® software suite, the world’s first distributed ethnography tool.
Dave has pioneered a science-based approach to organizations, drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. He believes that 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. A self-described “proud curmudgeon and pragmatic cynic,” Dave is well known for his iconoclastic style.
Here are definitions for five of Dave’s specialties:
- Complex adaptive system: An entangled system where everything is connected to everything else, and we may or may not know how they are interconnected and are constantly changing. A complex adaptive system is also an inherently unknowable system, with no linear material causality.
- Cynefin (pronounced kuh-nev-in): A Welsh word for habitat that signifies the multiple, intertwined factors in our environment and our experience that influence us (how we think, interpret and act) in ways we can never fully understand. The Cynefin Framework is a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making and is described as a sense-making device. It helps managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people’s behavior. The framework draws on research into systems theory, complexity theory, network theory, and learning theories.
- Emergence: Work processes that evolve in real time, in which the outcomes are not predictable, and employees must continuously make sense of, and adjust to, a changing situation. It is generally accepted that new product development, customer service, or any knowledge process conducted in a dynamically changing marketplace must be an emergent one if a company is to turn unpredictability to its competitive advantage.
- Narrative: A story that you write or tell someone, usually in great detail. The process of collecting anecdotes from people about how they actually do work to make sense of what is really going on in an organization.
- Sense-making: The process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity or uncertainty in order to make decisions. It is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.
Dave created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field. For more about Dave, see Profiles in Knowledge.
Books by Dave Snowden
Cynefin Framework
The Cynefin Framework was developed to help leaders understand their challenges and to make decisions in context. By distinguishing different domains (the subsystems in which we operate), it recognises that our actions need to match the reality we find ourselves in through a process of sense-making. This helps leaders cultivate an awareness of what is really complex and what is not and respond accordingly so that no energy is wasted in overthinking the routine but they also never try to make the complex fit into standard solutions.
The Cynefin Framework is and has been used in almost every conceivable sector: whether strategy, police work, international development, public policy, military, counterterrorism, safety, energy, healthcare, sales or education it has had something to offer. In this video, Dave Snowden introduces the Cynefin framework with a brief explanation of its origin and evolution and a detailed discussion of its architecture and function.
Three basic principles of system design, informed by complexity theory
- Distributed cognition means far more than the more popular phrase “wisdom of crowds,” which is a misnomer because crowds can be more foolish than wise. Distributed cognition means using network intelligence. The classic example is the Grameen Bank or micro-lending, with self-forming lending groups determining loan allocation rather than centralized credit scoring. In the context of modern management practice, that means the top-down stimulation of bottom-up activity. It’s not about delegation per se, or the absence of management, but it is about using the capacity of diverse networks to contribute to decision-making and system design; shifting the analyst from prime investigator and interpreter to a role of synthesis; and allowing systems to emerge through the interaction of people with software, rather than designing that use in advance.
- Finely granulated objects have more utility than chunked up documents (information) or massive organizational empires. (That is the meaning behind this column’s title, Everything is Fragmented.) The basic idea is simple: Small things are more adaptable than big things, and they are frequently more interesting and more able to gain our attention. People will spend more time surfing the Web and using the fragmented material of an RSS feed than reading documents. It’s easier to write a blog than a book. Fine granularity material can combine in novel and different ways more easily than formal documents. Fragmented stories of partial failure create more learning than formal documents summarizing best practice. Fragmented material can combine and recombine in novel and different ways, a form of conceptual blending. In organizations, small, self-forming teams are more adaptive than matrix structures. Networks adapt faster than hierarchies.
- Disintermediation is one of those interesting words that border on jargon, but it is too useful to abandon. It means removing the layers that separate decision makers from raw data — allowing them to move from an abstract representation of a large data set, spot patterns and anomalies, and focus on the five or six items to which they really need to pay attention. There is an ethical dimension to this too. When people encounter real stories/pictures, etc., they are far more likely to gain empathy and understanding, and therefore make more contextually aware decisions.
Volunteer not conscript
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 their knowledge on the basis that you may need it in the future, then you will never receive it.
Three rules or heuristics of Knowledge Management
- Knowledge will only ever be volunteered; it cannot 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.
What puzzles me is this. Despite the fact that people agree with these, they still design idealistic systems on the assumption that this time the rules will not apply.
It appears that we can know something without necessarily learning from it.
