Podcasts about complex adaptive systems

I, Stewart Alsop, welcomed Woody Wiegmann to this episode of Crazy Wisdom, where we explored the fascinating and sometimes unsettling landscape of Artificial Intelligence. Woody, who is deeply involved in teaching AI, shared his insights on everything from the US-China AI race to the radical transformations AI is bringing to education and society at large.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversationTimestamps01:17 The AI "Cold War": Discussing the intense AI development race between China and the US.03:04 Opaque Models & Education's Resistance: The challenge of opaque AI and schools lagging in adoption.05:22 AI Blocked in Schools: The paradox of teaching AI while institutions restrict access.08:08 Crossing the AI Rubicon: How AI users are diverging from non-users into different realities.09:00 Budgetary Constraints in AI Education: The struggle for resources like premium AI access for students.12:45 Navigating AI Access for Students: Woody's ingenious workarounds for the premium AI divide.19:15 Igniting Curiosity with AI: Students creating impressive projects, like catapult websites.27:23 Exploring Grok and AI Interaction: Debating IP concerns and engaging with AI ("Morpheus").46:19 AI's Societal Impact: AI girlfriends, masculinity, and the erosion of traditional skills.Key InsightsThe AI Arms Race: Woody highlights a "cold war of nerdiness" where China is rapidly developing AI models comparable to GPT-4 at a fraction of the cost. This competition raises questions about data transparency from both sides and the strategic implications of superintelligence.Education's AI Resistance: I, Stewart Alsop, and Woody discuss the puzzling resistance to AI within educational institutions, including outright blocking of AI tools. This creates a paradox where courses on AI are taught in environments that restrict its use, hindering practical learning for students.Diverging Realities: We explore how individuals who have crossed the "Rubicon" of AI adoption are now living in a vastly different world than those who haven't. This divergence is akin to past technological shifts but is happening at an accelerated pace, impacting how people learn, work, and perceive reality.The Fading Relevance of Traditional Coding: Woody argues that focusing on teaching traditional coding languages like Python is becoming outdated in the age of advanced AI. AI can handle much of the detailed coding, shifting the necessary skills towards understanding AI systems, effective prompting, and higher-level architecture.AI as the Ultimate Tutor: The advent of AI offers the potential for personalized, one-on-one tutoring for everyone, a far more effective learning method than traditional classroom lectures. However, this potential is hampered by institutional inertia and a lack of resources for tools like premium AI subscriptions for students.Curiosity as the AI Catalyst: Woody shares anecdotes of students, even those initially disengaged, whose eyes light up when using AI for creative projects, like designing websites on niche topics such as catapults. This demonstrates AI's power to ignite curiosity and intrinsic motivation when paired with focused goals and the ability to build.AI's Impact on Society and Skills: We touch upon the broader societal implications, including the rise of AI girlfriends addressing male loneliness and providing acceptance. Simultaneously, there's concern over the potential atrophy of critical skills like writing and debate if individuals overly rely on AI for summarization and opinion generation without deep engagement.Contact Information*   Twitter/X: @RulebyPowerlaw*   Listeners can search for Woody Wiegmann's podcast "Courage over convention" *   LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dataovernarratives/

Guest Bio:  Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the University of Wales.  Known for creating the sense-making framework, Cynefin, Dave's work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making.  He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory.  He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He holds positions as extra-ordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch and visiting Professor at Bangor University in Wales respectively.  He has held similar positions at 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 also won the Academy of Management aware 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 a 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 world-wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector. His company Cognitive Edge exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants.  He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management. The Centre for Applied Complexity was established to look at whole of citizen engagement in government and is running active programmes in Wales and elsewhere in areas such as social inclusion, self-organising communities and nudge economics together with a broad range of programmes in health.  The Centre will establish Wales as a centre of excellence for the integration of academic and practitioner work in creating a science-based approach to understanding society.   Social Media and Website LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b Twitter: @snowded Website: Cognitive Edge https://www.cognitive-edge.com/   Books/ Resources: Book: Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World by Dave Snowden and Friends https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynefin-Weaving-Sense-Making-Fabric-World/dp/1735379905 Book: Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Without-Optimism-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300248679/ Book: Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theology-Hope-Classics-Jurgen-Moltmann/dp/0334028787 Poem: ‘Mending Wall' by Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall Video: Dave Snowden on ‘Rewilding Agile' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrgaPDqet4c Article reference to ‘Rewilding Agile' by Dave Snowden https://cynefin.io/index.php/User:Snowded Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) In Times of Crisis https://cynefin.io/index.php/Field_guide_to_managing_complexity_(and_chaos)_in_times_of_crisis Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) In Times of Crisis (2) https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/managing-complexity-and-chaos-times-crisis-field-guide-decision-makers-inspired-cynefin-framework Cynefin Wiki https://cynefin.io/wiki/Main_Page   Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku:  Dave, thank you for making the time for this conversation. I read in your, your latest book - the book, Cynefin: Weaving Sense Making into the Fabric of Our World, which was released, I believe, in celebration of the twenty first year of the framework. And you mentioned that in your childhood, you had multidisciplinary upbringing which involved lots of reading. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Dave Snowden:  I think it wasn't uncommon in those days. I mean, if you did… I mean, I did science A levels and mathematical A levels. But the assumption was you would read every novel that the academic English class were reading. In fact, it was just unimaginable (that) you wouldn't know the basics of history. So, if you couldn't survive that in the sixth form common room, and the basics of science were known by most of the arts people as well. So that that was common, right. And we had to debate every week anyway. So, every week, you went up to the front of the class and you were given a card, and you'd have the subject and which side you are on, and you had to speak for seven minutes without preparation. And we did that every week from the age of 11 to 18. And that was a wonderful discipline because it meant you read everything. But also, my mother was… both my parents were the first from working class communities to go to university. And they got there by scholarship or sheer hard work against the opposition of their families. My mother went to university in Germany just after the war, which was extremely brave of her -  you know, as a South Wales working class girl. So, you weren't allowed not to be educated, it was considered the unforgivable sin. Ula Ojiaku:   Wow. Did it mean that she had to learn German, because (she was) studying in Germany…? Dave Snowden:  She well, she got A levels in languages. So, she went to university to study German and she actually ended up as a German teacher, German and French. So, she had that sort of background. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  And was that what influenced you? Because you also mentioned in the book that you won a £60 prize? Dave Snowden:  Oh, no, that was just fun. So, my mum was very politically active. We're a South Wales labor. Well, I know if I can read but we were labor. And so, she was a local Councilor. She was always politically active. There's a picture of me on Bertrand Russell's knee and her as a baby on a CND march. So it was that sort of background. And she was campaigning for comprehensive education, and had a ferocious fight with Aiden Williams, I think, who was the Director of Education, it was really nasty. I mean, I got threatened on my 11 Plus, he got really nasty. And then so when (I was) in the sixth form, I won the prize in his memory, which caused endless amusement in the whole county. All right. I think I probably won it for that. But that was for contributions beyond academic. So, I was leading lots of stuff in the community and stuff like that. But I had £60. And the assumption was, you go and buy one massive book. And I didn't, I got Dad to drive me to Liverpool - went into the big bookshop there and just came out with I mean, books for two and six pence. So, you can imagine how many books I could get for £60. And I just took everything I could find on philosophy and history and introductory science and stuff like that and just consumed it. Ula Ojiaku:  Wow, it seemed like you already knew what you wanted even before winning the prize money, you seem to have had a wish list... Dave Snowden:  I mean, actually interesting, and the big things in the EU field guide on (managing) complexity which was just issued. You need to build…, You need to stop saying, ‘this is the problem, we will find the solution' to saying, ‘how do I build capability, that can solve problems we haven't yet anticipated?' And I think that's part of the problem in education. Because my children didn't have that benefit. They had a modular education. Yeah, we did a set of exams at 16 and a set of exams that 18 and between those periods, we could explore it (i.e. options) and we had to hold everything in our minds for those two periods, right? For my children, it was do a module, pass a test, get a mark, move on, forget it move on. So, it's very compartmentalized, yeah? And it's also quite instrumentalist. We, I think we were given an education as much in how to learn and have had to find things out. And the debating tradition was that; you didn't know what you're going to get hit with. So, you read everything, and you thought about it, and you learn to think on your feet. And I think that that sort of a broad switch, it started to happen in the 80s, along with a lot of other bad things in management. And this is when systems thinking started to dominate. And we moved to an engineering metaphor. And you can see it in cybernetics and everything else, it's an attempt to define everything as a machine. And of course, machines are designed for a purpose, whereas ecosystems evolve for resilience. And I think that's kind of like where I, my generation were and it's certainly what we're trying to bring back in now in sort of in terms of practice. Ula Ojiaku:  I have an engineering background and a computer science background. These days, I'm developing a newfound love for philosophy, psychology, law and, you know, intersect, how do all these concepts intersect? Because as human beings we're complex, we're not machines where you put the program in and you expect it to come out the same, you know, it's not going to be the same for every human being. What do you think about that? Dave Snowden:  Yeah. And I think, you know, we know more on this as well. So, we know the role of art in human evolution is being closely linked to innovation. So, art comes before language. So, abstraction allows you to make novel connections. So, if you focus entirely on STEM education, you're damaging the human capacity to innovate. And we're, you know, as creatures, we're curious. You know. And I mean, we got this whole concept of our aporia, which is key to connecting that, which is creating a state of deliberate confusion, or a state of paradox. And the essence of a paradox is you can't resolve it. So, you're forced to think differently. So, the famous case on this is the liar's paradox, alright? I mean, “I always lie”. That just means I lied. So, if that means I was telling the truth. So, you've got to think differently about the problem. I mean, you've seen those paradoxes do the same thing. So that, that deliberate act of creating confusion so people can see novelty is key. Yeah. Umm and if you don't find… finding ways to do that, so when we looked at it, we looked at linguistic aporia, aesthetic aporia and physical aporia. So, I got some of the… one of the defining moments of insight on Cynefin was looking at Caravaggio`s paintings in Naples. When I realized I've been looking for the idea of the liminality. And that was, and then it all came together, right? So those are the trigger points requiring a more composite way of learning. I think it's also multiculturalism, to be honest. I mean, I, when I left university, I worked on the World Council of Churches come, you know program to combat racism. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes, I'd like to know more about that. That's one of my questions… Dave Snowden:  My mother was a good atheist, but she made me read the Bible on the basis, I wouldn't understand European literature otherwise, and the penetration guys, I became a Catholic so… Now, I mean, that that was fascinating, because I mean, I worked on Aboriginal land rights in Northern Australia, for example. And that was when I saw an activist who was literally murdered in front of me by a security guard. And we went to the police. And they said, it's only an Abo. And I still remember having fights in Geneva, because South Africa was a tribal conflict with a racial overlay. I mean, Africa, and its Matabele Zulu, arrived in South Africa together and wiped out the native population. And if you don't understand that, you don't understand the Matabele betrayal. You don't understand what happened. It doesn't justify apartheid. And one of the reasons there was a partial reconciliation, is it actually was a tribal conflict. And the ritual actually managed that. Whereas in Australia, in comparison was actually genocide. Yeah, it wasn't prejudice, it was genocide. I mean, until 1970s, there, were still taking half -breed children forcibly away from their parents, inter-marrying them in homes, to breed them back to white. And those are, I think, yeah, a big market. I argued this in the UK, I said, one of the things we should actually have is bring back national service. I couldn't get the Labor Party to adopt it. I said, ‘A: Because it would undermine the Conservatives, because they're the ones who talk about that sort of stuff. But we should allow it to be overseas.' So, if you put two years into working in communities, which are poorer than yours, round about that 18 to 21-year-old bracket, then we'll pay for your education. If you don't, you'll pay fees. Because you proved you want to give to society. And that would have been… I think, it would have meant we'd have had a generation of graduates who understood the world because that was part of the objective. I mean, I did that I worked on worked in South Africa, on the banks of Zimbabwe on the audits of the refugee camps around that fight. And in Sao Paulo, in the slums, some of the work of priests. You can't come back from that and not be changed. And I think it's that key formative period, we need to give people. Ula Ojiaku:  True and like you said, at that age, you know, when you're young and impressionable, it helps with what broadening your worldview to know that the world is bigger than your father's … compound (backyard)… Dave Snowden:  That's the worst problem in Agile, because what, you've got a whole class of, mainly white males and misogynism in Agile is really bad. It's one of the worst areas for misogyny still left, right, in terms of where it works. Ula Ojiaku:  I'm happy you are the one saying it not me… Dave Snowden:  Well, no, I mean, it is it's quite appalling. And so, what you've actually got is, is largely a bunch of white male game players who spent their entire time on computers. Yeah, when you take and run seriously after puberty, and that's kind of like a dominant culture. And that's actually quite dangerous, because it lacks, it lacks cultural diversity, it lacks ethnic diversity, it lacks educational diversity. And I wrote an article for ITIL, recently, which has been published, which said, no engineers should be allowed out, without training in ethics. Because the implications of what software engineers do now are huge. And the problem we've got, and this is a really significant, it's a big data problem as well. And you see it with a behavioral economic economist and the nudge theory guys - all of whom grab these large-scale data manipulations is that they're amoral, they're not immoral, they're amoral. And that's actually always more scary. It's this sort of deep level instrumentalism about the numbers; the numbers tell me what I need to say. Ula Ojiaku:  And also, I mean, just building on what you've said, there are instances, for example, in artificial intelligence is really based on a sample set from a select group, and it doesn't necessarily recognize things that are called ‘outliers'. You know, other races… Dave Snowden:  I mean, I've worked in that in all my life now back 20, 25 years ago. John Poindexter and I were on a stage in a conference in Washington. This was sort of early days of our work on counter terrorism. And somebody asked about black box AI and I said, nobody's talking about the training data sets. And I've worked in AI from the early days, all right, and the training data sets matter and nobody bothered. They just assumed… and you get people publishing books which say correlation is causation, which is deeply worrying, right? And I think Google is starting to acknowledge that, but it's actually very late. And the biases which… we were looking at a software tool the other day, it said it can, it can predict 85% of future events around culture. Well, it can only do that by constraining how executive see culture, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then the recruitment algorithms will only recruit people who match that cultural expectation and outliers will be eliminated. There's an HBO film coming up shortly on Myers Briggs. Now, Myers Briggs is known to be a pseudo-science. It has no basis whatsoever in any clinical work, and even Jung denied it, even though it's meant to be based on his work. But it's beautiful for HR departments because it allows them to put people into little categories. And critically it abrogates, judgment, and that's what happened with systems thinking in the 80s 90s is everything became spreadsheets and algorithms. So, HR departments would produce… instead of managers making decisions based on judgment, HR departments would force them into profile curves, to allocate resources. Actually, if you had a high performing team who were punished, because the assumption was teams would not have more than… Ula Ojiaku:  Bell curve... Dave Snowden:  …10 percent high performance in it. All right. Ula Ojiaku:  Yeah. Dave Snowden:  And this sort of nonsense has been running in the 80s, 90s and it coincided with… three things came together. One was the popularization of systems thinking. And unfortunately, it got popularized around things like process reengineering and learning organization. So that was a hard end. And Sanghi's pious can the sort of the, the soft end of it, right? But both of them were highly directional. It was kind of like leaders decide everything follows. Yeah. And that coincided with the huge growth of computing - the ability to handle large volumes of information. And all of those sorts of things came together in this sort of perfect storm, and we lost a lot of humanity in the process. Ula Ojiaku:  Do you think there's hope for us to regain the humanity in the process? Because it seems like the tide is turning from, I mean, there is still an emphasis, in my view, on systems thinking, however, there is the growing realization that we have, you know, knowledge workers and people… Dave Snowden:  Coming to the end of its park cycle, I see that all right. I can see it with the amount of cybernetics fanboys, and they are all boys who jump on me every time I say something about complexity, right? So, I think they're feeling threatened. And the field guide is significant, because it's a government, you know, government can like publication around effectively taken an ecosystems approach, not a cybernetic approach. And there's a book published by a good friend of mine called Terry Eagleton, who's… I don't think he's written a bad book. And he's written about 30, or 40. I mean, the guy just produces his stuff. It's called “Hope without Optimism”. And I think, hope is… I mean, Moltman just also published an update of his Theology of Hope, which is worth reading, even if you're not religious. But hope is one of those key concepts, right, you should… to lose hope is a sin. But hope is not the same thing as optimism. In fact, pessimistic people who hope actually are probably the ones who make a difference, because they're not naive, right? And this is my objection to the likes of Sharma Ga Sengi, and the like, is they just gather people together to talk about how things should be. And of course, everything should be what, you know, white MIT, educated males think the world should be like. I mean, it's very culturally imperialist in that sort of sense. And then nobody changes because anybody can come together in the workshop and agree how things should be. It's when you make a difference in the field that it counts, you've got to create a micro difference. This is hyper localization, you got to create lots and lots of micro differences, which will stimulate the systems, the system will change. I think, three things that come together, one is COVID. The other is global warming. And the other is, and I prefer to call it the epistemic justice movement, though, that kind of like fits in with Black Lives Matter. But epistemic justice doesn't just affect people who are female or black. I mean, if you come to the UK and see the language about the Welsh and the Irish, or the jokes made about the Welsh in BBC, right? The way we use language can designate people in different ways and I think that's a big movement, though. And it's certainly something we develop software for. So, I think those three come together, and I think the old models aren't going to be sustainable. I mean, the cost is going to be terrible. I mean, the cost to COVID is already bad. And we're not getting this thing as long COVID, it's permanent COVID. And people need to start getting used to that. And I think that's, that's going to change things. So, for example, in the village I live in Wiltshire. Somebody's now opened an artisan bakery in their garage and it's brilliant. And everybody's popping around there twice a week and just buying the bread and having a chat on the way; socially-distanced with masks, of course. And talking of people, that sort of thing is happening a lot. COVID has forced people into local areas and forced people to realise the vulnerability of supply chains. So, you can see changes happening there. The whole Trump phenomenon, right, and the Boris murmuring in the UK is ongoing. It's just as bad as the Trump phenomenon. It's the institutionalization of corruption as a high level. Right? Those sorts of things trigger change, right? Not without cost, change never comes without cost, but it just needs enough… It needs local action, not international action. I think that's the key principle. To get a lot of people to accept things like the Paris Accord on climate change, and you've got to be prepared to make sacrifices. And it's too distant a time at the moment, it has to become a local issue for the international initiatives to actually work and we're seeing that now. I mean… Ula Ojiaku:  It sounds like, sorry to interrupt - it sounds like what you're saying is, for the local action, for change to happen, it has to start with us as individuals… Dave Snowden:  The disposition… No, not with individuals. That's actually very North American, the North European way of thinking right. The fundamental kind of basic identity structure of humans is actually clans, not individuals. Ula Ojiaku:  Clans... Dave Snowden:  Yeah. Extended families, clans; it's an ambiguous word. We actually evolved for those. And you need it at that level, because that's a high level of social interaction and social dependency. And it's like, for example, right? I'm dyslexic. Right? Yeah. If I don't see if, if the spelling checker doesn't pick up a spelling mistake, I won't see it. And I read a whole page at a time. I do not read it sentence by sentence. All right. And I can't understand why people haven't seen the connections I make, because they're obvious, right? Equally, there's a high degree of partial autism in the Agile community, because that goes with mathematical ability and thing, and that this so-called education deficiencies, and the attempt to define an ideal individual is a mistake, because we evolved to have these differences. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes. Dave Snowden:  Yeah. And the differences understood that the right level of interaction can change things. So, I think the unit is clan, right for extended family, or extended, extended interdependence. Ula Ojiaku:  Extended interdependence… Dave Snowden:  We're seeing that in the village. I mean, yeah, this is classic British atomistic knit, and none of our relatives live anywhere near us. But the independence in the village is increasing with COVID. And therefore, people are finding relationships and things they can do together. Now, once that builds to a critical mass, and it does actually happen exponentially, then bigger initiatives are possible. And this is some of the stuff we were hoping to do in the US shortly on post-election reconciliation. And the work we've been doing in Malmo, in refugees and elsewhere in the world, right, is you change the nature of localized interaction with national visibility, so that you can measure the dispositional state of the system. And then you can nudge the system when it's ready to change, because then the energy cost of change is low. But that requires real time feedback loops in distributed human sensor networks, which is a key issue in the field guide. And the key thing that comes back to your original question on AI, is, the internet at the moment is an unbuffered feedback loop. Yeah, where you don't know the source of the data, and you can't control the source of the data. And any network like that, and this is just apriori science factor, right will always become perverted. Ula Ojiaku:  And what do you mean by term apriori? Dave Snowden:  Oh, before the facts, you don't need to, we don't need to wait for evidence. It's like in an agile, you can look at something like SAFe® which case claims to scale agile and just look at it you say it's apriori wrong (to) a scale a complex system. So, it's wrong. All right. End of argument right. Now let's talk about the details, right. So yeah, so that's, you know, that's coming back. The hyper localization thing is absolutely key on that, right? And the same is true to be honest in software development. A lot of our work now is to understand the unarticulated needs of users. And then shift technology in to actually meet those unarticulated needs. And that requires a complex approach to architecture, in which people and technology are objects with defined interactions around scaffolding structures, so that applications can emerge in resilience, right? And that's actually how local communities evolve as well. So, we've now got the theoretical constructs and a lot of the practical methods to actually… And I've got a series of blog posts - which I've got to get back to writing - called Rewilding Agile. And rewilding isn't returning to the original state, it's restoring balance. So, if you increase the number of human actors as your primary sources, and I mean human actors, not as people sitting on (in front of) computer screens who can be faked or mimicked, yeah? … and entirely working on text, which is about 10%, of what we know, dangerous, it might become 80% of what we know and then you need to panic. Right? So, you know, by changing those interactions, increasing the human agency in the system, that's how you come to, that's how you deal with fake news. It's not by writing better algorithms, because then it becomes a war with the guys faking the news, and you're always gonna lose. Ula Ojiaku:  So, what do you consider yourself, a person of faith? Dave Snowden:  Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  Why? Dave Snowden:  Oh, faith is like hope and charity. I mean, they're the great virtues… I didn't tell you I got into a lot in trouble in the 70s. Dave Snowden:  I wrote an essay that said Catholicism, Marxism and Hinduism were ontologically identical and should be combined and we're different from Protestantism and capitalism, which are also ontologically identical (and) it can be combined. Ula Ojiaku:  Is this available in the public domain? Dave Snowden:  I doubt it. I think it actually got me onto a heresy trial at one point, but that but I would still say that. Ula Ojiaku:  That's amazing. Can we then move to the framework that Cynefin framework, how did it evolve into what we know it as today? Dave Snowden:  I'll do a high-level summary, but I wrote it up at length in the book and I didn't know I was writing for the book. The book was a surprise that they put together for me. I thought that was just writing an extended blog post. It started when I was working in IBM is it originates from the work of Max Borrasso was my mentor for years who tragically died early. But he was looking at abstraction, codification and diffusion. We did a fair amount of work together, I took two of those aspects and started to look at informal and formal communities in IBM, and its innovation. And some of the early articles on Cynefin, certainly the early ones with the five domains come from that period. And at that time, we had access labels. Yeah. And then then complexity theory came into it. So, it shifted into being a complexity framework. And it stayed … The five domains were fairly constant for a fairly long period of time, they changed their names a bit. The central domain I knew was important, but didn't have as much prominence as it does now. And then I introduced liminality, partly driven by agile people, actually, because they could they couldn't get the concept there were dynamics and domains. So, they used to say things like, ‘look, Scrum is a dynamic. It's a way of shifting complex to complicated' and people say ‘no, the scrum guide said it's about complex.' And you think, ‘oh, God, Stacey has a lot to answer for' but… Ula Ojiaku: Who`s Stacey? Dave Snowden:  Ralph Stacey. So, he was the guy originally picked up by Ken when he wrote the Scrum Guide… Ula Ojiaku:  Right. Okay. Dave Snowden:  Stacey believes everything's complex, which is just wrong, right? So, either way, Cynefin evolved with the liminal aspects. And then the last resolution last year, which is… kind of completes Cynefin to be honest, there's some refinements… was when we realized that the central domain was confused, or operatic. And that was the point where you started. So, you didn't start by putting things into the domain, you started in the operatic. And then you moved aspects of things into the different domains. So that was really important. And it got picked up in Agile, ironically, by the XP community. So, I mean, I was in IT most of my life, I was one of the founders of the DSDM Consortium, and then moved sideways from that, and was working in counterterrorism and other areas, always you're working with technology, but not in the Agile movement. Cynefin is actually about the same age as Agile, it started at the same time. And the XP community in London invited me in, and I still think Agile would have been better if it had been built on XP, not Scrum. But it wouldn't have scaled with XP, I mean, without Scrum it would never have scaled it. And then it got picked up. And I think one of the reasons it got picked up over Stacey is, it said order is possible. It didn't say everything is complex. And virtually every Agile method I know of value actually focuses on making complex, complicated. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes. Dave Snowden:  And that's its power. What they're… what is insufficient of, and this is where we've been working is what I call pre-Scrum techniques. Techniques, which define what should go into that process. Right, because all of the Agile methods still tend to be a very strong manufacturing metaphor - manufacturing ideas. So, they assume somebody will tell them what they have to produce. And that actually is a bad way of thinking about IT. Technology needs to co-evolve. And users can't articulate what they want, because they don't know what technology can do. Ula Ojiaku:  True. But are you saying… because in Agile fundamentally, it's really about making sure there's alignment as well that people are working on the right thing per time, but you're not telling them how to do it? Dave Snowden:  Well, yes and no - all right. I mean, it depends what you're doing. I mean, some Agile processes, yes. But if you go through the sort of safe brain remain processes, very little variety within it, right? And self-organization happens within the context of a user executive and retrospectives. Right, so that's its power. And, but if you look at it, it took a really good technique called time-boxing, and it reduced it to a two-week sprint. Now, that's one aspect of time boxing. I mean, I've got a whole series of blog posts next week on this, because time boxing is a hugely valuable technique. It says there's minimal deliverable project, and maximum deliverable product and a minimal level of resource and a maximum level of resource. And the team commits to deliver on the date. Ula Ojiaku:  To accurate quality… to a quality standard. Dave Snowden:  Yeah, so basically, you know that the worst case, you'll get the minimum product at the maximum cost, but you know, you'll get it on that date. So, you can deal with it, alright. And that's another technique we've neglected. We're doing things which force high levels of mutation and requirements over 24 hours, before they get put into a Scrum process. Because if you just take what users want, you know, there's been insufficient co-evolution with the technology capability. And so, by the time you deliver it, the users will probably realize they should have asked for something different anyway. Ula Ojiaku:  So, does this tie in with the pre-Scrum techniques you mentioned earlier? If so, can you articulate that? Dave Snowden:  So, is to say different methods in different places. And that's again, my opposition to things like SAFe, to a lesser extent LeSS, and so on, right, is they try and put everything into one bloody big flow diagram. Yeah. And that's messy. All right? Well, it's a recipe, not a chef. What the chef does is they put different ingredients together in different combinations. So, there's modularity of knowledge, but it's not forced into a linear process. So, our work… and we just got an open space and open source and our methods deliberately, right, in terms of the way it works, is I can take Scrum, and I can reduce it to its lowest coherent components, like a sprint or retrospective. I can combine those components with components for another method. So, I can create Scrum as an assembly of components, I can take those components compared with other components. And that way, you get novelty. So, we're then developing components which sit before traditional stuff. Like for example, triple eight, right? This was an old DSDM method. So, you ran a JAD sessions and Scrum has forgotten about JAD. JAD is a really…  joint application design… is a really good set of techniques - they're all outstanding. You throw users together with coders for two days, and you force out some prototypes. Yeah, that latching on its own would, would transform agile, bringing that back in spades, right? We did is we do an eight-hour JAD session say, in London, and we pass it on to a team in Mumbai. But we don't tell them what the users ask for. They just get the prototype. And they can do whatever they want with it for eight hours. And then they hand it over to a team in San Francisco, who can do whatever they want with it in eight hours. And it comes back. And every time I've run this, the user said, ‘God, I wouldn't have thought of that, can I please, have it?' So, what you're doing is a limited life cycle -  you get the thing roughly defined, then you allow it to mutate without control, and then you look at the results and decide what you want to do. And that's an example of pre-scrum technique, that is a lot more economical than systems and analysts and user executives and storyboards. And all those sorts of things. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  Well, I see what you mean, because it seems like the, you know, the JAD - the joint application design technique allows for emergent design, and you shift the decision making closer to the people who are at the forefront. And to an extent my understanding of, you know, Scrum … I mean, some agile frameworks - that's also what they promote… Dave Snowden:  Oh, they don't really don't. alright. They picked up Design Thinking which is quite interesting at the moment. If you if you look at Agile and Design Thinking. They're both at the end of their life cycles. Ula Ojiaku:  Why do you say that? Dave Snowden:  Because they're being commodified. The way you know, something is coming to the end of its life cycle is when it becomes highly commodified. So, if you look at it, look at what they are doing the moment, the Double Diamond is now a series of courses with certificates. And I mean, Agile started with bloody certificates, which is why it's always been slightly diverse in the way it works. I mean, this idea that you go on a three-day course and get a certificate, you read some slides every year and pay some money and get another certificate is fundamentally corrupt. But most of the Agile business is built on it, right? I mean, I've got three sets of methods after my name. But they all came from yearlong or longer courses certified by university not from tearing apart a course. Yeah, or satisfying a peer group within a very narrow cultural or technical definition of competence. So, I think yeah, and you can see that with Design Thinking. So, it's expert ideation, expert ethnography. And it still falls into that way of doing things. Yeah. And you can see it, people that are obsessed with running workshops that they facilitate. And that's the problem. I mean, the work we're doing on citizen engagement is actually… has no bloody facilitators in it. As all the evidence is that the people who turn up are culturally biased about their representative based opinions. And the same is true if you want to look at unarticulated needs, you can't afford to have the systems analysts finding them because they see them from their perspective. And this is one of one science, right? You did not see what you do not expect to see. We know that, alright? So, you're not going to see outliers. And so, the minute you have an expert doing something, it's really good - where you know, the bounds of the expertise, cover all the possibilities, and it's really dangerous. Well, that's not the case. Ula Ojiaku:  So, could you tell me a bit more about the unfacilitated sessions you mentioned earlier? Dave Snowden:  They're definitely not sessions, so we didn't like what were triggers at moments. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Dave Snowden:  So, defining roles. So, for example, one of the things I would do and have done in IT, is put together, young, naive, recently graduated programmer with older experienced tester or software architect. So, somebody without any… Ula Ojiaku:  Prejudice or pre-conceived idea... Dave Snowden:  … preferably with a sort of grandparent age group between them as well. I call it, the grandparents syndrome - grandparents say things to their grandchildren they won't tell their children and vice versa. If you maximize the age gap, there's actually freer information flow because there's no threat in the process. And then we put together with users trained to talk to IT people. So, in a month's time, I'll publish that as a training course. So, training users to talk to IT people is more economical than trying to train IT people to understand users. Ula Ojiaku:  To wrap up then, based on what you said, you know, about Cynefin, and you know, the wonderful ideas behind Cynefin. How can leaders in organizations in any organization apply these and in how they make sense of the world and, you know, take decisions? Dave Snowden:  Well, if there's actually a sensible way forward now, so we've just published the field guide on managing complexity.  Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Dave Snowden:  And that is actually, it's a sort of ‘Chef's guide'. It has four stages: assess, adapt, exert, transcend, and within that it has things you could do. So, it's not a list of qualities, it's a list of practical things you should go and do tomorrow, and those things we're building at the moment with a lot of partners, because we won't try and control this; this needs to be open. Here's an assessment process that people will go through to decide where they are. So that's going to be available next week on our website. Ula Ojiaku:  Oh, fantastic! Dave Snowden:  For the initial registration.  Other than that, and there's a whole body of stuff on how to use Cynefin. And as I said, we just open source on the methods. So, the Wiki is open source. These… from my point of view, we're now at the stage where the market is going to expand very quickly. And to be honest, I, you know, I've always said traditionally use cash waiver as an example of this. The reason that Agile scaled around Scrum is he didn't make it an elite activity, which XP was. I love the XP guys, but they can't communicate with ordinary mortals. Yeah. It takes you about 10 minutes to tune into the main point, and even you know the field, right. And he (Jeff Sutherland) made the Scrum Guide open source. And that way it's great, right. And I think that that's something which people just don't get strategic with. They, in early stages, you should keep things behind firewalls. When the market is ready to expand, you take the firewalls away fast. Because I mean, getting behind firewalls initially to maintain coherence so they don't get diluted too quickly, or what I call “hawks being made into pigeons”. Yeah. But the minute the market is starting to expand, that probably means you've defined it so you release the firewall so the ideas spread very quickly, and you accept the degree of diversity on it. So that's the reason we put the Wiki. Ula Ojiaku:  Right. So, are there any books that you would recommend, for anyone who wants to learn more about what you've talked about so far. Dave Snowden:  You would normally produce the theory book, then the field book, but we did it the other way around. So, Mary and I are working on three to five books, which will back up the Field Guide. Ula Ojiaku:  Is it Mary Boone? Dave Snowden:  Mary Boone. She knows how to write to the American managers, which I don't, right… without losing integrity. So that's coming, right. If you go onto the website, I've listed all the books I read. I don't think… there are some very, very good books around complexity, but they're deeply specialized, they're academic. Gerard's book is just absolutely brilliant but it's difficult to understand if you don't have a philosophy degree. And there are some awfully tripe books around complexity - nearly all of the popular books I've seen, I wouldn't recommend. Yeah. Small Groups of Complex Adaptive Systems is probably quite a good one that was published about 20 years ago. Yeah, but that we got a book list on the website. So, I would look at that. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Thank you so much for that. Do you have any ask of the audience and how can they get to you? Dave Snowden:  We've open-sourced the Wiki, you know, to create a critical mass, I was really pleased we have 200 people volunteered to help populate it. So, we get the all the methods in the field guide them. And they're actively working at that at the moment, right, and on a call with them later. And to be honest, I've done 18-hour days, the last two weeks, but 8 hours of each of those days has been talking to the methods with a group of people Academy 5, that's actually given me a lot of energy, because it's huge. So, get involved, I think it's the best way… you best understand complexity by getting the principles and then practicing it. And the key thing I'll leave us with is the metaphor. I mentioned it a few times - a recipe book user has a recipe, and they follow it. And if they don't have the right ingredients, and if they don't have the right equipment, they can't operate. Or they say it's not ‘true Agile'. A chef understands the theory of cooking and has got served in apprenticeship. So, their fingers know how to do things. And that's… we need… a downside.. more chefs, which is the combination of theory and practice. And the word empirical is hugely corrupted in the Agile movement. You know, basically saying, ‘this worked for me' or ‘it worked for me the last three times' is the most dangerous way of moving forward. Ula Ojiaku:  Because things change and what worked yesterday might not work Dave Snowden:  And you won't be aware of what worked or didn't work and so on. Ula Ojiaku:  And there's some bias in that. Wouldn't you say? Dave Snowden:  We've got an attentional blindness if you've got Ula Ojiaku:  Great. And Dave, where can people find you? Are you on social media? Dave Snowden:  Cognitive. Yeah, social media is @snowded. Yeah. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Two websites – the Cognitive Edge website, which is where I blog, and there's a new Cynefin Center website now, which is a not-for-profit arm. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. All these would be in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Dave. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Dave Snowden:  Okay. Thanks a lot.

Right now, AI is having a moment — and it's not the first time grand predictions about the potential of machines are being made. But, what does it really mean to say something like ChatGPT is “intelligent”? What exactly is intelligence? In this season of the Complexity podcast, The Nature of Intelligence, we'll explore this question through conversations with cognitive and neuroscientists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts in six episodes. Together, we'll investigate the complexities of human intelligence, how it compares to that of other species, and where AI fits in. We'll dive into the relationship between language and thought, examine AI's limitations, and ask: Could machines ever truly be like us?

Host Riccardo Cosentino explores untapped knowledge in project management, drawing from his Oxford insights. This episode of Navigating Major Programmes delves into integrating social sciences and complex adaptive systems, addressing how minor changes can lead to significant impacts due to project complexity. Join Riccardo as he navigates through the complexities of project management, offering innovative solutions to embrace and manage these challenges effectively in a new mini series: The Science of Complexity. Could your approach to project management be outdated?"I am convinced that, although we have achieved many incredible things already as project leaders and managers, there's something missing, something that's already out there in the world's knowledge that we're not using well enough." – Riccardo Cosentino Steps for improving the management and understanding of complex, large-scale infrastructure projects:Step one: Social sciences and complex adaptive systems.Step two: Systems thinking.Step three: A Betagon chart.Step four: Finding a success criterion.Step five: Network graphs.Step six: Higher level network graphs.Step seven: Digital twins.Step eight: The Incerto.Step nine: Digital twins.Step ten: Composable systems.Step eleven: Semantics and Ontologies Mentioned Links:  The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (Recommended Reading)Amazon.caAmazon.comHow Understanding Systems Thinking Changed My Career (Riccardo's LinkedIn Article)Organizing for Work (Recommended Reading) Amazon.caAmazon.comNassim Nicholas Taleb's Published Works (Recommended Incerto Reading)Amazon.caAmazon.comDigital Construction Ontologies   If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. The conversation doesn't stop here—connect and converse with our LinkedIn community: Follow Navigating Major Programmes on LinkedInFollow Riccardo Cosentino on LinkedInRead Riccardo's latest at wwww.riccardocosentino.com Music: "A New Tomorrow" by Chordial Music. Licensed through PremiumBeat.DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the hosts and guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent or reflect the official policy, opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of Disenyo.co LLC and its employees.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Performance Psychcast. Today we are very fortunate to be speaking with David Smith.  David is a PhD student in sport/exercise science and sport/exercise psychology at the German Sports University in Cologne. He is a ASP licensed Sport Psychology Professional, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and Sports Diversity Leader with an M.Sc in sport/exercise psychology and B.Sc in sport/exercise science. As a sport scientist, David's research focus includes; visuomotor calibration, motivational climate, dynamical systems, diversity/inclusion, LGBTQ+ discrimination and more. Professionally, David currently works as a Sport Psychology Consultant for the Pride Cheerleading Association and Vancouver Curling Club - Team Ritchie, Strength and Conditioning coach for FC Düren, TuS Brauweiler Basketball, and SC Janus where he is also the head coach for the “performance group'' competitive swim team. David also works in educational and professional development as the Community Manager for Virtual Sport Psych and as the Managing Editor and Director of Education for Compete Sports Diversity. On top of all that, David hosts his own podcast, “Drag Race Psychology” examining RuPaul's Drag Race through the lens of sport psychology. David is a competitive swimmer himself, having won five medals at the USMS National Championships and 16 medals at the Gay Games, as well as set several national records. He also does amateur videography that he utilizes to develop and promote content centered around inclusive sports, helping inspire people to get involved and discover the social, physical, and mental health benefits of sport. He is a fierce advocate for utilizing sport as a platform to empower authenticity and confidence within his athletes, teams, and communities; achieving this through his work and brand, Stonewall Performance. As Greg was unable to make this episode, we invited Kate Walsh to co-host. Kate is a Masters's student of Sport and Exercise Psychology at Bristol, UWE, and her main interests lie in athlete mental health, performance and how the two go hand in hand.  Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bttrflyr/  & https://www.instagram.com/fitwithpride/  & https://twitter.com/StonewallFit  Stonewall: https://www.instagram.com/stonewallperformance www.arcope.co.uk  www.focuperform.co.uk  www.sportingbounce.com The online directory of sport performance specialists. Sportingbounce helps connect specialists in sport psychology, nutrition, sports massage, injury rehabilitation, coaching, and fitness training with clients. With a daily spend on Google Adwords, social media advertising, and excellent organic rankings on search engines your business will get found on Sporting Bounce. Visit sportingbounce.com to find out how sporting bounce can help you. Don't forget that listeners of this podcast can get 50% off the Premium membership package by entering the code performance, that's “PERFORMANCE” meaning you get the best possible coverage for less than 20 pence a day!   

How does a group of molecules transition into something that is life? And what do even mean when we say 'life'? To explore the origin of life, we're joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.   Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Trailer for Complexity: Physics of Life, from the Santa Fe Institute

How do you avoid overfitting, how loose is too loose in terms of loose pants and how should you approach sample sizes when designing your trading systems? What are complex adaptive systems, how do they apply to financial markets and why does regular math just not cut it? How does trend following differ from other strategies, what makes trend following so robust and what are the limitations for traditional statistics? Join us for this fascinating conversation with Richard Brennan.-----EXCEPTIONAL RESOURCE: Find Out How to Build a Safer & Better Performing Portfolio using this FREE NEW Portfolio Builder Tool-----Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.IT's TRUE ? – most CIO's read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.And you can get a free copy of my latest book “The Many Flavors of Trend Following” here.Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.Send your questions to info@toptradersunplugged.comAnd please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.Follow Rich on Twitter.Episode TimeStamps:01:04 - What has been on our radar recently?03:08 - Industry performance update08:21 - Q1, Adam: In terms of loose pants, how loose is too loose?13:36 - Trading with different models15:42 - Adam Q2: What is a reasonable sample size in real trade observations, to compare against backtest statistics?18:23 - A deep dive into complex adaptive systems (CAS)20:29 - The 5 properties of CAS25:24 - Examples of non-linearty in financial markets30:50 - Emerging properties in financial markets33:59 - Self organization36:33 - Adaption and evolution40:10 - Feedback loops43:11 - What does CAS and trend following have in common?49:38 - The limitations of traditional statistics01:01:14 - Summing it all up01:04:48 - What's next? Copyright © 2023 – CMC AG – All Rights...

Throughout the history of science, the concept of time has changed many times - from Newton and thermodynamic definitions to the weirdness of relativity and quantum mechanics. And as our understanding of life and the universe continues to grow, is it again time to reevaluate how we think about time? To explore this mind-bending idea, we're joined again by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.   Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Dr. Pravir Malik is a multi-disciplinary scholar and a quantum computing visionary. He is the founder and chief technologist of QIQuantum, a company that aims to create a radically different quantum computing architecture based on a fractal model connecting patterns at different levels of matter and life. He is also a partner at Galaxiez, a consultancy that applies aspects of his unified theory and mathematics of organization to model and improve complex systems. He has authored 22 books and multiple IEEE articles on his cosmology of light, and has a patent pending on a fourfold atom-based quantum computer. He is a regular contributor to Forbes, where he leads the Technology Council group for quantum computing, and has designed and led several events and certification programs for executives. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a recipient of the Best Book Award for 'The Fractal Organization: Creating Enterprises of Tomorrow'. He holds a PhD in Mathematics of Innovation in Complex Adaptive Systems from the University of Pretoria, and a MM from the Kellogg School of Management, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Florida, and a BSE in Computer Engineering from the Case Western Reserve University. https://qiquantum.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/pravirmalik https://pravirmalik.medium.com https://councils.forbes.com/profile/Pravir-Malik Time Stamp 0:00 to 02:44- Intro, Background, Moore's law & workings of a Classical computer 02:44 to 06:33- What is Quantum Physics 06:33 to 15:55- Various Quantum Mechanics Interpretation 15:55 to 18:12- Quaternary Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics 18:12 to 20:01- QI Quantum & a new approach to build a working quantum computer 20:01 to 30:43- What is a Quantum Computer & the leaders in the field 30:43 to 37:13- Applications of a quantum computer 37:13 to 42:21- How Can a quantum computer leverage AI to accelerate 42:21 to 44:53- Advice to Students Watch our highest-viewed videos: 1-DR R VIJAYARAGHAVAN - PROF & PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR AT TIFR India's 1st Quantum Computer- https://youtu.be/ldKFbHb8nvQ 2-TATA MOTORS- DRIVING THE FUTURE OF MOBILITY IN INDIA- SHAILESH CHANDRA- MD: TATA MOTORS-https://youtu.be/M2Ey0fHmZJ0 3-MIT REPORT PREDICTS SOCIETAL COLLAPSE BY 2040 - GAYA HERRINGTON -DIR SUSTAINABILITY: KPMG- https://youtu.be/Jz29GOyVt04 4-WORLDS 1ST HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANTATION- DR SERGIO CANAVERO - https://youtu.be/KY_rtubs6Lc 5-DR HAROLD KATCHER - CTO NUGENICS RESEARCH Breakthrough in Age Reversal- https://youtu.be/214jry8z3d4 6-Head of Artificial Intelligence-JIO - Shailesh Kumar https://youtu.be/q2yR14rkmZQ 7-STARTUP FROM INDIA AIMING FOR LEVEL 5 AUTONOMY - SANJEEV SHARMA CEO SWAAYATT ROBOTS - https://youtu.be/Wg7SqmIsSew 8-MAN BEHIND GOOGLE QUANTUM SUPREMACY - JOHN MARTINIS  - https://youtu.be/Y6ZaeNlVRsE 9-BANKING 4.0 - BRETT KING FUTURIST, BESTSELLING AUTHOR & FOUNDER MOVEN - https://youtu.be/2bxHAai0UG0 10-E-VTOL & HYPERLOOP- FUTURE OF INDIA" S MOBILITY- SATYANARAYANA CHAKRAVARTHY https://youtu.be/ZiK0EAelFYY 11-HOW NEUROMORPHIC COMPUTING WILL ACCELERATE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - PROF SHUBHAM SAHAY- IIT KANPUR- https://youtu.be/sMjkG0jGCBs 12-INDIA'S QUANTUM COMPUTING INDUSTRY- PROF ARUN K PATI -DIRECTOR QETCI- https://youtu.be/Et98nkwiA8w Connect & Follow us at: https://in.linkedin.com/in/eddieavil https://in.linkedin.com/company/change-transform-india https://www.facebook.com/changetransformindia/ https://twitter.com/intothechange https://www.instagram.com/changetransformindia/ Listen to the Audio Podcast at: https://anchor.fm/transform-impossible https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/change-i-m-possibleid1497201007?uo=4 https://open.spotify.com/show/56IZXdzH7M0OZUIZDb5mUZ https://www.breaker.audio/change-i-m-possible https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMjg4YzRmMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw Don't Forget to Subscribe www.youtube.com/@toctwpodcast #quantum #quantumcomputing #quantumphysics #quantummechanics

Dave Snowden (Twitter, LinkedIn) is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co. The Cynefin Co is "the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world". The Cynefin Framework is a decision support framework, a way of determining what method to adopt in this particular situation.Dave is a thorough-to-brusque practitioner and thinker using Complex Adaptive Systems (a dynamic network of interactions where the behaviour of the ensemble is not predictable from the components, and which is able to adapt to changing circumstances).Two key points I take from our conversation:-Don't focus on changing people (for which there is little evidence of success). Instead, focus on changing the connections people have with other people opens up more possibility for the whole assembly. -From a complexity view, the world is constantly changing and the information you have is partial. Better to be responsive to what's happening around you, rather than having aplan which will be immediately out of date.LinksProbably the most recent full explanation of the Cynefin Framework and how to us it is here. "Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis. A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework" published by the EU. SenseMaker® is a distributed ethnographic approach to understanding a situation. By allowing respondents to give meaning to their own experience, it avoids the epistemic injustice of third-party of algorithmic interpretations. "SenseMaker® allows the powerful combination of vast amounts of data, with the rich context of narrative, based on the anecdotes of real people going about their real lives. Very importantly, SenseMaker® places the voices and interpretations of people at the centre, instead of privileging those in power."Camino de SantiagoTimings0:50 - Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?6:03 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?11:52 - Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?20:58 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?22:46 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?25:52 - Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?26:58 - Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?Twitter: Powerful_TimesWebsite hub: here.Please do like and subscribe, to help others find the podcast.Thank you for listening! -- David

In our first episode this season, we dive into the world of open platforms and the future of organizing. With his thought-provoking presentation of “Gardening Platforms”, our guest Alex Komoroske, helps create a shift in mindset towards a more achievable and sustainable approach in creating impactful technology solutions. We explore his key learnings from leading products at Google Chrome, and how he continues to implement these in his own journey today. Talking on questions of morality, control, and designing for the nefarious users, there's so much Alex offers in this podcast, and we hope you take from it, as much as we did.  Alex Komoroske, is truly one to get inspired by when we think of the potential that powerful technology solutions can create. For 13 years, he worked with Google, building some of the most cherished products that came from the organization. Heading product for a company that affects billions of lives is no easy feat, and Alex did just that for Google Chrome. He took his vast ocean of knowledge, and for the last two years has helped shape Stripe, as their Head of Strategy. In his flip-book style presentation, aptly titled, “Gardening Platforms”, he discusses the fundamental emergent power dynamics of platforms, how to evolve an existing platform to continuously improve it, and how to create a new platform from scratch. This got us truly hooked, and we are glad that Alex joined us to discuss this, and many more mind-tinkering concepts in our podcast. We touch upon the inherently complex and evolutionary  nature of platforms, the role of composability and modularity, and what it means to be sensitive to socio-technical implications of your solutions.  Get ready to be inspired by his high-impact journey, brutal honesty, and some remarkable recommendations of books and concepts that have shaped his thoughts and processes.   Key Highlights 

When most of us think about information, we think of it as something we can possess or ‘know'. But what if it's so much more than that? In this episode, we're joined by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Sara is going to examine information and the critical role it plays in complex systems.   Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

On today's episode, Financial expert and #1 Amazon best-selling author John Browning talks about why you should build your portfolio to support your life. Listen as John talks about a chapter in his book and gain some insight into how you can Build a Life, Not (just) a Portfolio. Learn more when you Connect with John by texting "LIFE" to 321-421-5213 or GuardianRockWealth.com.

Coach Koop discusses how athletes are Complex Adaptive Systems and how subjective feedback can be integrated into training. Paper discussedBuy Koop's new book on Amazon or Audible.Information on coaching-www.trainright.comKoop's Social MediaTwitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop

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What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might identify as universal features of all living systems, most scholars would agree life is a physical phenomenon unfolding in time. And yet current physics is notorious for its inadequacy with respect to time. Life appears to hinge on information transfer — but, again, what do we mean by “information,” and what it is relationship to energy and matter? If humankind can't settle fundamental issues with these theoretical investigations, we might be missing other kinds of life (and mind) — not just in outer space, but here on Earth, right beneath our noses. But new models that suggest a vastly wider definition of life offer hope that we might — soon! — not only learn to recognize the biospheres and technospheres of other living worlds, but notice other “aliens” at home, and even find our place amidst a living cosmos.Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we'll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on the show, we speak with SFI External Professor Sara Walker (Twitter, Google Scholar), Deputy Director of The Beyond Center at ASU, where she acts as Associate Professor in half a dozen different programs. In this conversation, we discuss her pioneering research in the origins of life and the profound and diverse implications of Assembly Theory — a new kind of physics she's developing with chemist Leroy Cronin and a team of SFI and NASA scholars.  Sara likes to speculate out loud in public conversation, so strap in for an unusually enthusiastic, animated, and free-roaming conversation at the very bleeding edge of science. And be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com.If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentioned Papers:Intelligence as a planetary scale processby Adam Frank, David Grinspoon & Sara WalkerThe Algorithmic Origins of Lifeby Sara Imari Walker & Paul C. W. DaviesBeyond prebiotic chemistry: What dynamic network properties allow the emergence of life?by Leroy Cronin & Sara WalkerIdentifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometryby Stuart Marshall, Cole Mathis, Emma Carrick, Graham Keenan, Geoffrey Cooper, Heather Graham, Matthew Craven, Piotr Gromski, Douglas Moore, Sara Walker & Leroy CroninAssembly Theory Explains and Quantifies the Emergence of Selection and Evolutionby Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, Michael Lachmann, Christopher Kempes, Sara Walker, Leroy CroninQuantum Non-Barking Dogsby Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies, Prasant Samantray, Yakir AharonovThe Multiple Paths to Multiple Lifeby Christopher P. Kempes & David C. Krakauer Other Related Videos & Writing:SFI Seminar - Why Black Holes Eat Informationby Vijay BalasubramanianMajor Transitions in Planetary Evolutionby Hikaru Furukawa and Sara Imari Walker2022 Community Lecture: “Recognizing The Alien in Us”by Sara WalkerSara Walker and Lee Cronin: The Alien Debateon The Lex Fridman ShowIf Cancer Were Easy, Every Cell Would Do ItSFI Press Release on work by Michael LachmannThe Ministry for The Futureby Kim Stanley RobinsonRe: Wheeler's delayed choice experimentWikipediaOn the SFI “Exploring Life's Origins” Research ProjectComplexity Explorer's Origins of Life Free Open Online CourseChiara Marletto on Constructor TheorySimon Saunders, Philosopher of Physics at OxfordRelated SFI Podcast Episodes:Complexity 2 - The Origins of Life: David Krakauer, Sarah Maurer, and Chris Kempes at InterPlanetary Festival 2019Complexity 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryComplexity 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionComplexity 40 - The Information Theory of Biology & Origins of Life with Sara Imari Walker (Big Biology Podcast Crossover)Complexity 41 - Natalie Grefenstette on Agnostic Biosignature DetectionComplexity 68 - W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns & Verbs (Part 1)Complexity 80 - Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical CyclingAlien Crash Site 015 - Cole MathisAlien Crash Site 019 - Heather GrahamAlien Crash Site 020 - Chris KempesAlien Crash Site 021 - Natalie Grefenstette

Sara Walker is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist working new theory of physics that might allow us to understand what life is, its general characteristics, its origin on Earth, and how to find alien examples. At Arizona State University she is the deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, associate director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, and associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Complex Adaptive Systems. She is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.

Announcement: New Podcast Publishing Cadence Before I introduce my guest for this episode (if you've not already seen the preview post), I must apologise for the apparent silence. Life happened and this has affected the AILP podcast publishing cadence (assuming you noticed! :D). Can I share something with you? Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming trying to maintain balance and remain relevant whilst juggling so many things (work, children, family, and other responsibilities) - some of you reading this post would agree. I'm however learning to pace myself and this involves constantly reviewing and re-balancing priorities. Although this goes against ‘conventional wisdom', with so much else going on this year, we'll be publishing new episodes on a 6-week cadence (more or less) until further notice. Thanks for understanding and your unwavering support. To paraphrase a quote attributed to both Confucius and Martin Luther King Jr, #SlowDownIfYouMustButDontStop. Take care of yourself and loved ones and have a wonderful 2022!  Ula ------ Guest Bio:  Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the University of Wales.  Known for creating the sense-making framework, Cynefin, Dave's work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making.  He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory.  He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He holds positions as extra-ordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch and visiting Professor at Bangor University in Wales respectively.  He has held similar positions at 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 also won the Academy of Management aware 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 a 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 world-wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector. His company Cognitive Edge exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants.  He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management. The Centre for Applied Complexity was established to look at whole of citizen engagement in government and is running active programmes in Wales and elsewhere in areas such as social inclusion, self-organising communities and nudge economics together with a broad range of programmes in health.  The Centre will establish Wales as a centre of excellence for the integration of academic and practitioner work in creating a science-based approach to understanding society.   Social Media and Website LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b Twitter: @snowded Website: Cognitive Edge https://www.cognitive-edge.com/   Books/ Resources: Book: Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World by Dave Snowden and Friends https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynefin-Weaving-Sense-Making-Fabric-World/dp/1735379905 Book: Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Without-Optimism-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300248679/ Book: Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theology-Hope-Classics-Jurgen-Moltmann/dp/0334028787 Poem: ‘Mending Wall' by Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall Video: Dave Snowden on ‘Rewilding Agile' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrgaPDqet4c Article reference to ‘Rewilding Agile' by Dave Snowden https://cynefin.io/index.php/User:Snowded Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) In Times of Crisis https://cynefin.io/index.php/Field_guide_to_managing_complexity_(and_chaos)_in_times_of_crisis Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) In Times of Crisis (2) https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/managing-complexity-and-chaos-times-crisis-field-guide-decision-makers-inspired-cynefin-framework Cynefin Wiki https://cynefin.io/wiki/Main_Page   Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku:  Dave, thank you for making the time for this conversation. I read in your, your latest book - the book, Cynefin: Weaving Sense Making into the Fabric of Our World, which was released, I believe, in celebration of the twenty first year of the framework. And you mentioned that in your childhood, you had multidisciplinary upbringing which involved lots of reading. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Dave Snowden:  I think it wasn't uncommon in those days. I mean, if you did… I mean, I did science A levels and mathematical A levels. But the assumption was you would read every novel that the academic English class were reading. In fact, it was just unimaginable (that) you wouldn't know the basics of history. So, if you couldn't survive that in the sixth form common room, and the basics of science were known by most of the arts people as well. So that that was common, right. And we had to debate every week anyway. So, every week, you went up to the front of the class and you were given a card, and you'd have the subject and which side you are on, and you had to speak for seven minutes without preparation. And we did that every week from the age of 11 to 18. And that was a wonderful discipline because it meant you read everything. But also, my mother was… both my parents were the first from working class communities to go to university. And they got there by scholarship or sheer hard work against the opposition of their families. My mother went to university in Germany just after the war, which was extremely brave of her -  you know, as a South Wales working class girl. So, you weren't allowed not to be educated, it was considered the unforgivable sin. Ula Ojiaku:   Wow. Did it mean that she had to learn German, because (she was) studying in Germany…? Dave Snowden:  She well, she got A levels in languages. So, she went to university to study German and she actually ended up as a German teacher, German and French. So, she had that sort of background. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  And was that what influenced you? Because you also mentioned in the book that you won a £60 prize? Dave Snowden:  Oh, no, that was just fun. So, my mum was very politically active. We're a South Wales labor. Well, I know if I can read but we were labor. And so, she was a local Councilor. She was always politically active. There's a picture of me on Bertrand Russell's knee and her as a baby on a CND march. So it was that sort of background. And she was campaigning for comprehensive education, and had a ferocious fight with Aiden Williams, I think, who was the Director of Education, it was really nasty. I mean, I got threatened on my 11 Plus, he got really nasty. And then so when (I was) in the sixth form, I won the prize in his memory, which caused endless amusement in the whole county. All right. I think I probably won it for that. But that was for contributions beyond academic. So, I was leading lots of stuff in the community and stuff like that. But I had £60. And the assumption was, you go and buy one massive book. And I didn't, I got Dad to drive me to Liverpool - went into the big bookshop there and just came out with I mean, books for two and six pence. So, you can imagine how many books I could get for £60. And I just took everything I could find on philosophy and history and introductory science and stuff like that and just consumed it. Ula Ojiaku:  Wow, it seemed like you already knew what you wanted even before winning the prize money, you seem to have had a wish list... Dave Snowden:  I mean, actually interesting, and the big things in the EU field guide on (managing) complexity which was just issued. You need to build…, You need to stop saying, ‘this is the problem, we will find the solution' to saying, ‘how do I build capability, that can solve problems we haven't yet anticipated?' And I think that's part of the problem in education. Because my children didn't have that benefit. They had a modular education. Yeah, we did a set of exams at 16 and a set of exams that 18 and between those periods, we could explore it (i.e. options) and we had to hold everything in our minds for those two periods, right? For my children, it was do a module, pass a test, get a mark, move on, forget it move on. So, it's very compartmentalized, yeah? And it's also quite instrumentalist. We, I think we were given an education as much in how to learn and have had to find things out. And the debating tradition was that; you didn't know what you're going to get hit with. So, you read everything, and you thought about it, and you learn to think on your feet. And I think that that sort of a broad switch, it started to happen in the 80s, along with a lot of other bad things in management. And this is when systems thinking started to dominate. And we moved to an engineering metaphor. And you can see it in cybernetics and everything else, it's an attempt to define everything as a machine. And of course, machines are designed for a purpose, whereas ecosystems evolve for resilience. And I think that's kind of like where I, my generation were and it's certainly what we're trying to bring back in now in sort of in terms of practice. Ula Ojiaku:  I have an engineering background and a computer science background. These days, I'm developing a newfound love for philosophy, psychology, law and, you know, intersect, how do all these concepts intersect? Because as human beings we're complex, we're not machines where you put the program in and you expect it to come out the same, you know, it's not going to be the same for every human being. What do you think about that? Dave Snowden:  Yeah. And I think, you know, we know more on this as well. So, we know the role of art in human evolution is being closely linked to innovation. So, art comes before language. So, abstraction allows you to make novel connections. So, if you focus entirely on STEM education, you're damaging the human capacity to innovate. And we're, you know, as creatures, we're curious. You know. And I mean, we got this whole concept of our aporia, which is key to connecting that, which is creating a state of deliberate confusion, or a state of paradox. And the essence of a paradox is you can't resolve it. So, you're forced to think differently. So, the famous case on this is the liar's paradox, alright? I mean, “I always lie”. That just means I lied. So, if that means I was telling the truth. So, you've got to think differently about the problem. I mean, you've seen those paradoxes do the same thing. So that, that deliberate act of creating confusion so people can see novelty is key. Yeah. Umm and if you don't find… finding ways to do that, so when we looked at it, we looked at linguistic aporia, aesthetic aporia and physical aporia. So, I got some of the… one of the defining moments of insight on Cynefin was looking at Caravaggio`s paintings in Naples. When I realized I've been looking for the idea of the liminality. And that was, and then it all came together, right? So those are the trigger points requiring a more composite way of learning. I think it's also multiculturalism, to be honest. I mean, I, when I left university, I worked on the World Council of Churches come, you know program to combat racism. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes, I'd like to know more about that. That's one of my questions… Dave Snowden:  My mother was a good atheist, but she made me read the Bible on the basis, I wouldn't understand European literature otherwise, and the penetration guys, I became a Catholic so… Now, I mean, that that was fascinating, because I mean, I worked on Aboriginal land rights in Northern Australia, for example. And that was when I saw an activist who was literally murdered in front of me by a security guard. And we went to the police. And they said, it's only an Abo. And I still remember having fights in Geneva, because South Africa was a tribal conflict with a racial overlay. I mean, Africa, and its Matabele Zulu, arrived in South Africa together and wiped out the native population. And if you don't understand that, you don't understand the Matabele betrayal. You don't understand what happened. It doesn't justify apartheid. And one of the reasons there was a partial reconciliation, is it actually was a tribal conflict. And the ritual actually managed that. Whereas in Australia, in comparison was actually genocide. Yeah, it wasn't prejudice, it was genocide. I mean, until 1970s, there, were still taking half -breed children forcibly away from their parents, inter-marrying them in homes, to breed them back to white. And those are, I think, yeah, a big market. I argued this in the UK, I said, one of the things we should actually have is bring back national service. I couldn't get the Labor Party to adopt it. I said, ‘A: Because it would undermine the Conservatives, because they're the ones who talk about that sort of stuff. But we should allow it to be overseas.' So, if you put two years into working in communities, which are poorer than yours, round about that 18 to 21-year-old bracket, then we'll pay for your education. If you don't, you'll pay fees. Because you proved you want to give to society. And that would have been… I think, it would have meant we'd have had a generation of graduates who understood the world because that was part of the objective. I mean, I did that I worked on worked in South Africa, on the banks of Zimbabwe on the audits of the refugee camps around that fight. And in Sao Paulo, in the slums, some of the work of priests. You can't come back from that and not be changed. And I think it's that key formative period, we need to give people. Ula Ojiaku:  True and like you said, at that age, you know, when you're young and impressionable, it helps with what broadening your worldview to know that the world is bigger than your father's … compound (backyard)… Dave Snowden:  That's the worst problem in Agile, because what, you've got a whole class of, mainly white males and misogynism in Agile is really bad. It's one of the worst areas for misogyny still left, right, in terms of where it works. Ula Ojiaku:  I'm happy you are the one saying it not me… Dave Snowden:  Well, no, I mean, it is it's quite appalling. And so, what you've actually got is, is largely a bunch of white male game players who spent their entire time on computers. Yeah, when you take and run seriously after puberty, and that's kind of like a dominant culture. And that's actually quite dangerous, because it lacks, it lacks cultural diversity, it lacks ethnic diversity, it lacks educational diversity. And I wrote an article for ITIL, recently, which has been published, which said, no engineers should be allowed out, without training in ethics. Because the implications of what software engineers do now are huge. And the problem we've got, and this is a really significant, it's a big data problem as well. And you see it with a behavioral economic economist and the nudge theory guys - all of whom grab these large-scale data manipulations is that they're amoral, they're not immoral, they're amoral. And that's actually always more scary. It's this sort of deep level instrumentalism about the numbers; the numbers tell me what I need to say. Ula Ojiaku:  And also, I mean, just building on what you've said, there are instances, for example, in artificial intelligence is really based on a sample set from a select group, and it doesn't necessarily recognize things that are called ‘outliers'. You know, other races… Dave Snowden:  I mean, I've worked in that in all my life now back 20, 25 years ago. John Poindexter and I were on a stage in a conference in Washington. This was sort of early days of our work on counter terrorism. And somebody asked about black box AI and I said, nobody's talking about the training data sets. And I've worked in AI from the early days, all right, and the training data sets matter and nobody bothered. They just assumed… and you get people publishing books which say correlation is causation, which is deeply worrying, right? And I think Google is starting to acknowledge that, but it's actually very late. And the biases which… we were looking at a software tool the other day, it said it can, it can predict 85% of future events around culture. Well, it can only do that by constraining how executive see culture, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then the recruitment algorithms will only recruit people who match that cultural expectation and outliers will be eliminated. There's an HBO film coming up shortly on Myers Briggs. Now, Myers Briggs is known to be a pseudo-science. It has no basis whatsoever in any clinical work, and even Jung denied it, even though it's meant to be based on his work. But it's beautiful for HR departments because it allows them to put people into little categories. And critically it abrogates, judgment, and that's what happened with systems thinking in the 80s 90s is everything became spreadsheets and algorithms. So, HR departments would produce… instead of managers making decisions based on judgment, HR departments would force them into profile curves, to allocate resources. Actually, if you had a high performing team who were punished, because the assumption was teams would not have more than… Ula Ojiaku:  Bell curve... Dave Snowden:  …10 percent high performance in it. All right. Ula Ojiaku:  Yeah. Dave Snowden:  And this sort of nonsense has been running in the 80s, 90s and it coincided with… three things came together. One was the popularization of systems thinking. And unfortunately, it got popularized around things like process reengineering and learning organization. So that was a hard end. And Sanghi's pious can the sort of the, the soft end of it, right? But both of them were highly directional. It was kind of like leaders decide everything follows. Yeah. And that coincided with the huge growth of computing - the ability to handle large volumes of information. And all of those sorts of things came together in this sort of perfect storm, and we lost a lot of humanity in the process. Ula Ojiaku:  Do you think there's hope for us to regain the humanity in the process? Because it seems like the tide is turning from, I mean, there is still an emphasis, in my view, on systems thinking, however, there is the growing realization that we have, you know, knowledge workers and people… Dave Snowden:  Coming to the end of its park cycle, I see that all right. I can see it with the amount of cybernetics fanboys, and they are all boys who jump on me every time I say something about complexity, right? So, I think they're feeling threatened. And the field guide is significant, because it's a government, you know, government can like publication around effectively taken an ecosystems approach, not a cybernetic approach. And there's a book published by a good friend of mine called Terry Eagleton, who's… I don't think he's written a bad book. And he's written about 30, or 40. I mean, the guy just produces his stuff. It's called “Hope without Optimism”. And I think, hope is… I mean, Moltman just also published an update of his Theology of Hope, which is worth reading, even if you're not religious. But hope is one of those key concepts, right, you should… to lose hope is a sin. But hope is not the same thing as optimism. In fact, pessimistic people who hope actually are probably the ones who make a difference, because they're not naive, right? And this is my objection to the likes of Sharma Ga Sengi, and the like, is they just gather people together to talk about how things should be. And of course, everything should be what, you know, white MIT, educated males think the world should be like. I mean, it's very culturally imperialist in that sort of sense. And then nobody changes because anybody can come together in the workshop and agree how things should be. It's when you make a difference in the field that it counts, you've got to create a micro difference. This is hyper localization, you got to create lots and lots of micro differences, which will stimulate the systems, the system will change. I think, three things that come together, one is COVID. The other is global warming. And the other is, and I prefer to call it the epistemic justice movement, though, that kind of like fits in with Black Lives Matter. But epistemic justice doesn't just affect people who are female or black. I mean, if you come to the UK and see the language about the Welsh and the Irish, or the jokes made about the Welsh in BBC, right? The way we use language can designate people in different ways and I think that's a big movement, though. And it's certainly something we develop software for. So, I think those three come together, and I think the old models aren't going to be sustainable. I mean, the cost is going to be terrible. I mean, the cost to COVID is already bad. And we're not getting this thing as long COVID, it's permanent COVID. And people need to start getting used to that. And I think that's, that's going to change things. So, for example, in the village I live in Wiltshire. Somebody's now opened an artisan bakery in their garage and it's brilliant. And everybody's popping around there twice a week and just buying the bread and having a chat on the way; socially-distanced with masks, of course. And talking of people, that sort of thing is happening a lot. COVID has forced people into local areas and forced people to realise the vulnerability of supply chains. So, you can see changes happening there. The whole Trump phenomenon, right, and the Boris murmuring in the UK is ongoing. It's just as bad as the Trump phenomenon. It's the institutionalization of corruption as a high level. Right? Those sorts of things trigger change, right? Not without cost, change never comes without cost, but it just needs enough… It needs local action, not international action. I think that's the key principle. To get a lot of people to accept things like the Paris Accord on climate change, and you've got to be prepared to make sacrifices. And it's too distant a time at the moment, it has to become a local issue for the international initiatives to actually work and we're seeing that now. I mean… Ula Ojiaku:  It sounds like, sorry to interrupt - it sounds like what you're saying is, for the local action, for change to happen, it has to start with us as individuals… Dave Snowden:  The disposition… No, not with individuals. That's actually very North American, the North European way of thinking right. The fundamental kind of basic identity structure of humans is actually clans, not individuals. Ula Ojiaku:  Clans... Dave Snowden:  Yeah. Extended families, clans; it's an ambiguous word. We actually evolved for those. And you need it at that level, because that's a high level of social interaction and social dependency. And it's like, for example, right? I'm dyslexic. Right? Yeah. If I don't see if, if the spelling checker doesn't pick up a spelling mistake, I won't see it. And I read a whole page at a time. I do not read it sentence by sentence. All right. And I can't understand why people haven't seen the connections I make, because they're obvious, right? Equally, there's a high degree of partial autism in the Agile community, because that goes with mathematical ability and thing, and that this so-called education deficiencies, and the attempt to define an ideal individual is a mistake, because we evolved to have these differences. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes. Dave Snowden:  Yeah. And the differences understood that the right level of interaction can change things. So, I think the unit is clan, right for extended family, or extended, extended interdependence. Ula Ojiaku:  Extended interdependence… Dave Snowden:  We're seeing that in the village. I mean, yeah, this is classic British atomistic knit, and none of our relatives live anywhere near us. But the independence in the village is increasing with COVID. And therefore, people are finding relationships and things they can do together. Now, once that builds to a critical mass, and it does actually happen exponentially, then bigger initiatives are possible. And this is some of the stuff we were hoping to do in the US shortly on post-election reconciliation. And the work we've been doing in Malmo, in refugees and elsewhere in the world, right, is you change the nature of localized interaction with national visibility, so that you can measure the dispositional state of the system. And then you can nudge the system when it's ready to change, because then the energy cost of change is low. But that requires real time feedback loops in distributed human sensor networks, which is a key issue in the field guide. And the key thing that comes back to your original question on AI, is, the internet at the moment is an unbuffered feedback loop. Yeah, where you don't know the source of the data, and you can't control the source of the data. And any network like that, and this is just apriori science factor, right will always become perverted. Ula Ojiaku:  And what do you mean by term apriori? Dave Snowden:  Oh, before the facts, you don't need to, we don't need to wait for evidence. It's like in an agile, you can look at something like SAFe® which case claims to scale agile and just look at it you say it's apriori wrong (to) a scale a complex system. So, it's wrong. All right. End of argument right. Now let's talk about the details, right. So yeah, so that's, you know, that's coming back. The hyper localization thing is absolutely key on that, right? And the same is true to be honest in software development. A lot of our work now is to understand the unarticulated needs of users. And then shift technology in to actually meet those unarticulated needs. And that requires a complex approach to architecture, in which people and technology are objects with defined interactions around scaffolding structures, so that applications can emerge in resilience, right? And that's actually how local communities evolve as well. So, we've now got the theoretical constructs and a lot of the practical methods to actually… And I've got a series of blog posts - which I've got to get back to writing - called Rewilding Agile. And rewilding isn't returning to the original state, it's restoring balance. So, if you increase the number of human actors as your primary sources, and I mean human actors, not as people sitting on (in front of) computer screens who can be faked or mimicked, yeah? … and entirely working on text, which is about 10%, of what we know, dangerous, it might become 80% of what we know and then you need to panic. Right? So, you know, by changing those interactions, increasing the human agency in the system, that's how you come to, that's how you deal with fake news. It's not by writing better algorithms, because then it becomes a war with the guys faking the news, and you're always gonna lose. Ula Ojiaku:  So, what do you consider yourself, a person of faith? Dave Snowden:  Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  Why? Dave Snowden:  Oh, faith is like hope and charity. I mean, they're the great virtues… I didn't tell you I got into a lot in trouble in the 70s. Dave Snowden:  I wrote an essay that said Catholicism, Marxism and Hinduism were ontologically identical and should be combined and we're different from Protestantism and capitalism, which are also ontologically identical (and) it can be combined. Ula Ojiaku:  Is this available in the public domain? Dave Snowden:  I doubt it. I think it actually got me onto a heresy trial at one point, but that but I would still say that. Ula Ojiaku:  That's amazing. Can we then move to the framework that Cynefin framework, how did it evolve into what we know it as today? Dave Snowden:  I'll do a high-level summary, but I wrote it up at length in the book and I didn't know I was writing for the book. The book was a surprise that they put together for me. I thought that was just writing an extended blog post. It started when I was working in IBM is it originates from the work of Max Borrasso was my mentor for years who tragically died early. But he was looking at abstraction, codification and diffusion. We did a fair amount of work together, I took two of those aspects and started to look at informal and formal communities in IBM, and its innovation. And some of the early articles on Cynefin, certainly the early ones with the five domains come from that period. And at that time, we had access labels. Yeah. And then then complexity theory came into it. So, it shifted into being a complexity framework. And it stayed … The five domains were fairly constant for a fairly long period of time, they changed their names a bit. The central domain I knew was important, but didn't have as much prominence as it does now. And then I introduced liminality, partly driven by agile people, actually, because they could they couldn't get the concept there were dynamics and domains. So, they used to say things like, ‘look, Scrum is a dynamic. It's a way of shifting complex to complicated' and people say ‘no, the scrum guide said it's about complex.' And you think, ‘oh, God, Stacey has a lot to answer for' but… Ula Ojiaku: Who`s Stacey? Dave Snowden:  Ralph Stacey. So, he was the guy originally picked up by Ken when he wrote the Scrum Guide… Ula Ojiaku:  Right. Okay. Dave Snowden:  Stacey believes everything's complex, which is just wrong, right? So, either way, Cynefin evolved with the liminal aspects. And then the last resolution last year, which is… kind of completes Cynefin to be honest, there's some refinements… was when we realized that the central domain was confused, or operatic. And that was the point where you started. So, you didn't start by putting things into the domain, you started in the operatic. And then you moved aspects of things into the different domains. So that was really important. And it got picked up in Agile, ironically, by the XP community. So, I mean, I was in IT most of my life, I was one of the founders of the DSDM Consortium, and then moved sideways from that, and was working in counterterrorism and other areas, always you're working with technology, but not in the Agile movement. Cynefin is actually about the same age as Agile, it started at the same time. And the XP community in London invited me in, and I still think Agile would have been better if it had been built on XP, not Scrum. But it wouldn't have scaled with XP, I mean, without Scrum it would never have scaled it. And then it got picked up. And I think one of the reasons it got picked up over Stacey is, it said order is possible. It didn't say everything is complex. And virtually every Agile method I know of value actually focuses on making complex, complicated. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes. Dave Snowden:  And that's its power. What they're… what is insufficient of, and this is where we've been working is what I call pre-Scrum techniques. Techniques, which define what should go into that process. Right, because all of the Agile methods still tend to be a very strong manufacturing metaphor - manufacturing ideas. So, they assume somebody will tell them what they have to produce. And that actually is a bad way of thinking about IT. Technology needs to co-evolve. And users can't articulate what they want, because they don't know what technology can do. Ula Ojiaku:  True. But are you saying… because in Agile fundamentally, it's really about making sure there's alignment as well that people are working on the right thing per time, but you're not telling them how to do it? Dave Snowden:  Well, yes and no - all right. I mean, it depends what you're doing. I mean, some Agile processes, yes. But if you go through the sort of safe brain remain processes, very little variety within it, right? And self-organization happens within the context of a user executive and retrospectives. Right, so that's its power. And, but if you look at it, it took a really good technique called time-boxing, and it reduced it to a two-week sprint. Now, that's one aspect of time boxing. I mean, I've got a whole series of blog posts next week on this, because time boxing is a hugely valuable technique. It says there's minimal deliverable project, and maximum deliverable product and a minimal level of resource and a maximum level of resource. And the team commits to deliver on the date. Ula Ojiaku:  To accurate quality… to a quality standard. Dave Snowden:  Yeah, so basically, you know that the worst case, you'll get the minimum product at the maximum cost, but you know, you'll get it on that date. So, you can deal with it, alright. And that's another technique we've neglected. We're doing things which force high levels of mutation and requirements over 24 hours, before they get put into a Scrum process. Because if you just take what users want, you know, there's been insufficient co-evolution with the technology capability. And so, by the time you deliver it, the users will probably realize they should have asked for something different anyway. Ula Ojiaku:  So, does this tie in with the pre-Scrum techniques you mentioned earlier? If so, can you articulate that? Dave Snowden:  So, is to say different methods in different places. And that's again, my opposition to things like SAFe, to a lesser extent LeSS, and so on, right, is they try and put everything into one bloody big flow diagram. Yeah. And that's messy. All right? Well, it's a recipe, not a chef. What the chef does is they put different ingredients together in different combinations. So, there's modularity of knowledge, but it's not forced into a linear process. So, our work… and we just got an open space and open source and our methods deliberately, right, in terms of the way it works, is I can take Scrum, and I can reduce it to its lowest coherent components, like a sprint or retrospective. I can combine those components with components for another method. So, I can create Scrum as an assembly of components, I can take those components compared with other components. And that way, you get novelty. So, we're then developing components which sit before traditional stuff. Like for example, triple eight, right? This was an old DSDM method. So, you ran a JAD sessions and Scrum has forgotten about JAD. JAD is a really…  joint application design… is a really good set of techniques - they're all outstanding. You throw users together with coders for two days, and you force out some prototypes. Yeah, that latching on its own would, would transform agile, bringing that back in spades, right? We did is we do an eight-hour JAD session say, in London, and we pass it on to a team in Mumbai. But we don't tell them what the users ask for. They just get the prototype. And they can do whatever they want with it for eight hours. And then they hand it over to a team in San Francisco, who can do whatever they want with it in eight hours. And it comes back. And every time I've run this, the user said, ‘God, I wouldn't have thought of that, can I please, have it?' So, what you're doing is a limited life cycle -  you get the thing roughly defined, then you allow it to mutate without control, and then you look at the results and decide what you want to do. And that's an example of pre-scrum technique, that is a lot more economical than systems and analysts and user executives and storyboards. And all those sorts of things. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  Well, I see what you mean, because it seems like the, you know, the JAD - the joint application design technique allows for emergent design, and you shift the decision making closer to the people who are at the forefront. And to an extent my understanding of, you know, Scrum … I mean, some agile frameworks - that's also what they promote… Dave Snowden:  Oh, they don't really don't. alright. They picked up Design Thinking which is quite interesting at the moment. If you if you look at Agile and Design Thinking. They're both at the end of their life cycles. Ula Ojiaku:  Why do you say that? Dave Snowden:  Because they're being commodified. The way you know, something is coming to the end of its life cycle is when it becomes highly commodified. So, if you look at it, look at what they are doing the moment, the Double Diamond is now a series of courses with certificates. And I mean, Agile started with bloody certificates, which is why it's always been slightly diverse in the way it works. I mean, this idea that you go on a three-day course and get a certificate, you read some slides every year and pay some money and get another certificate is fundamentally corrupt. But most of the Agile business is built on it, right? I mean, I've got three sets of methods after my name. But they all came from yearlong or longer courses certified by university not from tearing apart a course. Yeah, or satisfying a peer group within a very narrow cultural or technical definition of competence. So, I think yeah, and you can see that with Design Thinking. So, it's expert ideation, expert ethnography. And it still falls into that way of doing things. Yeah. And you can see it, people that are obsessed with running workshops that they facilitate. And that's the problem. I mean, the work we're doing on citizen engagement is actually… has no bloody facilitators in it. As all the evidence is that the people who turn up are culturally biased about their representative based opinions. And the same is true if you want to look at unarticulated needs, you can't afford to have the systems analysts finding them because they see them from their perspective. And this is one of one science, right? You did not see what you do not expect to see. We know that, alright? So, you're not going to see outliers. And so, the minute you have an expert doing something, it's really good - where you know, the bounds of the expertise, cover all the possibilities, and it's really dangerous. Well, that's not the case. Ula Ojiaku:  So, could you tell me a bit more about the unfacilitated sessions you mentioned earlier? Dave Snowden:  They're definitely not sessions, so we didn't like what were triggers at moments. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Dave Snowden:  So, defining roles. So, for example, one of the things I would do and have done in IT, is put together, young, naive, recently graduated programmer with older experienced tester or software architect. So, somebody without any… Ula Ojiaku:  Prejudice or pre-conceived idea... Dave Snowden:  … preferably with a sort of grandparent age group between them as well. I call it, the grandparents syndrome - grandparents say things to their grandchildren they won't tell their children and vice versa. If you maximize the age gap, there's actually freer information flow because there's no threat in the process. And then we put together with users trained to talk to IT people. So, in a month's time, I'll publish that as a training course. So, training users to talk to IT people is more economical than trying to train IT people to understand users. Ula Ojiaku:  To wrap up then, based on what you said, you know, about Cynefin, and you know, the wonderful ideas behind Cynefin. How can leaders in organizations in any organization apply these and in how they make sense of the world and, you know, take decisions? Dave Snowden:  Well, if there's actually a sensible way forward now, so we've just published the field guide on managing complexity.  Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Dave Snowden:  And that is actually, it's a sort of ‘Chef's guide'. It has four stages: assess, adapt, exert, transcend, and within that it has things you could do. So, it's not a list of qualities, it's a list of practical things you should go and do tomorrow, and those things we're building at the moment with a lot of partners, because we won't try and control this; this needs to be open. Here's an assessment process that people will go through to decide where they are. So that's going to be available next week on our website. Ula Ojiaku:  Oh, fantastic! Dave Snowden:  For the initial registration.  Other than that, and there's a whole body of stuff on how to use Cynefin. And as I said, we just open source on the methods. So, the Wiki is open source. These… from my point of view, we're now at the stage where the market is going to expand very quickly. And to be honest, I, you know, I've always said traditionally use cash waiver as an example of this. The reason that Agile scaled around Scrum is he didn't make it an elite activity, which XP was. I love the XP guys, but they can't communicate with ordinary mortals. Yeah. It takes you about 10 minutes to tune into the main point, and even you know the field, right. And he (Jeff Sutherland) made the Scrum Guide open source. And that way it's great, right. And I think that that's something which people just don't get strategic with. They, in early stages, you should keep things behind firewalls. When the market is ready to expand, you take the firewalls away fast. Because I mean, getting behind firewalls initially to maintain coherence so they don't get diluted too quickly, or what I call “hawks being made into pigeons”. Yeah. But the minute the market is starting to expand, that probably means you've defined it so you release the firewall so the ideas spread very quickly, and you accept the degree of diversity on it. So that's the reason we put the Wiki. Ula Ojiaku:  Right. So, are there any books that you would recommend, for anyone who wants to learn more about what you've talked about so far. Dave Snowden:  You would normally produce the theory book, then the field book, but we did it the other way around. So, Mary and I are working on three to five books, which will back up the Field Guide. Ula Ojiaku:  Is it Mary Boone? Dave Snowden:  Mary Boone. She knows how to write to the American managers, which I don't, right… without losing integrity. So that's coming, right. If you go onto the website, I've listed all the books I read. I don't think… there are some very, very good books around complexity, but they're deeply specialized, they're academic. Gerard's book is just absolutely brilliant but it's difficult to understand if you don't have a philosophy degree. And there are some awfully tripe books around complexity - nearly all of the popular books I've seen, I wouldn't recommend. Yeah. Small Groups of Complex Adaptive Systems is probably quite a good one that was published about 20 years ago. Yeah, but that we got a book list on the website. So, I would look at that. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Thank you so much for that. Do you have any ask of the audience and how can they get to you? Dave Snowden:  We've open-sourced the Wiki, you know, to create a critical mass, I was really pleased we have 200 people volunteered to help populate it. So, we get the all the methods in the field guide them. And they're actively working at that at the moment, right, and on a call with them later. And to be honest, I've done 18-hour days, the last two weeks, but 8 hours of each of those days has been talking to the methods with a group of people Academy 5, that's actually given me a lot of energy, because it's huge. So, get involved, I think it's the best way… you best understand complexity by getting the principles and then practicing it. And the key thing I'll leave us with is the metaphor. I mentioned it a few times - a recipe book user has a recipe, and they follow it. And if they don't have the right ingredients, and if they don't have the right equipment, they can't operate. Or they say it's not ‘true Agile'. A chef understands the theory of cooking and has got served in apprenticeship. So, their fingers know how to do things. And that's… we need… a downside.. more chefs, which is the combination of theory and practice. And the word empirical is hugely corrupted in the Agile movement. You know, basically saying, ‘this worked for me' or ‘it worked for me the last three times' is the most dangerous way of moving forward. Ula Ojiaku:  Because things change and what worked yesterday might not work Dave Snowden:  And you won't be aware of what worked or didn't work and so on. Ula Ojiaku:  And there's some bias in that. Wouldn't you say? Dave Snowden:  We've got an attentional blindness if you've got Ula Ojiaku:  Great. And Dave, where can people find you? Are you on social media? Dave Snowden:  Cognitive. Yeah, social media is @snowded. Yeah. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Two websites – the Cognitive Edge website, which is where I blog, and there's a new Cynefin Center website now, which is a not-for-profit arm. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. All these would be in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Dave. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Dave Snowden:  Okay. Thanks a lot.

Behavior is a biopsychosocial system. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rick-smith6/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rick-smith6/support

The Cognitive Crucible is a forum that presents different perspectives and emerging thought leadership related to the information environment. The opinions expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorsement by the Information Professionals Association. During this episode, Noah Komnick discusses his award-winning thought leadership and writings related to complexity and cybernetics. Before retiring from the Marine Corps, Noah received an “outside the box” innovation award from the Secretary of the Navy for his Reaction Control philosophy, which he implemented in the 2018 timeframe while commanding Marine Wing Communications Squadron 38. His present work and PhD research is about building defendable organizations for the "Age of Complexity.” Resources: Cognitive Crucible Podcast Episodes Mentioned #47 Bar-Yam on Complex Systems and the War on Ideals #59 Mark Moffett on Societies, Identity, and Belonging Reaction Control: Developing the Anti-fragile Warrior Reaction Control: A Self-Regulating Process to Improve a Sailor or Marine's Decision Making (2016 SECNAV Innovation Award in the Outside the Box category) Rise of the Neostrategist: A New Paradigm for the Age of Complexity by Noah Komnick Neostrategy: How to Win in the Age of Complexity by Noah Komnick NECSI 2018 Conference National Security Language Is Stuck in the Cold War by Josh Kerbel Teams Manifesto by Yaneer Bar-Yam Murray Gell-Mann Richard Feynmen Colin Gray (Military Theorist) The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex by Murray Gell-Mann Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Frans P.B. Osinga Boyd's EM Theory An Introduction to Cybernetics by W. Ross Ashby [primary source for Law of Requisite Variety] The Future of Strategy by Colin S. Gray The Two Cultures: And a Second Look by C.P. Snow Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E. O. Wilson Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems by John H. Holland Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Stanley and Lehman Incerto by Nassim Taleb Taylorism Laplace's demon “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” - George Box DoD's Calendar Year 2020 Suicide Report Link to full show notes and resources https://information-professionals.org/episode/cognitive-crucible-episode-72 Guest Bio: Noah Komnick is the CEO and founder of Seneka. Seneka partners with select private and public entities to design and develop defendable enterprises and communities. Noah is also a retired U.S. Marine officer. As an active-duty Marine, he was a career communication and information systems officer, a strategic-operational planner, and a communications squadron commander. His operational tours included duties with infantry, force reconnaissance, aviation, and expeditionary units. He was also an Associate Professor of Naval Science at both Northwestern University and Illinois Institute of Technology. Just prior to his retirement from the Marine Corps, Noah served as a cyber strategist for the nation's Cyberspace Solarium Commission and U.S. Cyber Command. Additionally, he is the creator of Reaction Control (a self-regulating process to improve Marines' mental fitness for combat) and Neostrategy (a new paradigm for achieving objectives in complex systems). Reaction Control received innovation awards from the Commandant of the Marine Corps and Secretary of the Navy in 2016, while Neostrategy publicly debuted at the International Conference on Complex Systems in 2018. Currently, Noah is a PhD candidate with Capitol Technology University where his interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection of cybernetics, complexity science, and sociobiology as applied to organizational design. As a lifelong learner, Noah has masters' degrees in National Security & Strategy (from the U.S. Naval War College), Operational Studies (from the School of Advanced Warfighting at Marine Corps University), Business Administration (from the University of Rhode Island), and a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering (from Illinois Institute of Technology). He is a member of the American Cybernetics Society and the Operational Research Society. About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain. For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org. Or, connect directly with The Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, on LinkedIn. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, 1) IPA earns from qualifying purchases, 2) IPA gets commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

This week on Serious Privacy, Paul Breitbarth welcomes K Royal, the recently-approved PhD graduand (yes, it's a word) fresh from her dissertation defense on Privacy Complaince in US Universities. Many of our listeners likely participated in the nearly-anonymous Delphi Method part of her research, where privacy professionals around the world answered a series of questions to determine critical parts about privacy in the university setting. These included triggers, program elements, and risk factors. Her PhD is in public affairs, a fitting match for privacy law, from the University of Texas at Dallas, the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences.Join us as we discuss the substance of privacy law at US universities, some common misperceptions, but also the difference in the PhD process between the US and Europe. Some of your favorite topics come up, such as CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA. Also, her research involves the complexity of managing privacy law in a complex environment, bringing in Complexity Theory as a framework. Complex Adaptive Systems was used in terms of privacy law by Zhang and Schmidt when considering China's privacy law back in 2015 in their paper Thinking of data protection law's subject matter as a complex adaptive system: A heuristic display.As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at seriousprivacy@trustarc.com. In addition, if you like our podcast, please do rate and comment on our program in your favorite podcast app. We also have a LinkedIn page for Serious Privacy, so please follow for more in-depth discussion.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to John Dobbin about his ongoing attempt to demystify the language of complex adaptive systems to help contemporary executives transform their organisations into agile powerhouses. John helps us understand the difference of scale between agile and adaptive work, how bureaucratic structures can inhibit the success of agile practices, and the tactics he employs to help teams become more agile and organisations become more adaptive. We look at how middle-management might be re-imagined as core to good adaptive work, learn how Haier has become the great success story for the movement, and explore how rationality and faith need to interact with good intent for high performance outcomes. We close by looking at the impact remote work might have on adaptive practice, and imagine what a world full of complex adaptive organisations might look like. Hosted by www.eqlab.co - learn a new way to lead.

In this episode, our crew get to talk to Sunil Mundra. Author of Enterprise Agility: Being Agile in a Changing World and talk about Complex Adaptive Systems and the education system that prepares leaders for Stable companies, not the ones we need in the future who can sense and adapt to challenges. Ricardo, Ras and Ian can be found on LInkedIn Sunil Mundra's book is https://www.amazon.co.uk/Enterprise-Agility-Being-Agile-Changing/dp/B07T8KF7NT/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=sunil+mundra&qid=1630009909&sr=8-1 Ian's courses can be found at https://ianbannercourses.carrd.co/

In an increasingly complex and globalized sociopolitical landscape, attempting to take part in meaningful social action can be difficult. It often, at least for us, feels as though we are being pulled in one hundred different directions ... none of which have a clear vision for a better future. So what's a girl -- or the nicest man on earth and his grumpy cyborg buddy -- to do? Join us in this 2-hour Falcon and the Winter Soldier special as we learn what it means to “reify” a symbol (anything from a flag, to a person, to a single, innocuous word); unpack the important relationship between ideology, axiology, and ontology; and explore the transformative, healing power of community-building. We realize that Phil talks about Complex Adaptive Systems in the episode without defining them; please forgive her, as she is neck deep in systems organization graduate studies right now, gets over-excited, and forgets that other people are not. For your benefit, we've linked a great introductory video explaining the topic below. We also realize that we totally forgot to talk about Sharon ... in our defence, so did the MCU, for like, five movies. As always, we would love love love to hear any thoughts, comments or opinions you may have! Stay safe everyone.

Colleen Kirtland is on a learning journey, and in this episode, she shares her passion for and commitment to learning as much as possible from nature. Pointing to many resources and examples of biomimicry, economics, and above all systems thinking, Kirtland invites us to think about creating systems that not just grow linearly but thrive. She argues that “resiliency is built over a very long time,” and the same can be said for agile. “As I'm unpeeling life itself, I'm learning to be a better leader and a better coach of teams…” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. (Stick around until the end for some more insights and fun interaction.) Learn more: • Jeanine Benyus, biomimicry.org (https://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus/) • Kate Raworth, Donut Economics (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/) • John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CTLFPNK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) • Mariana Mazzucato, “The Value of Everything” (https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything) • Linda Hogan, Dwellings (https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393322477)

Find out more on our website: https://bit.ly/3sKJTLS An emerging topic within the A.I domain is the subject of Enterprise Knowledge Graphs. The use of Semantic graphs is a long-standing theme within computational systems, stretching back to the 1960's. However, the construction of semantic or knowledge graphs was a manual and time-consuming process. Two converging technological developments have transformed the process of creating knowledge graphs and offer the possibility to automate their creation and application. Since 2000 the field of Network Dynamics has formed a solid foundation for applied graph theory and analytics. Combined with the recent developments in advanced natural language processing (NLP), and Deep Learning, we now have the means to translate large volumes of raw text into knowledge graphs with strong semantic structure. This emerging capability is opening new commercial opportunities for Enterprise Knowledge graphs (EKG) and associated applications. This presentation will cover some of the EKG applications in development within BT Laboratories. Speaker: Dr Robert Hercock has over twenty years' experience in leading security research projects in the UK and was theme leader for Cyber Security in the UK MOD Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre. Robert's research interests include cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics and Complex Adaptive Systems. He has also served as a member of the Royal Society Science and Industry Committee. Robert has chaired international workshops on adaptive cyber defence. He has over twenty international publications in AI and security concepts, in addition to over thirty filed patents, and he frequently provides expert advice to government on defence, cybersecurity and AI issues. Professionally, Robert is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET. He also serves as an independent technical expert for the UK Defence Science Expert Committee (DSEC) and was a Business Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In 2020, Robert was appointed as Fellow at the Oxford Changing Character of Warfare Centre, Pembroke College.

Social-ecological systems are complex. But as we discuss in this episode, “complex” does not mean “complicated”! Complexity theory holds that systems that possess certain attributes are “complex”, including a capacity for adaptation, self-organization, an open nature, and the emergence of system traits greater than the sum of its parts. We explain what each of these terms mean, relate complexity theory to social-ecological systems and resilience, and discuss a couple of papers that dive into the relationship between complexity and social-ecological systems. Funding support from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Center for Great Plains Studies, https://www.unl.edu/plains/welcome Contact Us: whrapodcast@gmail.com Council for Resilience Education website: cre.unl.edu References: Flyn, C. 2021, Jan. 24. As birth rates fall, animals prowl in our abandoned ‘ghost villages'. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/as-birth-rates-fall-animals-prowl-in-our-abandoned-ghost-villages Klampe, M. 2021, Jan. 5. Use of ocean resources changed as Dungeness crab fishing industry adapted to climate shock event. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-01-ocean-resources-dungeness-crab-fishing.html Levin, A. 1999. Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems. Ecosystems, 1, 431-436. Preiser, R., Biggs, R., De Vos, A., and Folke, C. 2018. Social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems: organizing principles for advancing research methods and approaches. Ecology and Society, 23(4), 46. Music licensed from www.purple-planet.com

What if we could see the nature of the stories that drive us, how would we be? Would we be able to change them? And what would we want in their place? This week, Alnoor Ladha, mystic, visionary, activist and regenerative farmer explores the four ways to change the world. More at https://accidentalgods.life

This is part two of a discussion with Greg Young and Danielle Grant about the challenges and opportunities of leadership in complex adaptive systems. It can be difficult to find success in a dynamic network of interactions because the behavior of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components. Listen for advice and action items you can use today. Brought to you by LeadershapeGlobal.com

This is part one of a discussion with Greg Young and Danielle Grant about the challenges and opportunities of leadership in complex adaptive systems. It can be difficult to find success in a dynamic network of interactions because the behaviour of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behaviour of the components. Listen for advice and action items you can use today. Brought to you by LeadershapeGlobal.com

Jane is an objectivist, critical realist, complexity theorist, and the latest member of the IDW; trying to develop a philosophy to fix the world!https://twitter.com/jane_gatsby https://www.instagram.com/janegatsby/https://anchor.fm/jane-gatsbyhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCOtng2n53EdbUCNtTyIToghttps://linktr.ee/janegatsbyIf you want to see the interview in raw zoom call video form:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlH688ZkMmc(I have other new discussions coming to youtube soon too)These are the two I recorded with Boonn recently  (available on all platforms)https://open.spotify.com/episode/660UA6PndgeFtQcnQ5nqlv?si=fbqebLS7Ql-F4KoDHKDZrghttps://open.spotify.com/episode/4WKLcQtiCScaDomrSnT1zQ?si=SIVUESPESVyoXWRm9ryw3wAlso, I have new episodes here:https://open.spotify.com/show/3hzsuvFc9CbRBuTy9lLmjHThe new website! https://www.dailyarchetype.com/I will also have a discussion premiering next week onhttps://www.facebook.com/ArchiveOwl/Join the discussion on the FB grouphttps://www.facebook.com/groups/dailyarchetype/Also DailyArchetype on IGPlease check out what's in the works on Youtube and you can also see some of my old live chats if you like. When I get 100 subscribers I can make a custom YouTube URLhttps://tinyurl.com/DailyarchetypeMusic (Three kinds of Sun) by Norma Rockwell and the theme by studio star gazer, with voices by:  Eli Harris, Katrice Beal, Annie Phung and Allison Drew (not in that order). If interested in helping with the production or to become a guest, please send an email to dailyarchetype@gmail.comSupport on Venmo @isaac-Miller-83Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/Dailyarchetype)

Jeffrey is inspired by Jon Smart and the DOES Virtual conference to discuss homeostasis as a source of resistance to change, and Squirrel tells a client story about curiosity as a way to help a complex system adapt. SHOW LINKS: - DOES Virtual "Las Vegas": https://events.itrevolution.com/virtual/ - Jon Smart: https://itrevolution.com/sooner-safer-happier/ - Complex Adaptive Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system - Paradoxical Agenda-Setting: https://feelinggood.com/tag/paradoxical-agenda-setting/ --- Our new book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://conversationaltransformation.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list! We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show. 
 Email us at info@conversationaltransformation.com

About this Episode Every once in a while we are lucky enough to be part of incredibly productive teams - you know the kind.  They're the types of teams that seem to be in a constant state of flow, no matter what happens.  These teams can stay focus seemingly regardless of anything, and they seem to be able to last forever. But what are the forces at work that create such high performance, unflappable team performance?   And can we apply those forces to any team, and create a replicable process to foster high-performance organic team development, and insert it into just about any team or workplace environment? In today's episode, my guest, Dr. Pravir Malik, Head of Organizational Sciences at Zappos.com, and I talk about the science of high-performing workplace teams.  By studying Complex Adaptive Systems, Dr. Malik shares how teams can develop the organic ability to evolve into ultra high performance – and by that I don’t just mean output, although that’s definitely part of it, but I mean team engagement, focus, trust, adaptability, longevity.  All of this regardless of the external circumstances. About Our Guest, Dr. Pravir Malik Pravir is the Head of Organizational Sciences at Zappos.com (Zappos is the amazing shoe company that revolutionized the online purchasing space, starting from about 20 years ago.  I’m going to say that everything you love about buying online today can be connected directly back to Zappos.  Impossible to overstate their influence on how we shop today – and they have one of the best company cultures on the planet).  Pravir's team is leading the creation and incubation of organizational development technologies, in support of establishing a resilient, high-performing, adaptive organization that will withstand the test of time.  He has been an advisor to the CEO, COO, and CHRO at Zappos, and is the Founder of Zappos Organizational Sciences Consulting.  He also serves as an advisor to several global organizations. In the past, he has served as a Founding Member of A.T. Kearney India, a top-tier global consulting company, and served as the Managing Director Advisory Services for BSR, a leading global CSR consulting company.  Prior to his current position, he led Pricing Operations at Zappos.com. He has a Ph.D. in Technology Management with a focus on Mathematics of Innovation in Complex Adaptive Systems from the University of Pretoria, an MBA from J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management with a focus on Marketing and Organizational Behaviour, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Florida with a focus on AI, and a BSE in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. For More Information Click here to contact Pravir via Linkedin Click here to contact Organizational Sciences Consulitng About Pat Perdue In addition to his consulting, social media, and branding work, Pat Perdue is founder of YCASTR Podcast Solutions - driving employee engagement through custom designed podcasts for your organization. Pat is also a recognized Customer Experience and Sales Leadership professional.  Pat's podcast, Pat Perdue's Customer Experience  Podcast, is one of the leading podcasts on customer experience. You can reach Pat on Twitter at @patperdue or connect on Linkedin here:  Linkedin.com/in/patperdue/

Episode 23 of the Futures Intelligence Leadership Podcast with Graham Norris and Dave Snowden. ABOUT Graham NorrisGraham is the founder of Foresight Psychology, delivering Keynotes and facilitation to help people get comfortable with the future and make better decisions. His doctoral research looked at change, adaptability and mindfulness among knowledge workers in China, which has been experiencing exceptionally rapid change and development. The subjects of the study showed that resilience and flexibility are key to overcoming biases and primal thinking that make optimal decision-making in the modern world challenging.ABOUT Dave SnowdenDave is the founder of Cognitive edge which was founded in 2005 with the objective of building methods, tools and capability to utilise insights from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. Even if you do not know who Dave Snowden is you may be familiar with, or even used one of his decision making frameworks, called the Cynefin Framework, which he developed while at IBM to help understand the context for decision making. You can find out more about Dave and his work at https://www.cognitive-edge.com/ABOUT The DialogueIn this dialogue we discuss, how uncertainty impacts our understanding of space and time, the limitations of self awareness and memory, the importance of disposition in complexity, how to navigate crisis using diversity and distributed decision making, why leaders need better decision making metrics and why need to get rid of the cult of the individual leader and embrace contextual and crews based leadership.

In part 2 of this interview, Charlie and Charles detail the difference between Complex Adaptive Systems and the Industrial Method of farming. Charles’ resonates his free flowing insight into the direct relationship between farming, food systems, human health and its effect on the mental health of ourselves and our children. They summarise the consequences of our increasing divorcement from nature and the job description of a regenerative farmer. Charles Massy is a devotee for regenerative farming and patriarch for land care advocates in Australia. He is a farmer, author and storyteller who has brought life to the ideals of so many scholars and forward thinkers that are fundamental to our human interaction on the ecosystem. He has deep empathy for nature that is in sync with land management. To start a dialogue and converse more about topics raised in this podcast, please visit The Regenerative Journey Podcast Facebook Group.  Episode Takeaways:   Emergent Properties are the name they’ve given to elements within the system that will emerge when it needs to adapt. The solution lies within  |  If you have a healthy environment and you degrade it too far it will go to a stage that it’s almost impossible to get it back  |  In industrial farms you have drug addicted plants waiting for their fertiliser dose  |  Modern industrial food is causing all of these diseases causing havoc on human health  |  Most indigenous women in hunter-gatherer societies can identify at least 500 food or medicinal plant  in their landscape  |  We now find devastating evidence that the world’s most widely used herbicide is in almost all modern foods  |  For every child in Australia under aged under six, only 1 in 4 has ever climbed a tree or a rock  |  The solutions are simple: grow and eat healthy food and get out into nature as much as you can | Episode Links: Holistic Management – Alan Savoury Nourishment - Fred Provenza Last Child In The Woods – Richard Louv Di Haggerty – Cropping Farmers A Thousand Days Program Zach Bush - Holistic Health and Wellbeing Patagonia Provisions – Yvonne Chouinard

My guest today is Ian Hathaway. Ian is an analyst, strategic advisor, writer, and entrepreneur, and currently leads product development for ecosystem advisory at Techstars, where he works with founders and community leaders around the world to support their path towards building better tech ecosystems. He is also the co-author of The Startup Community Way, a book on building entrepreneurial ecosystems published in July 2020. If you know me, then you know I have a rule – I don't read new books. There are so many great ones out there that I haven't read yet that it feels counterproductive to take my chances with something that just came out. But I broke my rule for Ian's book and I couldn't be happier I did. I was initially introduced to Ian by Nicolas Colin, Director of The Family, to chat about the book and my obsession with building technology ecosystems.That said, Ian is a fascinating guest so this conversation ended up covering so much more: we start by discussing why artist don't like when people fuck with their art and Ian's writing process, then we go into the book, why startup communities are complex adaptive systems, and why everyone should play positive-sum games. After that we move into Europe's technology ecosytem, underrated hubs and policy suggestions and we wrap up the conversation by talking about coaching and how it changed Ian's life.If you are as obsessed about writing, entrepreneurship and startup communities as I am, then this conversation won't disappoint. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Anette met Dr. Peter Hammer through a webinar he presented, and immediately identified with much of his work and the overlap she saw with her work through Panhandle Twenty/20. Dr. Hammer was gracious enough to agree to be on the podcast, and had lots of great insights, and provided new lenses through which to view our complex adaptive systems. Peter J. Hammer was named the A. Alfred Taubman Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School in fall 2018. Hammer has taught at Wayne Law since 2003 and is the director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne Law. The Keith Center is dedicated to promoting the educational, economic and political empowerment of under-represented communities in urban areas and to ensuring that the phrase “equal justice under law” applies to all members of society. Hammer was instrumental in editing and compiling Judge Damon J. Keith’s biography, Crusader for Justice: Federal Judge Damon J. Keith (2013).Hammer has become a leading voice on the economic and social issues impacting the city of Detroit, and has added new courses to the law school curriculum on “Race, Law and Social Change in Southeast Michigan” and “Re-Imagining Development in Detroit: Institutions, Law & Society.”Hammer has spent more than 25 years engaging issues of human rights, law and development in Cambodia. He was a founding board member and past president of Legal Aid of Cambodia, an organization providing free legal services to Cambodia’s poor. He is presently a board member of the Center for Khmer studies and the Life & Hope Association, an organization in Siem Reap, Cambodia, founded and run by Buddhists monks to address the needs of orphans, vulnerable children and at-risk young women.When in Southeast Michigan rather than Southeast Asia, Hammer is equally engaged in the community. He is a member of the board of directors of the ACLU of Michigan. He works actively with groups such as The Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, We the People of Detroit and the Detroit People’s Platform.Prior to entering academia, he was an associate at the Los Angeles office of O’Melveny & Myers, where he maintained an active practice in antitrust, health law and the presentation of expert economic testimony. Hammer received his undergraduate education at Gonzaga University and completed his professional and graduate education at the University of Michigan, where he earned a J.D. and a Ph.D. (economics). Before entering private practice, he clerked for the Hon. Alfred T. Goodwin, former chief judge of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.Hammer spent eight years on the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School. He was the first openly gay professor ever to be considered for tenure at the law school and the first male in the living memory of the institution to be denied tenure. The final vote was 18 in favor of tenure and 12 opposed (2 votes short of the required two-thirds majority). Hammer tells the story of his experiences attempting to internally grieve the tenure denial in an article, “In the Shadow of Gratz and Grutter: Grieving Diversity at the University of Michigan.”

The average company only lives for ten years, even large corporates perish after approximately four decades. A company that hits its 100th birthday has done rather well indeed. And, yet the cities of London or Paris, Rome or Beijing, have existed for millennia. Post Covid-19, we should therefore refocus our attention on what makes for prosperous cities and towns. These are the real engines of long-term economic development; not the in-vogue digital giants, nor even the elder denizens of industry, e.g. Mercedes, GE, BP or Sony; as we have known them. These commercial entities will all be historical footnotes within a single human lifespan. In this webinar, Robert aims to convey why cities matter and argues for a radical new approach to macro-economic planning, as we enter a brave new post-pandemic world. It really is time to try some new ideas. Speaker: Dr Robert Hercock is a Chief Research Scientist in the British Telecommunications Security Research Practice. He has over 20 years' experience in managing security research projects in the UK, and was theme leader for Networks and Cyber Security in the UK MOD Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre. His research interests include Cyber Security, A.I, Robotics and Complex Adaptive Systems. He chairs an international workshop on adaptive cyber defence, and has over thirty international publications in AI and security concepts, in addition to 26 filed patents. His latest book is on the theme of resilience and cohesion in social systems: (“Cohesion – The Making of Society ”, available from Amazon.) Professionally he is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society, and was previously an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School Oxford University. He has also served for several years as an independent technical expert for the UK Defence Science Advisory Council (DSAC), and was a Business Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. He has also served on the Royal Society Science and Industry Translation committee, which works to promote UK industry and academic knowledge exchange. Interested in watching our webinars live, or taking part in the production of our research? Join our community at: https://bit.ly/3sXPpb5

Value: After Hours is a podcast about value investing, Fintwit, and all things finance and investment by investors Tobias Carlisle, Bill Brewster and Jake Taylor. See our latest episodes at https://greenbackd.com/ About Bill: Bill runs Sullimar Capital Group, a family investment firm. Bill's website: https://sullimarcapital.group/ Bill's Twitter: @BillBrewsterSCG Value: After Hours is a podcast about value investing, Fintwit, and all things finance and investment. About Jake: Jake is a partner at Farnam Street. Jake's website: http://www.farnam-street.com/ Jake's podcast: https://twitter.com/5_GQs Jake's Twitter: https://twitter.com/farnamjake1 Jake's book: The Rebel Allocator https://amzn.to/2sgip3l ABOUT THE PODCAST Hi, I'm Tobias Carlisle. I launched The Acquirers Podcast to discuss the process of finding undervalued stocks, deep value investing, hedge funds, activism, buyouts, and special situations. We uncover the tactics and strategies for finding good investments, managing risk, dealing with bad luck, and maximizing success. SEE LATEST EPISODES https://acquirersmultiple.com/podcast/ SEE OUR FREE DEEP VALUE STOCK SCREENER https://acquirersmultiple.com/screener/ FOLLOW TOBIAS Website: https://acquirersmultiple.com/ Firm: https://acquirersfunds.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Greenbackd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobycarlisle Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tobiascarlisle Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tobias_carlisle ABOUT TOBIAS CARLISLE Tobias Carlisle is the founder of The Acquirer’s Multiple®, and Acquirers Funds®. He is best known as the author of the #1 new release in Amazon’s Business and Finance The Acquirer’s Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market, the Amazon best-sellers Deep Value: Why Activists Investors and Other Contrarians Battle for Control of Losing Corporations (2014) (https://amzn.to/2VwvAGF), Quantitative Value: A Practitioner’s Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors (2012) (https://amzn.to/2SDDxrN), and Concentrated Investing: Strategies of the World’s Greatest Concentrated Value Investors (2016) (https://amzn.to/2SEEjVn). He has extensive experience in investment management, business valuation, public company corporate governance, and corporate law. Prior to founding the forerunner to Acquirers Funds in 2010, Tobias was an analyst at an activist hedge fund, general counsel of a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, and a corporate advisory lawyer. As a lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions he has advised on transactions across a variety of industries in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Singapore, Bermuda, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Guam.

Today we welcome Carolyn McClanahan, M.D., CFP®, Founder of Life Planning Partners to the In the Suite guest chair for this special bonus episode on Coronavirus. Carolyn was one of the few financial planning professionals to read the COVID-19 tea leaves back in 2013—calling it the next black swan.In this episode, Carolyn provides valuable insights about the virus from her earlier work in medicine with Complex Adaptive Systems, virology, and immunology. From the financial planning perspective, she shares the keys to managing your family through a global health and economic crisis, practical keys to staying safe, and effective strategies for creating resilience over the long-term.

Can you tell from the title of this episode that I've been watching a LOT of Frozen 2 while on lock down? In this episode I talk to Andrew Blades, an uncertainty navigator and polymath, about how to lead in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world. Andrew is based out of Melbourne, Australia, and serves as the risk and and compliance manager in the state of Victoria's EPA (Environment Protection Authority). He started his professional career in the intelligence section of the Australian Air Force, focusing on planning the Force's response to ""low probability, high impact"" events, lectured in university, spent time in the private sector, and today holds four Master's degrees together with a range of certifications that match his substantial experience. Andrew has a truly remarkable intellect and his views on the current global COVID-19 crisis (both from a health and economic perspective) were insightful and helpful, particularly from a leadership perspective. Key quote: 'This (pandemic) is a systemic risk to all humans, and we're not used to thinking in terms of systemic risk - we're used to thinking in a much smaller level of risk ... I think there's a possibility ... that what we start to see out of this is people start think in a much broader (way)' -- Andrew Blades The Harvard Business Review article on Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework for strategic decision making in uncertainty and complexity https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making Margaret Heffernan's new book, 'Uncharted' https://www.mheffernan.com/#modal-close Music : Mike Morse | Perfect Teamwork Engage with Mike https://mikestopforth.com/ Connect with Mike on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikestopforth/ Follow Mike on Twitter https://twitter.com/mikestopforth When you're ready to produce your own podcast, contact the podcast experts at

This week I take a pause on interviews to share my thoughts on the Coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of complex systems and network collapse—and talk about the possible silver lining we might find in a time of crisis and enforced social isolation. I hope it helps! Feel free to email me with your thoughts, questions, feedback.Support this show on Patreon for secret episodes, the Future Fossils book club, and more awesome stuff than you probably have time for.Grab the books I mention on Future Fossils at my Amazon Shop and I get a small-but-helpful kickback from the retail leviathan.Intro Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield) • Here are all of the other podcasts and reading I mentioned in this episode, followed by some useful info about the COVID19 pandemic specifically:David Weinberger on Future Fossils about how we’ve always relied on black box explanationsW. Brian Arthur on on Complexity Podcast about the economy as a complex adaptive systemDr. Mike Ryan of the WHO on decision-making under conditions of uncertaintyJamie Stantonian on the disruptive impact caused by the Gutenberg printing press“An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, my sci-fi short about the philosophical challenges wrought by technological changeSamo Burja on how crisis requires a more fluid social response than institutional expertise“I did ‘The Mindscape’ thing, which was basically me sitting there in a chair, with an enormously long cigarette, sort of talking in real East-Midlands monotone – so no change there – but the essential thing about culture turning to steam, the fact that everything was speeding up so much that we seem to be heading for, what I refer to as a ‘phase transition period’, which is where one state suddenly and chaotically changes from one state to another state; like the boiling point of water.I said that I felt that we were approaching a kind of cultural boiling point, but as you know with the emergence of the cloud – I mean back then it did perhaps sound a bit extreme and a bit weird and the sort of thing that you might expect an Occultist, who clearly does a lot of drugs to say. But I think that events since then have made it look a lot more conservative as a guess at the future.”– Alan MooreWatch The Mindscape of Alan Moore on Archive.org or YoutubeHunter Maats on Future Fossils about the challenges of education and knowledge infrastructure in the Information AgeDouglas Rushkoff on Future Fossils about “present shock” and new modes of social organization for adapting to technological changeRaissa D’Souza on the collapse of complex networksMe at the Australian Psychedelic Society (Melbourne) on “May you live in interesting times”Nicole Creanza on the interplay of cultural and biological evolutionBruce Damer on Future Fossils about his origins of life researchWashington Post on Isaac Newton’s “Year of Wonders”Charles Eisenstein’s superb big-picture book, The Ascent of HumanityDr. Richard Hobday on the value of sunlight in fighting viruses and maintaining good health12 Museums Offering Virtual Tours, courtesy of Travel & Leisure• Useful info pages about the pandemic:Sam Scarpino, complex systems scientist, on solid mental and physical health advice for dealing with COVID19Worldometers real-time tracking of the pandemicARCGIS real-time tracking of the pandemic on a global mapTimeline of pandemics and their relative severityFast Company on how to lead in times of crisisThe Cut on how not to go stir crazy (mostly good exercise advice) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this Episode 4 of the Futures Intelligent Leadership Flowcast I am joined by Dave Snowden and Craig Whelden. Dave is the founder of Cognitive edge which was founded in 2005 with the objective of building methods, tools and capability to utilize insights from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. Even if you do not know who Dave Snowden is you may be familiar with, or even used one of his decision making frameworks, called the Cynifen Framework, which he developed while at IBM to help understand the context for decision making. If you look at his profile you will quickly realize that he has a brilliant mind and alot of wisdom to share. Craig has 40 years of experience in the US Military, both in and out of uniform. He recently retired and authored a book titled, “Leadership The Art of Inspiring People to Be Their Best” and he enjoys motivational speaking about his experiences in leadership. I had the pleasure of meeting Craig in Honolulu Hawaii prior to his book release and found him to be a very humble and authentic person, and a great model of leadership.In this dialogue Dave and Craig explore contextual leadership, cognitive diversity to manage complexity, coherent teams and cultures, why many military command techniques are rooted in neuroscience, why changing process and relationships dynamics is more effective than trying to change people, The power of leadership self-awareness, the strengths and limits of 360 reviews, and the important of real time feedback loops and leadership narrative.Lets listen Find out more at www.haku.global

The key to self-organization resideds in a field of tension between discipline and freedom.

We discuss with Paul Tevis (https://twitter.com/ptevis) about the Complex Adaptive Systems, Liberating Structures, & becoming an independent coach. Video & full show notes: https://youtu.be/4jRgOxDHux8

For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.David Krakauer's Webpage & Google Scholar Citations.Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

In this episode, we sit down with Rachel Happe, co-founder and principal at the Community Roundtable. We discuss her journey and explore areas such as business management, the role of "power" in relationships, leadership, and communities as "complex adaptive systems."

The theories of complex adaptive systems devised by the Santa Fe Institute have been used to draw out surprising patterns in the world around us — such as biology in mammals or revenue growth in retail stores. James Lewis, a principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, has been exploring how to apply such thinking to technology, in particular the practices and characteristics that underpin successful uses of microservices. Join our regular host Mike Mason to hear more about the surprising world of complex adaptive systems, and what technologists can learn from it.

Professor David Clutterbuck is a scion in the field of coaching, mentoring, team coaching and research. He is one of Europe's most prolific and well-known management writers and thinkers. He has written in excess of 70+ books and numerous articles and blogs. He is the co-founder of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and is now a lifetime ambassador of the association. He is a visiting professor of the faculty of coaching and mentoring at Henley Business School, Sheffield Hallam, Oxford Brookes and York St. Johns Universities. I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with him today and I hope you enjoy this episode on the Game of Teams Podcast series.   This particular episode with Professor David Clutterbuck illuminates the systemic nature of teams and how teams are part of a nested system. The terrain is complex, often messy and fraught with issues like a team's history, unspoken expectations, power dynamics, team dynamics and competing priorities and often a misguided sense of why the team is a team. Professor David Clutterbuck shared many vignettes, ideas for engagement, a framework called Perill and his explanation of a powerful question hidden in an acronym called Prairie. David spoke to his passion for teams because they are so complex and replete with learning and also his passion for writing. He has just written a new book adding to his portfolio of 70+ books called A Practitioners Handbook of Team Coaching, which is launching in the last week of April. A must read for any team Leader/member/coach or practitioner wishing to support teams be great. Noteworthy points of discussion Stand-up comedy was by far the most scary thing David has every tried but he recognises that laughter is a huge remedy and can be helpful in providing the “fizz” and “buzz” on teams He often asks of teams to tell him the most ridiculous positive thing that happened recently to connect people with their humanness and to improve the quality of conversations. Important to see teams as a part of an ecosystem and to appreciate the complexity of the system of which teams are apart Teams need to understand their history to know their future Psychological safety is very closely linked to high performance David Clutterbuck advises more time spent in upfront preparation and getting to know the team than in actual team coaching. Really important to appreciate the complexity of teams/the dynamics of interrelations not just within the team but also with their interfaces. Many reasons to engage in team coaching. Conflict, A new Leader, Project teams needing to move faster and be a real team, working out interdependencies, all kinds of transitions, learning skills/process management and how to collaborate or dialogue effectively together. Important too to get clear agreements between all parties to a team coaching engagement to understand expectations Fundamental role of Team Coach is to be redundant over time, to get to a place where the team has absorbed the coaching process. Learning is a critical dimension for teams. Top teams must be able to answer the question “Is this team adapting, evolving and changing at pace ahead of or at least abreast of pace of change around them?” A team must work with a team development plan. What is the learning the team must achieve together to cope with their environment and to get at the performance required. David Clutterbuck shared his PERILL Framework for teams. P stands for Purpose and Motivation, E stands for external relations and processes, R stands for relations, I stands for internal processes like decision making, L stands for learning and L stands for Leadership not the person but the 15 or so functions a leader needs to negotiate with the team to distribute effectively. This model is inherently the first Complex Adaptive Systems thinking framework for teams. Too often teams reach for the simple solution but David Clutterbuck explained the peril of this way of simplistic thinking. Teams needs to understand their system sufficiently well to put in place solutions and ways of working that are sustainable The simple question “who are your stakeholders” is often a mystery to many teams Other similarly provocative but helpful questions include “what is the unique contribution this team can make?” and “who would care if you were not hear?” David explained his formula for powerful questions housed in the acronym Prairie. P is personal, R is resonating, A is acute, R is reverberating, I is innocent and E is explicit. The key is to ask short/sweet questions that are to the point with emotional impact. David Clutterbuck spoke about endings in a team coaching and more specifically about his process with teams. David reminded me that the team has to be responsible for their process.  He often asks and repeatedly asks two questions. 1. What is going on in this team right now and 2. What would you collectively like to do about it? He ends when teams have absorbed the habit of coaching.   Resources: the following include the resources we alluded to over the course of our conversation Clutterbuck, D. (2007) Coaching the team at Work. Clutterbuck, D. (2004) Everyone needs a Mentor Clutterbuck,D. (2013) Powerful Questions for Coaches and Mentors Clutterbuck,D. (2019) The Practitioners Handbook of Team Coaching https://www.davidclutterbuckpartnership.com

We're back with a new episode of the podcast, I had a fantastic conversation with Allan Cohen, a strategy consultant I had the pleasure of hearing as a keynote speaker at Landmark's recent Conference for Global Transformation in beautiful Monterey, California. I loved the two sessions I had the chance of checking out and thought it would be great to talk about business consulting with Allan and the kind of creativity involved in determining and solving a variety of business challenges of the kind he has experience with. Little did I know our conversation would take us into talking about artificial intelligence, self driving vehicles, and complex adaptive systems. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did, and if you do please subscribe to the podcast, take the time to write a rating or a review on your favourite podcast app as it helps more people discover and enjoy the show. Alternatively, you can go and tell a friend whatever traditional way you would choose to do so. Thanks!  Mentioned in this episode: Allan Cohen, Strategy Consultant Landmark Worldwide Conference for Global Transformation Pong (video game) Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov Star Trek Dr Who Business Processes Reengineering Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Learning Algorithms Structure Linear Programming / Object Oriented Self-driving cars Swiftkey Google's AI beats a top player at the game of Go TED: "What a driverless car world could look like" (video) Google's AI "Project Magenta" just created music (video) Turing Test Chatbot / messaging bots Big 4 Accounting / Consulting Groups Amazon to acquire Whole Foods Israel The Mastery Foundation Werner Erhard Northern Ireland Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams Pizza flavored ice cream (in Philadelphia) World of Warcraft Complex adaptive systems Rain of Gold, Victor Villaseñor Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John Holland

This week’s episode deals with complex adaptive systems, which are found both in nature and in organizational settings (among other places)… With storm clouds overhead, I stand along a dry creek bank in Texas. As the rain starts, very soon there is a small trickle of water, it grows larger, and in time becomes a … Continue reading 052 – Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems →

Today my guest is Stephen Bungay. Stephen is the author of The Art of Action, a book on strategy execution under uncertainty. The book draws from lessons learned in military organizations where they’ve had to deal with complex situations 200 years before businesses needed to. I personally always cringe a little when I hear people talking about military leadership in the context of knowledge work, but Stephen knows where to draw the line of applicability, and that’s actually one of the topics we discuss. We also talk about why our plans don’t always lead to the outcomes we want or why our plans don’t always lead to the actions we want. And what to do about it.

Marshall Kuypers is a PhD candidate in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, concentrating in Risk Analysis. His research studies quantitative models to assess cyber security risk in organizations. I heard Marshall talk at a major IT Security conference and after listening to him, I knew that I had to get him on the show to share his expertise. Marshall continues a theme that I have been harping on recently which is for you to deepen your sophistication of communicating at the highest level in your organization about Cyber Risk and investments that you want your company to mitigate against. For some of you this discussion will be re-enforcement of concepts and ideas that you already know but need to be reminded of. For others, Marshall will bring a fresh approach to you to test with your CFO, CEO or Board. The more effective you can be with communicating to your horizontal peers and upstream reports the better you can fulfill your mission within your company. Major take aways from this episode are: 1. A Practical and actionable discussion regarding Risk Analysis for Cyber Security 2. How Develop situational awareness for making better IT Security Investment Decisions 3. How to look at your internal security event data in a different way (no not your log data) to support IT Security investment. 4. How to validate or eliminate intuition from assessing probability of IT Security events happening. 5. How to eliminate recency bias from IT Security decisions (Fear and uncertainty cranked by media). 6. We also discuss power laws and complex systems theory which is fun as well. I have linked up all the show notes on redzonetech.net/podcast where you can get access to Marshall's presentation and research. About Marshall Marshall Kuypers is a PhD candidate in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, concentrating in Risk Analysis. His research studies quantitative models to assess cyber security risk in organizations. Marshall has a diverse background spanning many fields, including modeling cyber security, developing trading algorithms with a high frequency trading company, researching superconducting materials at UIUC, and modeling economic and healthcare systems with the Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASoS) engineering group at Sandia National Labs. Marshall is also the Co-President of the Stanford Complexity Group and a predoctoral science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford. Read full transcript here. How to get in touch with Marshall Kuypers: mkuypers@stanford.edu Key Resources: Stanford University CISAC Profile RSA presentation Practical Quantitative Risk Analysis for Cyber Systems Power Laws Veris Community  - Privacy Rights Clearing House Title Quoted on Eweek : http://www.eweek.com/security/security-researchers-challenge-claims-data-breaches-increasing.html Books Mentioned: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard, a powerful tool that helps you communicate the status of your IT Security program visually in just a few minutes. Credits: * Outro music provided by Ben’s Sound Other Ways To Listen to the Podcast iTunes | Libsyn | Soundcloud | RSS | LinkedIn Please Leave a Review  Support this growing and thriving program by giving us a review here Click here for instructions on how to leave an iTunes review if you're doing this for the first time. About Bill Murphy Bill Murphy is a world renowned IT Security Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Randall Anway is a Registered Architect in New York and Connecticut.  He specializes in design research and is inspired by natural patterns and systems.  He holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut.   His Accreditations include Certified Biomimicry Specialist, LEED AP, and Certified Sustainable Building Advisor. Randall’s experience includes building systems research for the Army Corps of Engineers and facility information management at Xerox Corporation, as well as high-end residential design.  His research and design experience spans from software simulation to historical building materials and residential, commercial and institutional projects.  He is a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), INCOSE Natural Systems Working Group, and a founding member of Biomimicry NYC.  An occasional contributor to the online journal, Zygote Quarterly, he is constantly learning about the changing world of design.  Based near Long Island Sound in Connecticut, he offers consulting through his firm, New Tapestry, LLC. System Ah-ha! Observing the ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert Favorite System Tool Other people's imaginations Using cameras to think in a visual way Pen and Paper Learning Resource Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems by John Holland The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures by J. Scott Turner InsightMaker.com - A free dynamic modeling and simulation web application Advice “Apprenticing to the biological world means learning to observe and interact safely and productively.” Contact Facebook or LinkedIn: randallanway New Tapestry, LLC (new-tapestry.com) Biomimicry NYC (biomimicrynyc.com) Zygote Quarterly (zqjournal.org)

In our 56th episode we present to you a 2+ hour techno trip with our guest Chris Stanford. Based in London, Britain Chris has been busy at his residency with Jaded at Corsica Studios, also producing and releasing on labels like EarToGround & LDNwht which he co-manages with Gareth Wild & Dax J. He also started another label this called Quant which is already featuring music from Hector Oaks, Urbano, Mutecell, Nikola Gala and next up it's The Plant Worker For this episode we will give you a two hour set with addictive techno grooves, so there's nothing else to do but to enjoy. http://www.residentadvisor.net/dj/chrisstanford http://www.discogs.com/artist/2480415-Chris-Stanford-2 Artwork: Photography by Justinas Vilutis Track list: 1. Hiss - Damballah (Francois X wedo mix) [DEMENT3D] 2. Irradiation - Wave Function (Evirgen remix) [Temp] 3. Tadeo - Cyclical [Another Intelligence] 4. Mistake Made - Indec [Vault Series] 5. Rødhåd - Haumea (Phase Satellite mix) [Token] 6. Synthek - Coherence [Attic] 7. Isolated Lines - Raze [Creaked] 8. Myk Derill - Crossword [Gynoid] 9. Kwartz - Second Function (Milton Bradley reconstruction) [RSVD] 10. Bas Mooy - Shanks [Sleaze] 11. VSK - 1.4 System (Conrad Van Orton mix) [Complex Adaptive Systems] 12. Fabrizio Lapiana - Osmosis [Attic] 13. Philippe Petit - Processed [DMT] 14. Aerts - Fracture (Developer remix) [Authentic Pew] 15. Leiras - These Bones (Peter Van Hoesen remix) [Ownlife] 16. Keith Carnal - Irrational Behavior (Francois X remix) [Affin] 17. Rebekah - Apex [Elements] 18. The Plant Worker - Limited.G. 005 [Limited] 19. RNTS - Hazel (Hector Oaks remix) [Coum] 20. Yan Cook - Melter [Dynamic Reflection] 21. Cleric - Shadow [EarToGround] 22. Cleric - Sangha [EarToGround] 23. Dax J - Closer To God [Monnom Black] 24. Slam - Cirkon Bells (Edit Select remix) [Soma] 25. Unam Zetineb - Interpolate (Soolee remix) [More Than Less] 26. Relapso - Mirage [Relapso] 27. Vohkinne - Creole Rhythm (Tripeo remix) [Atrophic Society] 28. Hiss:1292 - Eshu (Opuswerk takes you higher version) [DEMENT3D] 29. Dolby D & A. Paul - Insidious Act 1 (Submerge & Ricardo Garduno remix) [Dolma] 30. Hector Oaks - New Beginning [KEY] 31. David Meiser - Rise Of The Machines (Elektrabel remix) [Physical] 32. Keepsakes - Let Me See Your Teeth [Green Fetish] 33. Isolated Lines - Stride [Creaked] 34. Skew & Satirist - Morphogenesis [KILLEKILL]

Guest: George Poste, Chief Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems; Regents’ Professor and Del E. Webb Chair in Health Innovation, ASU Bio and Contact Info Listen (5:51) A paradigm shift to systems thinking