Podcast appearances and mentions of Dave Snowden

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.

In today's episode of the podcast “Leadership is a Competitive Advantage” I am joined by Beth Smith, a senior consultant at The Cynefin Co., to discuss why different types of problems require different approaches to decision-making. In this episode, we dive into the Cynefin framework, a powerful sense-making tool developed by Dave Snowden that helps leaders and organizations navigate clear, complicated, complex and chaotic environments. The Cynefin framework is a recognition that different types of problems require different approaches to decision-making. As Beth Smith explains, "The Cynefin framework is just the fundamental recognition that in the world there are different types of system. And according to what system a certain problem, issue, opportunity, decision lies in, generally requires different types of actions or different ways of knowing and understanding that system. So we always start off with the clear domain, which is where you have very clear cause-and-effect relationships, where anyone on the street can look at it and understand: if you do X, you're going to get Y. Then there is the complicated domain, where you still have cause and effect, but it takes expert knowledge or analysis to determine the right answer. But then we have the complex domain, where there are patterns, but no clear cause-and-effect relationships because multiple factors are interacting, leading to emergence. And finally, we have the chaotic domain, where there is no order, no cause and effect – you just have to act and try to stabilize the situation before you can make sense of it." This means that decision-making is not just about applying a static model; it is about recognizing how different environments shape the way we make sense of problems. However, a common mistake in organizations is misclassifying problems and applying the wrong methods to solve them. "The most common pattern is people are operating on a complex problem using the logic and the tools, the methods of the complicated domain, or even the clear domain." This domain dissonance leads to frustration and failure because complexity demands experimentation, adaptability, and emergent solutions—not rigid best practices or expert-driven analysis. So, if you are looking for practical tools to navigate complexity in your own work, this conversation is for you. Let's dive in. PS! This episode was made possible thanks to Mihkel Tammo and Elar Killumets's Juhtimisklubi, who connected me with Beth during her visit to Tallinn. Thanks, Mihkel!

In this enlightening conversation, Dave Snowden discusses the principles of complexity science and its application in organizational change. He emphasizes the importance of understanding human interactions over attempting to change behavior directly. The discussion covers the evolution of ideas, the coherence of theories, and the role of culture in decision-making. Dave also highlights the significance of storytelling in mapping organizational culture and the need for real-time pattern detection through micro scenarios. The conversation concludes with insights on balancing human agency with AI in organizations and the necessity of creating spaces for innovation.Follow Dave on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/TakeawaysComplexity science is essential for understanding human systems.Cultural dynamics significantly influence decision-making in organizations.Mapping organizational culture through stories provides valuable insights.Stimulating change requires altering interactions rather than behaviors.AI should complement human judgment, not replace it.Micro scenarios can reveal weak signals in complex systems.Creating informal networks fosters innovation and collaboration.Understanding context is crucial for effective organizational change.Organizations must adapt to the complexity of their environments.Real-time pattern detection is vital for navigating change.Subscribe to our newsletter:LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/it-experience-insights-6996053129205026816/⁠Email: ⁠https://happysignals.com/itxm-insights

Organizational ‘purpose' can set out a North Star that can create directional alignment, which is especially important in organizations with deep empowerment.  But are purpose statements merely platitudes on a flip chart, or should the focus shift to genuine stories, meaningful patterns, and tangible actions?  Returning from their festive slumber, Dave, Esmee and Rob talk to Dave Snowden, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, The Cynefin Centre about purpose, why it may not help, what the alternatives might be and how to have a listening for the ‘micro-narratives' in your organization. TLDR:00:50 Back from the Christmas break!05:42 Exploring organizational purpose with Dave Snowden1:00:20 Discovering personal purpose through Ikigai1:07:55 Celebrating a 21st anniversary and the Children of the World Project Guest:Dave Snowden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/Hosts:Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Rob Kernahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/Guest host Sandeep Kumar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeepkumar99/Production:Marcel van der Burg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-vd-burg/Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Sound:Ben Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/Louis Corbett:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/'Cloud Realities' is an original podcast from Capgemini

Does asking for the “dumbest” solutions stimulate the most creative ideas? Join Squirrel and Jeffrey as they answer two listener questions on the theme of boosting creativity, including why you might wear a funny hat to your team warm-up, in this week's episode of Troubleshooting Agile. Links: - Core Protocols Checkin: https://thecoreprotocols.org/protocols/checkin - Dave Snowden on Changing Clothes: https://medium.com/@brixen/dave-snowden-how-leaders-change-culture-though-small-actions-766cd2bf5128 - Niko Niko chart: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/niko-niko/ -------------------------------------------------- You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com And we'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show: email us at info@agileconversations.com -------------------------------------------------- About Your Hosts Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick joined forces at TIM Group in 2013, where they studied and practised the art of management through difficult conversations. Over a decade later, they remain united in their passion for growing profitable organisations through better communication. Squirrel is an advisor, author, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant, and he's helped over 300 companies of all sizes make huge, profitable improvements in their culture, skills, and processes. You can find out more about his work here: douglassquirrel.com/index.html Jeffrey is Vice President of Engineering at ION Analytics, Organiser at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, and is an accomplished author and speaker. You can connect with him here: www.linkedin.com/in/jfredrick/

On this week's Salience Podcast, we explore anthropology, sensemaking and complexity.Our guest is Ellie Snowden. For those familiar with the Cynefin framework and its developer Dave Snowden, well Ellie is his daughter. Apart from an enormous requirement for personal resilience being Dave's daughter, Ellie has developed her own deep competency in the field of anthro-complexity and sensemaking. Ellie leads the Cynefin company's work on health and healthcare with her experience of supporting centre members in their use of SenseMaker® and surrounding methods. In this episode, we talk about the importance of narratives in expanding our world view, and how surfacing multiple voices can help cultivate culture. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

As you will have heard in previous episodes for example with Ray Ison, Mette Böll and others, there is a lot of interest currently in systems thinking approaches in education as a key competency for our young people. But what systems thinking means once you scratch the surface is a question that we need to ask. And if we're supporting our young people (as well as teachers and leaders) to navigate complexity, Dave - from his background in Anthro-Complexity (https://cynefin.io/wiki/Anthro-complexity) - will definitely have something to say about that!  Dave is the creator of the Cynefin Framework (https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/) and originated the design of SenseMaker®, the world's first distributed ethnography tool. He is the lead author of Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision-makers, a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service, and the Cynefin Centre. He divides his time between two roles: founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the founder and Director of the Cynefin Centre. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making.  He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. Using natural science as a constraint on the understanding of social systems avoids many of the issues associated with inductive or case-based approaches to research.  Dave holds positions as an extraordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch as well as visiting Professor at the University of Hull. He has held similar positions at Bangor University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Canberra University, the University of Warwick and The University of Surrey. He held the position of senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period in Nanyang. Social Links Great thinking on the Cynefin blog: https://thecynefin.co/our-thinking/ LinkedIn: @dave-snowden - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/ X: https://twitter.com/snowded

No 40º episódio de "O Futuro Vem do Futuro", Adriana Salles Gomes, diretora editorial da MIT Sloan Management Review Brasil, recebe Alexandre Magno, CEO da Cynefin Brasil, para uma conversa reveladora sobre a gestão da complexidade no Brasil. Parceiro de Dave Snowden, referência global no tema, Alexandre compartilha uma perspectiva diferenciada sobre a importância de desenvolver uma atitude de aprendizado diante dos desafios complexos, especialmente na América Latina. Neste episódio, Alexandre explora como a complexidade no Brasil transcende o conhecido "custo Brasil", abarcando questões não-lineares e incertezas que exigem abordagens inovadoras. Ele apresenta a metodologia Cynefin, que visa quebrar padrões de pensamento, e explica a famosa Matriz Cynefin para tomada de decisão em ambientes simples, complicados, complexos e caóticos, ilustrando cada contexto com exemplos práticos. Adriana e Alexandre também discutem como a Cynefin Brasil se diferencia das consultorias tradicionais, com uma abordagem baseada nas ciências naturais que questiona práticas comuns do setor. Alexandre compartilha cases e descreve o uso de técnicas como o mapeamento estuarino e os mapas narrativos, desenvolvidas para ajudar empresas a navegarem em ambientes de incerteza. Para encerrar, Alexandre reflete sobre a importância de uma liderança capaz de compreender a complexidade e aborda como a tomada de decisão distribuída e a gestão da incerteza podem fortalecer as organizações. Ele também discute o papel da inteligência artificial e dos dados, enfatizando a necessidade de combinar o raciocínio humano com a análise orientada por dados para extrair o máximo valor. Este episódio oferece uma visão prática e instigante sobre os desafios e as oportunidades da gestão da complexidade, com Alexandre Magno conduzindo uma discussão profunda sobre como enfrentar essas questões no contexto corporativo brasileiro. Inscreva-se⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ na Newsletter Xtended ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Inscreva-se⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ na Newsletter Future-ready

Jeder kennt sie: Die Pilotprojekte! Sie laufen immer perfekt: Die besten Leute, volle Unterstützung vom Management, und alle sind begeistert von den Ergebnissen. Doch sobald es auf breiterer Ebene umgesetzt wird, läuft es plötzlich schief. Warum ist das so? In dieser Folge schauen wir tiefer und hinterfragen, warum ihre Ergebnisse oft nicht skalierbar sind. Es liegt nicht nur an der Auswahl der besten Mitarbeiter oder am geschützten Rahmen – es steckt mehr dahinter: Jedes kleine Eingreifen verändert das System. Doch was bedeutet das für unseren Alltag? Außerdem knüpfen wir an das Cynefin Framework von Dave Snowden an, um zu zeigen, wie Experimente in komplexen Systemen durchgeführt werden sollten – und warum der Erfolg eines Projekts oft trügerisch sein kann. Du erreichst uns mit deinen Fragen auf den unten angegebenen Social Media Kanälen, auf unserer Webseite https://www.wir-muessen-reden.net oder direkt an podcast@wir-muessen-reden.net Abonnieren, teilen, Algorithmus glücklich machen! Über positive Bewertungen auf den gängigen Plattformen freuen wir uns natürlich auch. Viel Spaß beim Hören! Dein David & Martin Martin Aigner: Twitter: @aigner_martin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-aigner-865064193 David Symhoven: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-symhoven-2a04021a5/ Cynefin: https://cynefin.io Link zur Folge 163: Management mal anders https://open.spotify.com/episode/1zmjfXpIHnV4qDBgumjv30?si=a8d21678c31b46e4

Today, my guest is Dave Snowden, a leading expert in complexity theory and knowledge management. Dave is the creator of the Cynefin Framework, which is a tool for understanding challenges and helping us make decisions within the right context. His work is international in nature. It covers government and industry, looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organizational decision-making. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of topics, and he's well-known for his pragmatic cynicism - and you will hear that come through as you listen to this episode. I wish I had come across Dave's work earlier in my career because I think I'd have made some different career choices. In particular, his 2007 Harvard Business Review article with Mary Boone is excellent. It was on the cover of the November edition of the HBR and won the Academy of Management Award for Best Paper of that year. In this episode, we dive into the nuances of decision-making in complex environments. He walks us through the Cynefin Framework and how it helps us understand the challenges at hand. Dave shares insights into how organizations can avoid the pitfalls of traditional decision-making approaches that often oversimplify complex issues. We also explore the role of narrative in making sense of complexity and how his work with something called SenseMaker, supports capturing and interpreting diverse perspectives. If you're interested in how to navigate complexity and make better decisions in uncertain times, this episode is a must-listen. Show notes: Dave Snowden The Cynefin Framework Dave and Mary Boone's 2007 HBR Article, “A Leader's Framework for Decision-Making” SenseMaker Estuarine Mapping EU Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) in Times of Crisis Wardley Maps - A strategic mapping technique that helps organizations understand and adapt to their competitive landscape. Gary Klein's Pre-mortem Max Boisot's I-Space London taxi drivers' “The Knowledge” Taylorism Agile Hawthorne effect Cynefin's ‘risk matrix' Abductive thinking Dave on algorithmic induction Dave on AI: “anthropomorphising idiot savants” _ _ _ _ Like what you heard? Subscribe to The Decision-Making Studio Podcast Sign up for our Decision Navigators Course https://thedecisionmaking.studio/        

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeHow can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation?How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly dominated by anxiety and technological determinism?This week on Future Fossils (as a teaser for the kind of conversations I am having for my upcoming spin-off Humans On The Loop), I meet with Stockholm-based transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator, complexity researcher, founder of The Psychedelic Society, and once upon a time the youngest-ever board member of Greenpeace UK, Stephen Reid to discuss the importance of taking a more values-driven approach to technology development. Stephen and I agree that it's crucial to consider the potential consequences of technological advancements and to promote a more thoughtful approach to innovation…but for the sake of playing with tension, he places more of an emphasis on our capacity for axiological design whereas I feel more of a need to point out that the rapid evolution of technology can outpace our ability to predict its consequences, troubling efforts to design an enduringly sustainable future. One thing we agree on, and model in this episode, is the value of deeper conversations about the role of technology in society…and how to integrate their transformative potentials.PS — I'm guest lecturing for Stephen's upcoming four-week course on Technological Metamodernism soon, along with Alexander Beiner and Hanzi Freinacht and Ellie Hain and Rufus Pollock. We'll engage critically with ideas like Daniel Schmachtenberger's axiological design and Vitalik Buterin's d/acc. As usual I'm probably the odd duck in this lineup, going hard on epistemic humility and the injunction of digital media to effect a transformation of the modern self-authoring ego into networked, permeable, transjective sub-agencies arising spontaneously and fluidly from fundamentally noncomputable interactions of rapid information flows... Anyway, the point is we'd love to have you join us and sink your teeth into these discussions! I absolutely promise to bring up voting cyborg ecotopes. Big thanks to Stephen for inviting me to play!PPS — Here is another really good, very different conversation between me and Stephen and Alistair Langer on Alistair's show Catalyzing Radical Systems Change.(Editorial Correction: It was Mike Tyson, not Muhammad Ali, who said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.")✨ Support This Work• Hire me as a consultant or advisor• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backers for Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Chapters(0:00:00-0:10:29) Stephen's Background and Interests in Technology and Metamodernism (0:10:29-0:18:03) Navigating the Complex Relationship Between Technology and Human Values (0:18:03-0:25:18) The Limits of Axiological Design and the Importance of Community Oversight (0:25:18-0:34:29) Defining and Defending Axiological Design (0:34:29-0:45:03) Exploring Alternative Governance Structures: Guilds and Rites of Passage (0:45:03-0:56:36) Vitalik Buterin's "Defensive Decentralized Accelerationism" (0:56:36-1:06:04) Integrating Humor and Recognizing Irony in the Technosphere(1:06:04-1:12:17) Recovering Awe, Curiosity, and Playfulness in a Tech-Saturated World (1:12:17- 1:12:56) Finding Lightness in the Face of Existential Questions (1:12:56-1:13:28) Exploring The Future and A Call to Action✨ MentionsIain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Hanzi Freinacht, Josh Schrei, Ken Wilber, Vitalik Buterin, Bayo Akomolafe, Cory Doctorow, Nora Bateson, Dave Snowden, W. Brian Arthur, J. F. Martel, Stafford Beer, Rene Descartes, Bill Plotkin, Joe Edelman, Ellie Hain, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Kegan, Aldous Huxley, Andrés Gomez Emilsson✨ Select Related Episodes (also available as a Spotify playlist)223 - Timothy Morton, 220 - Austin Wade-Smith219 - Joshua Schrei217 - Gregory Landua and Speaker John Ash214 - Megan Phipps, JF Martel, Phil Ford213 - Amber Case, Michael Zargham212 - Geoffrey West, Manfred Laubichler187 - Kevin Welch, David Hensley178 - Chris Ryan176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, Sam Gandy174 - Evan Snyder172 - Tyson Yunkaporta166 - Anna Riedl165 - Kevin Kelly163 - Toby Kiers, Brandon Quittem141 - Nora Bateson122 - Magenta Ceiba109 - Bruce Damer094 - Mark Nelson086 - Onyx Ashanti080 - George Dvorsky076 - Technology as Psychedelic Parenting066 - John Danaher060 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens056 - Sophia Rokhlin051 - Daniel Schmachtenberger050 - Ayana Young042 - William Irwin Thompson017 - Tibet Sprague This is a public episode. 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In the autumn of 1996 in Palo Alto, Dan Newman had a career-defining epiphany: facilitation is playing other people's games with your own rules. It's something that has stayed with him on his journey from consultant to facilitator, as he solves complex organisational problems by asking: how are their rules preventing them from winning?We cover a lot of ground from Dan's storied career in this brilliant conversation, dancing from the debate of the neutral facilitator, to cultural communication traits, the psychology of music, and why he will happily fine his clients for breaking the rules!Full to the brim with facilitation lessons to learn, try and apply yourself.Find out about:Tips, insights and anecdotes from Dan's nearly 30 year careerThe key differences between the role of the facilitator and the consultantHow to rebuild people's ‘finite games' into ‘infinite games', with a positive-sum outcomeHow to use Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework to aid decision-making and de-complexify problemsHow to take a company out of their culture to see new perspectivesDon't miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.And download the free 1-page summary, so you can always have the key points of this episode to hand.Links:Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.Dan's BookConnect to Dan Newman:LinkedInWebsiteSupport the Show.**Click here to navigate through all episodes via this interactive podcast map.**If you're inspired by our podcast and crave similar conversations, consider joining Dr Myriam Hadnes' NeverDoneBefore Facilitation Community. **If you're keen to master the art of facilitation, discover our expert-led live, online Facilitation Courses at the NDB Academy. **If you enjoy the show, consider a one-off donation and contribute to the ongoing costs of running the podcast.

Subscribe to The Beautiful Mess Podcast in your favorite podcast platform using this RSS URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/24711.rssIntroductionIn today's episode of The Beautiful Mess Podcast, I am talking to Chris Butler. Chris is currently a staff product operations manager at GitHub.During his career, he's worked at companies like Google, Facebook, Cognizant, Kayak, and Waze, as well as founding the Uncertainty Project. Chris embraces the mess like few people I've met. Defying categorization in his career path, inventing models and techniques for collaboration and sense-making, he's well versed in engineering, design and product, and figuring out how to challenge the status quo in big companies.Somehow he manages to be a mad scientist in terms of ways of working, and have a day job. In this episode we talk about being a change agent, introducing new ways of working, embracing a persona external to your day job, and interesting stories about the Google culture and define career categorizations.Enjoy.Transcript[00:00:00] John Cutler: Hi Chris, welcome to the It Depends podcast. How are you doing?[00:01:07] Chris Butler: Good. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to say it depends as many times as possible during this podcast.[00:01:13] John Cutler: You will not be judged for saying it depends in this podcast.[00:01:17] Chris Butler: I have the it depends jar over here that I have to keep putting, you know, a dollar in every single time I say it on other places. So it's, it's good that this is an open space.[00:01:25] John Cutler: And it depends safe space for sure. One thing I wanted to start out with is that typically there's things about our personal experience or how we grew up or maybe the jobs we've had, our personal context, which is our own personal It Depends. When you think about your personal experience, what are some things that stood out that have shaped how you view situations?[00:01:44] Chris Butler: I really hate the question, at a barbecue, "Like, what do you do?" It requires me to simplify down what I am and kind of my experience around what I do down to a place that is you know, maybe not helpful.[00:01:58] In high school I would help teach the C programming course because I was taught by another student and the teachers there didn't know how to do C programming. So I basically taught that course. I was a senior class vice president, but I ran on the anarchist ticket, mostly about how we would get like better pencil machines in the hallways.[00:02:16] And then I was, you know, a team captain on a football team, three time All League, Honorable Mention of my Empire. And I also built red boxes and ran bulletin board systems that were like, Warez Bulletin Boards back in the day.[00:02:30] I try not to require my identity to become one thing. Rather than like a T shaped career or whatever those other things are, like an octopus career. And the reason why I like that is because, you know, the octopus is like a very interesting neural kind of, system where it has one brain, but it also has like brains in all of its arms.[00:02:49] I guess I've just started to allow myself to be more comfortable with having a bunch of different things that maybe unify in certain cases. And I get paid for those things or it's part of my daily job. But I think I've just always followed my interests.[00:03:01] The anarchist kind of thread in my background or the fact that I was building red boxes or doing warez boards kind of says to me a little bit that I also have a problem with doing things within the rules sometimes. I don't think this is fair, right? Like just to be very clear, I don't think this is fair, but I feel like I have a natural distrust for leaders. I realized that there are also people, right. And there was a great post that came out a little while ago that was basically like, you will never fully love your manager no matter what, because of just the way, the way that these systems work.[00:03:29] That's maybe something that has really formed the way I think about all of this stuff and the work that I do on a regular basis is really, it's, it's a lot about how are we pushing back on just the way things are. That's where I would say, you know, I've kind of come from and maybe that's, that's the reason why I am the way I'm today.[00:03:46] John Cutler: I'm curious, when you start a new job do you know you've found your fellow Anarchist, you know, football captain, you know, cause certainly you could run into the football captain in the hall and say, Hey, welcome, welcome to the Anarchy Club, you were in the Anarcy Club too. And they, they might not be too happy with that statement.[00:04:04] John Cutler: How do you know that you found your tribe when you're in a company?[00:04:08] Chris Butler: Joining very large companies is interesting because I guess I see part of what my benefit is to people is building connections between maybe topics that don't make sense together, but also connecting and creating networks within the organization I'm in .[00:04:23] For example, there's a group called Flux and Gale, and it was started by someone internal to Google that was all about people that are model thinkers, system thinkers, like that type of stuff.[00:04:35] You kind of have to pretend to just be a regular person at first. I guess. When you find your other community, it's not because you want to just like be the same as everybody else. It's that you want your thinking challenged in this domain and they have the tools, the terminology, the language and the background to be able to then push you.[00:04:54] I've been doing a lot of stuff with something called design fiction, which is really about this idea of like prototyping some future artifact. And then how do we use that in a bunch of different ways? Like I I've given a talk about like product management is product management, fiction, right? Which like everything we write as product managers is fiction at first. It just happens to be really boring fiction, unfortunately. And so like, how do we do a better job of that?[00:05:15] But me going into like an intranet site and looking up things like design fiction, I started to find groups of people that were, you know, interested in these topic areas. And from there, I'm just have a natural like networking kind of ability that I then just reach out to people and say, Hey, I did this cool thing over here. I think you might be interested in it.[00:05:33] So that's, that's how I ended up like finding those people is really based on topic areas, but it's not always, it's not always possible. The intranet site that runs something like GitHub is different than the intranet sites that were inside of Google.[00:05:45] It's hard, but if you allow for that iterative exploration, you'll find the next person that is like this and, and maybe pushes you in a way that that would be helpful.[00:05:55] John Cutler: I knew you do a fair amount of speaking external to the companies you work at. curious how the desire to express yourself externally from your companies Is that a balancing act for you so that you can balance the need to project that everywhere internally as well.[00:06:10] Chris Butler: It's more of like an escape valve because I think like whenever we're at an organization, there are cultural expectations. There's the Overton window of what is acceptable or not. I've had previous leaders say we're kind of cutesy or like too smart or something like that. I have to try to gauge what is the Overton window for process change inside of this organization, and how do I push them a little bit so I can do more of this stuff? I think I've started to come to the conclusion, and I think a lot of people in the Wardley Mapping community also think about this, is that like, I can't use the terminology, I can't call it this thing anymore.[00:06:42] I was talking to someone at the product ops summit in New York like a month or two ago. And they were an agile coach that had gone into product operations, which feels like a natural progression, honestly, based on the terminology of today. She was saying that if she then tries to do something like hold a retrospective for the team, especially with her current team, they would be like, no, we're not, we don't do that type of thing. We don't get in a room and just like whine at each other about how bad things are. Right. But when she says like, we just had this launch and the launch went well in a lot of ways, but not in all ways, so why don't we get in a room and let's talk about like what went right, what went wrong and what we could do better next time.[00:07:17] I need a place to be able to experiment with these concepts. And so I use the external speaking as a place to do that. Would say that the values that I really care about personally end up being connection, right? Ends up being how do we actually discover new ways of doing things and then how do I personally learn about things. And so that type of drive for me means that these are going to be topic areas where I think they're on the edge of what is acceptability or considered to be normal or regular for these teams.[00:07:44] And that's what drives me is it's that escape valve.[00:07:46] Now, what's cool though, is that like when people that are part of my work come and see me talk about this stuff. They want to do more of it internally. The problem is how do we do it in a way that still allows leaders to kind of feel the culture that they have is appropriate and it's not too much of an assault on that.[00:08:02] So I think that's the, that's the problem I ended up coming up against is that I want to do these things internally. Right. But it's not always going to be considered to be a good thing if I didn't.[00:08:11] John Cutler: don't know if you have any, an example of something within the Wardley Mapping community, for example, that if you went down a rabbit hole, it would be the best three hours that had ever had. within Google or GitHub or whatever, if you went down that same rabbit hole in the same way, in that, in a different culture, it would not go over well. Maybe to give people like a very tangible, sense of how that would go down.[00:08:33] Chris Butler: Well so like with Wardley Mapping, right? Created by Simon Wardley, there's a bunch of different people that, that are kind of in this community of practice around essentially how do we create value chains and then understand the evolution of them over time, right? That's the simplest way I would put it.[00:08:46] I did a workshop as part of one of the Wardley Mapping online conferences about how you use Wardley Maps as a game board for doing strategic rehearsal or wargaming.[00:08:54] That's the type of thing where those people are like, "Oh, wow, this is actually a very interesting way to use this map to then talk about evolution."[00:09:00] When I did that, by the way, I did that inside of Google as part of our summit. And it was interesting because we did two different exercises as part of this. We did scenario planning where we would create basically critical uncertainty--so a two by two of like two different uncertainties, and it creates four worlds that we want to like talk about.[00:09:16] And the people that were user researchers, designers, they really got that. They, they did a great job inside of Google to do that. The PMs inside of Google had a really hard time thinking about like uncertainty about the future. But then like we, we changed it around and I had people build their Wardley Maps and then we would have random events that would happen and then they would have to like figure out what does that mean.[00:09:36] I think the thing that I do in a lot of these types of workshops or in these discussions, it ends up being that there's a surprise that they need to realize on their own. And so inside of this, I had felt like our strategy was not as like, well formulated as it could have been and was not communicated out in the way it could have been. And so whenever I asked for reflection at the end of this process of using a Wardley Map, people were like, you know, I was like, how did the strategy work out for you? And they were like, we are incredibly reactive.[00:10:03] I think it's things like that where you have to sometimes just not use exactly the type of terminology you want to use, but you want to still get people to some type of transformation or realization. And so, that to me is like, maybe looking at those two different communities, like, that type of wargaming thing could have gone on for actually more hours after that with the Wardley Mapping community. Within my community, It was like a little bit like pulling teeth to get people to think about this, like uncertainty and have an imperfect map. Inside the Wardley Mapping community all these maps are disposable. You create a map and then you will throw it away essentially.[00:10:34] Every time that I've ever done a workshop inside of Google where there's like post it notes, someone's like, "Who's going to write down all these post it notes?" And I'm like, no, we're not. We're just going to throw them all away, like, or recycle them ideally. But like, we don't need to have every single idea captured. It was about the lived experience of everybody inside this workshop that was actually meaningful.[00:10:52] So it's like stances on what is considered to be expertise or great at something, like how certain or uncertain people are. I think it's those kinds of things inside the communities that end up being I think it's very different.[00:11:04] John Cutler: Without necessarily revealing privacy stuff or whatever, what, what is it about the the Google culture that predisposes it to how are we going to write up all the stickies?[00:11:15] Chris Butler: There's a lot of smart people inside of Google, right? For a very long time, the culture was around academic excellence, right? I actually, I interviewed at Google like four times before I got offered a job. And I think it was the first couple of times I got rejected because my high school GPA wasn't that high.[00:11:28] There's like a real academic kind of smartness type of thing that's there. And so what that means is like, for people that are very smart in a particular domain, they tend to think that if they just think hard enough about something, they will come up with the perfect answer.[00:11:40] That's not true in my opinion.[00:11:42] This also is then related to like consensus driven decision making, which I think Google suffers from an awful lot. Where because everybody's like the other part of the culture is kind of like everybody's kind of nice to each other as well. It means that we all have to agree to be able to move forward. Because we're all super smart people, that means all of our opinions are equally weighted. And we have to converge all of them before we can move forward on anything.[00:12:02] And so that's, those are two things I think from the culture. And again, there are benefits to those types of cultures.[00:12:07] I would say that in the face of uncertainty, that's why we have to write down and take notes about every idea that came up because we don't want to miss a good idea that was there, when the reality is like, this was really just more of a workshop to get people to talk to each other in a particular way. And, and so I think that's, that's like a key difference, I think, and the reason why actually it's like that inside of places like Google.[00:12:28] John Cutler: When you think about the Wardley Mapping community. So that's the flip side. Like, what's the first thing that jumps out to you?[00:12:34] riverside_john_cutler_raw-audio_john_cutler's studio_0002: It's[00:12:34] John Cutler: seems like it's a honeypot for a certain type of thinking or need. what, what, what about that context sort of is the flip side for that? Um, cause it attracts a certain type thinker, uh, almost by definition of the visualization.[00:12:53] Chris Butler: I've met a lot of people inside the Wardley Mapping community that, you know, I mean, they're, they're fairly analytical when it comes to trying to understand this because some people are trying to take it into the direction where it's like, we're going to now use this map. Right. And, and you, you know, Double Loop right? Like I think Double Loop is a great example of that type of thing. They are actually trying to, in some way, mechanize these types of strategies. The honeypot of Wardley Mapping is trying to understand what is going on and then making choices about that.[00:13:19] The antithesis to that is that we actually have to make choices together and we want to make sure that everybody's happy. How much of your organization needs to agree to a strategic direction or not?[00:13:29] And I used to think it was like high, like you want to get everybody to agree. Then I was kind of like, Oh, well, maybe it's like 51%. You just need like most people. And then now I'm, now I'm actually of the mind that like, if you have a leader that you trust, it's actually only one person needs to actually believe in that strategy and everybody else can like decide whether they want to stay on that train or not. Basically. Right. Culture is another one. Like, yeah, you can try to change culture. It takes a lot of work to change culture, but if this culture is just not right for you, you just shouldn't be there.[00:13:59] Ideally, right? I think there's issues with like, you know, the fact that compensation and we all have to take care of families and that type of thing that I think ends up muddying this thing. But I think that's the ideal, right? We want to make hard decisions. And I think most of the time making hard decisions is a better strategic value, but that doesn't work inside of consensus driven cultures.[00:14:20] Like, like a Google. If we were to say to our leaders a lot of the time, like, should we do this or that? They'd say, do both. And it was because we also had unlimited resources almost, right? Search and ads are just printing money. So like all these other things we should be able to just like build whatever we want, but maybe the thing that, that Google has done really well that I loved about Google was that they don't feel bad about killing products if they feel like it's not in line. That's great.[00:14:44] And then there was like an internal site called Meme Gen which is known publicly, but it's like a meme site for Googlers. And it's usually very scathing of the leadership. And I thought this was probably one of the most interesting cultural things inside of Google.[00:14:58] If I wanted to understand what was actually going on with the people inside of Google, and it could be negative, a little bit negative sometimes. If I go to Meme Gen, I will understand what most of Google is thinking about, like in reality, not what we're actually talking about when it comes to, like the polished press releases and stuff like that.[00:15:12] John Cutler: I wonder what it is about that culture that would let that type of thing emerge.[00:15:19] it that, well, people are doing pretty well from a financial perspective and they're not going to get fired for saying something scathing? Or maybe that's changed now. Maybe you're like, yeah.[00:15:28] Chris Butler: it's, it is changing. I mean, I think there's always a struggle within organizations about how to allow for people to have, say, political discussions internally. And so that is something. There's an article that just came out recently about how they're removing downvotes because of some of the memes that came out about like the, you know, Israel, Palestine, conflict, right.[00:15:47] So there's things like that, that I think they're still figuring out. Now, there has been a belief that, that Googlers think that like management is trying to slowly kill Meme Gen because they don't like it.[00:15:58] Maybe from the beginning though, too. It's like, if, if you have a lot of really smart people. That are doing their own thing. That means that you allow for this type of like hacker culture. Like that's, that's, that's the truth is, is what's going on here. And so I think as like an organization like Google that's trying to become more of like a shareholder holder value type of organization, rather than an engineering driven organization, I think that's where you start to see that change.[00:16:22] Whereas for me, like it, it actually is very much like an engineer driven way of being is that you just build something because you felt like it was funny, right? That's where, that's where I think Meme Gen comes from, right? And there's lots of stuff like that internally that I thought was like, again, I think is, is an important part of like the culture there, but it's changing over time.[00:16:41] John Cutler: When you see people forming strategies do you have any example of of some contextual factor that they tend to think that matters that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme?[00:16:49] Chris Butler: One of the things I see pretty often is that people think about the plan, not about the strategy. And so we end up getting tied around the axle on like the stack ranking priority of this thing over this thing, rather than what are the rules that we're actually trying to kind of think about from this?[00:17:07] If you look at something like your roadmap or the next projects that are being funded, look at like how many headcount, any of those things are, that is your strategy at that point. And I call it the starter strategy and kind of a, you know, it's fine. Like that's, that's the way most leaders they'll come in. They'll create this like thing, which is a roadmap. That is the strategy, quote unquote, but it's really just like a plan.[00:17:26] That's actually something that leaders shouldn't be doing. Product leaders should not micromanage as much.[00:17:30] And I've definitely heard this concept that people should get into the weeds and worry about it. When the reality is like, If you're a product leader, if you're there to talk about the strategy, then maybe you need to know something about how the execution will take place. And I don't want to create this false dichotomy between strategy and execution. Like every execution includes a strategy of some type. But what I really get annoyed with is like, your job is actually to build culture now or to build the team or to create incentives for practicing in a way that you want people to practice. And that to me is less about like you're helping make these little tiny decisions and it's more about like broader things.[00:18:06] All the decisions then start being like, like led from just the leader rather than being distributed through the team, which is what we really want. That's why you should have a great strategy is because you should make the really hard decisions that people are constantly struggling with very easy. Because here's the strategy that says that we're going to do these things.[00:18:22] When we have things like escalations happening from the people that are at the ground level or at like the practicing level where they're talking with customers and they're building things for customers. If a whole bunch of escalations happen because of this theme, it sounds like that's actually a problem your team is struggling with, and they want guidance, right?[00:18:38] But it shouldn't be on a piece by piece basis. It should be that probably those five different things that are in the same theme, that's a strategy. And that's actually something that's really pertinent to today in making decision making, in doing decisions. We don't have enough where people are looking at the escalations to see how that modifies the strategy.[00:18:55] And then the third kind of last thing I think happens a lot for leaders is that they don't provide the context to their organization as often as they should. We don't have as much, at least I don't see it in a way that really, I think impacts people's day to day is here's kind of the headwinds and tailwinds that I see, like over the last month that I think you should actually know because I have a different context than you. Here's what I think you need to know more about in this world. And I feel like a lot of the time when we do strategy, like reviews, it's just pushing information up in a document or a slide deck or something like that, but there's very little, like, there's no, like, what is the person that's reviewing? What are they going to provide inside this meeting other than just like saying yes or no? Like they should actually be preparing things as well about like what they think is going on with the organization. That that's what I would argue.[00:19:43] John Cutler: When you think about the last couple of years why are we seeing this increase in people saying leaders should get into the details. Why are we saying this so often? Why is Brian Chesky saying this on an interview and, and every day on LinkedIn, someone's saying or have to be more hands on than you thought you were like, what's going on.[00:20:06] Chris Butler: I'm sure that there are leaders that are domain experts, right? Like I, I don't, I, I totally believe that's true. Right. And, and I've, I've often gotten in trouble both internally with my teams or externally on Tik TOK about saying, I don't think product managers should be very technical.[00:20:20] You can be a domain expert as a leader, and you can have good judgment and taste and kind of belief around things. But if you're not actually building teams that are able to be the domain experts. Right. I think that's a failure of leadership or, or a failure of building a team at the very least.[00:20:39] Because I want to make sure that there's like, there's a difference between like being great at hiring and talent development versus leadership in a certain area versus the management mechanisms and politics and all those different things that like are balled into a manager or a senior leader type of position. I want to make sure that that's clear that like, there's a lot of different ways to be a great senior leader. I think the moment that some moment that your job is there to catch all of the failures of your team. That's probably not a very healthy relationship.[00:21:08] That's why, like when, when managers complain that they don't get any like feedback from people, it's because that's the way that they usually are interacted with is like, you're there to make the most perfect presentation possible and any, any failure, like, you know, I've, I've heard about certain leaders that if anybody ever fails for any reason, they're suddenly unlucky and they should not be trusted with anything else. And that just sounds insane to me. You've got to be incredibly lucky. And that's like survivorship bias. Right. So then make it to that point. And maybe that's just the way that they think is the right view of the world. But I think, I don't think it is, I think it's bad for the organizations that they're building[00:21:43] John Cutler: What are some tips to make those sessions more effective?[00:21:46] Chris Butler: Derek Sivers has like a post that's like a two cents and it's all about the fact that a leader's two cents can be taken way out of context when the reality is it was like, just like a throwaway comment. And now someone's spun up a work stream to like figure out what this like two cent comment meant basically.[00:22:02] Speak less. Like it's your, your job is, is there to enable teams and to help them, but not to be like the main speaker, right? Like that, that's what I would argue.[00:22:11] The last thing is to actually believe in the systems that allow for that type of peer feedback. PMs can learn an awful lot from the way that like does great design critiques work or great code reviews happen.[00:22:23] From those kinds of practices, you end up actually learning something much more from each other. And because there's other people there, you accelerate the learning because other people are dealing with other problems. Allowing for that type of thing and actually not only inspiring it, but actually pushing to have those things inside of your teams. I think that is what great leaders should do is they want to create as many opportunities for feedback, between their team members as possible. And they're not always going to be the right ones to do the feedback because again, there's power dynamics. There's the fear of like losing your job because you screwed up, right? Like these are things that are really visceral for people. I don't think that the leader can always do that. What they can do though is they can push for systems that allow for that type of thing and do a better job of that.[00:23:03] I've heard this from a leader specifically that they thought that retrospectives were just whining sessions. And then they sent me a couple of articles about how HBR thought that retrospectives were bad. I get it. Like you need a good facilitator for those things sometimes, right? Like people will rat hole or they'll just want to complain or whatever. But I think overall, like having the team talk in a structured way about things is better than not doing it. Is what I would argue.[00:23:27] And I think this is why leaders, what they should be doing more of, is actually telling people on their team why they made a particular decision. And what was the process by which they did that. And if it's just intuition, Like, I just have tons of experience in this industry and so I'm making a decision based on this. That I think is the part that we, we need senior leaders to describe more.[00:23:44] And this is why like things like forward looking case studies, like decision forcing cases I think are so interesting is that you get everybody in a room from both junior to senior people and I would run these inside of Google. We get L3s to L7s inside of this room. They have to create a slide that is going to be for this offsite. It's very, it's a very PM activity. Right. Um, they, they have five minutes to create a slide that is going to basically frame this conversation that needs to take place.[00:24:09] And it's really interesting because like the L3 people, they, they are like very much, okay, well, here's the traffic light grid of options and characteristics and like red, yellow, green, everything like that, the L7s they would just be like, I have two questions for this audience. It's just like question one, question two. And it's like, the discussion is what matters in that case.[00:24:27] And what's really cool is just seeing the way that those senior leaders think about that in comparison to the junior ones. And they're not wrong or right. They're just like two different ways of looking at it.[00:24:37] I think this is why like strategic rehearsal thing I was talking about for wildly mapping, like. Those senior leaders should not go off and do email during those summits and just have their people do these activities. They should be there actually describing how they would do this. We need leaders to present more of their expertise as well inside these things to be able to describe this.[00:24:55] So that's why, I tend to want to have these types of containers for conversations that rather than the weekly, you know hand down of here's what's going to happen. I want the leader to be part of a game that talks about different decisions and see how different people in that room would do it because you learn about everybody's decision making capability.[00:25:15] That's what I would say. I think those things are more helpful. I've been starting to read this, this book about LARPing live action role playing, but there's this idea of a conceit where I'm going to play this role. It's not really who I am. Right. But I may be a jerk right now or like six hats is a great example of that, right? Like one of those hats is a jerk and it's okay because that's just the way six hats work. Right. So I think like allowing for those types of things that are more exploratory, I think, actually help the entire team learn from each other.[00:25:40] John Cutler: Back in the beginning of the podcast you talked about how you were okay with the flexibility in these particular environments. Right? Now I understand better about how you might be okay with like, uh, this is going to be improv slash, uh, we're going to do a two by two and improv and you're going to make slides and, and going to be fine with, uh, we're going to throw it all away afterwards.[00:26:05] Chris Butler: Right. That's right.[00:26:06] Dave Snowden. We call it acceptation. I think it's this idea of like meta or interdisciplinary thinking. I think we, we can gain an awful lot from that. And, and that's, that's what I love about this work.[00:26:16] John Cutler: One thing I like about how you're describing this though, is that you seem. to like the theory side of it, but then you seem to like manifesting it in an actually very visceral, hands on, out in the world type way. And one thing I've noticed Is that often that duality is not something that people immediately understand, right?[00:26:37] Do you ever get pigeonholed as being very theoretical and academic and you're like you have to raise your hand and say actually "Do you want to do an improv, uh role playing session with me? Like let's LARP. We're gonna go LARPing now." How do you communicate that duality that you seem to have to folks? ,[00:26:55] Chris Butler: I've been definitely called very academic, like very theoretical. But what's funny too is that like with a lot of the people that if I like be coaching someone or trying to mentor them, you know, I'm asking a lot of questions because I'm trying to understand what is the context of what's going on.[00:27:10] And, and people have said like, you know, I'll have a conversation with Chris and it's like the first 55 minutes are just like meandering. I have no idea where they're going. And then he gives me like three things to do with the 55 minute work. And it's like exactly what I needed, basically. You're absolutely right.[00:27:24] I think like part of the product manager's job is to be a toolbox of like methodologies and frameworks, right? It's like shu ha ri from the agile world is, is what we're trying to do.[00:27:32] I think once you get to that point where you're doing your own way. It's usually just a combination of things that have worked. I mean, I think you've said this too, about the fact that like frameworks are usually just an experts encodification of what they usually do. Right. And it worked in that moment, in that place, in that time. And it's trying to now turn it into something that anybody can pick up as a tool. But the reality is like, there's pieces of it that won't exactly work in every context.[00:27:54] Rather than assuming that there's this process that just has to work this exact way, how do we build something that is appropriate and fit for this. And I think maybe dropping another kind of like honeypot name is probably Christopher Alexander and pattern libraries and stuff like that. The way he thinks about things is that we're going to create a beautiful place that is going to be a place for someone to live, that is situated in the environment and gives them the things that they want, like the ability to have like a great breakfast with a beautiful view or something like that.[00:28:24] He really railed against the idea of kind of establishment of licensing for architects, the way that like architecture started to become something that was all about like the perfect way of doing something.[00:28:34] And if it's going to be for people, you have to build things in a very special way. And that's why I think like. We need all these tools and then we have like a team, which is a bunch of just people together and we need to figure out how they work and what they, what they want to work like. And that's why those things are, but it's, it's very hard.[00:28:49] I definitely try to do that. Usually it's just through workshops, right? It's like, that's the simplest way. Let's get in a room and we're going to format this conversation where it's not one person talking the whole time. It's all of us talking in this particular way.[00:29:00] And so that's kind of a, just for me, that's the brass tacks of this is like conversations.[00:29:06] John Cutler: Awesome. Well, I think that's a good way to end, actually. That's like a nice way of wrapping this up. This was a lot of fun and. I think I'm supposed to ask, you know, where are people supposed to find you? Although I think people are generally fairly findable now at the moment.[00:29:23] Chris Butler: Yeah. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. If people want to connect and I'd love to hear if you try anything that I've talked about, I'd love to hear how it works for you and whether it does or doesn't. The Uncertainty Project is a community of like decision makers and strategists that I think is interesting.[00:29:36] And there's like, that's where I've been doing some, some more interesting writing about this. But yeah, just in general, just always excited to hear how people are doing their job.[00:29:44] John Cutler: Great. All right. Thank you so much, Chris.[00:29:46] Chris Butler: You're welcome. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cutlefish.substack.com

A rebroadcast of a chat hosts Andy Cleff, Ben Au-Yeung, Serge Marten, and Jay Hrcsko had with Dave Snowden about Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, and Metamodernism.  We explore thru a Boxian lens "All models are wrong, but some are useful."  Are these effective tools for organizations to gain new perspectives on themselves? Are there other potentially better ways to journey in complex adaptive systems? Contact Information LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowded Website Books/Articles/Videos Events About the Agile Uprising If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review, a rant, or leave comments on your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps others find us.  Much thanks to the artist  from  who provided us our outro music free-of-charge!  If you like what you heard,     to find more music you might enjoy! If you'd like to join the discussion and share your stories,  please jump into the fray at our  We at the Agile Uprising are committed to being totally free.  However, if you'd like to contribute and help us defray hosting and production costs we do have a .  Who knows, you might even get some surprises in the mail!

In this conversation, Dave Snowden discusses various topics related to complexity, agility, and decision-making. He shares his experiences with travel and speaking engagements, emphasizing the importance of listening to the audience and adapting his presentations accordingly. Dave highlights patterns and cynicism in the Agile community, cautioning against the commoditization of Agile and the reliance on motivational speakers. He explains the principles of organizing for emergence and complexity, emphasizing the need to work with how things are and focus on local interactions. Dave also discusses the outcome of complexity models, the risk of losing purpose in breaking things down, and the challenge of organizational attention span. He concludes by discussing the contribution opportunities for Hexi and the importance of creating a capability to handle unknown unknowables. The conversation explores the concept of constant complexity in the world and the need for adaptability and strategic thinking. The impact of AI and ecological collapse is discussed, highlighting the potential risks and opportunities they present. The tension between control and empowerment in organizations is examined, along with the role of risk in decision-making. The importance of building ecosystems and embracing distributed decision-making is emphasized. The conversation concludes with a reflection on the impact of work and the future of the Agile landscape.TakeawaysListen to the audience and adapt presentations accordinglyBeware of the commoditization of Agile and the reliance on motivational speakersOrganize for emergence and complexity by working with how things are and focusing on local interactionsQuantify human judgment and detect anomalies to make better decisionsCreate a capability to handle unknown unknowables and shift to a profession mindset The world is experiencing constant complexity, and organizations need to adapt and embrace strategic thinking to navigate this reality.AI and ecological collapse are significant factors that are changing the business landscape and require proactive preparation.Overdependence on technology can hinder adaptability and resilience, and organizations should strive for a balance between technology and human intelligence.Risk should be considered in decision-making, and organizations should focus on reducing risk through distributed decision-making and building ecosystems.The impact of work extends beyond individual contributions, and collective efforts and teamwork are essential for long-term success.The Agile landscape should focus on collaboration, innovation, and addressing unarticulated problems to become a sustainable movement.For questions or requests that you would like us to check on, please drop a message on LinkedIn or join the Mastering Agility Discord community!Participate as an audience memberMastering Agility MuralMastering Agility merch

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Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about the ideas in his podcast monologue/Substack post "Why I'm Finally Leaving X and Probably All Social Media." They discuss Douglas's history with social media, the early social internet, Facebook's parasitism of legacy news, the decontextualization of content, The WELL, owning your own words, leaving Facebook in 2013, Jim's social media sabbaticals, the opportunity to create an info agent, the number of daily interruptions, attention-deficit disorder as an adaptive strategy, books versus articles, effects of long-term social media use, the quest for nominal identity, how careful curation improves X, using social media as a professional writer, the organic in-between, strong vs weak social links, the ability of strong links to hold & metabolize, how the internet spawns billionaires, airline subsidies, Girardian mimesis, liberal universal humanism, rebuilding embodied life at the Dunbar number, John Vervaeke's "religion that is not a religion," starting where you are, and much more. Episode Transcript "Why I'm Finally Leaving X and Probably All Social Media," by Douglas Rushkoff Team Human, by Douglas Rushkoff Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, by Douglas Rushkoff The WELL JRS EP30 - Nora Bateson on Complexity & the Transcontextual JRS EP 184 - Dave Snowden on Managing Complexity in Times of Crisis JRS EP 190 - Peter Turchin on Cliodynamics and End Times JRS EP 170 - John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall on The Religion That Is Not a Religion Named one of the “world's ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff's work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.

The Cynefin Framework sets out different lenses through which circumstances can be made sense of, from 'clear' through to 'chaos'!  As we have covered on previous episodes of the show (CR020 & CR003), it is very useful for helping frame and understand the shift to “digital”.This week, Dave, Sjoukje, and Rob talk to Rob England and Cherry Vu, who are Teal Unicorn and explore new ways of management, about the relevance of the Cynefin Framework in their work with organisations, the builds Rob and Cherry have made on it (with Dave Snowden!), and what results they have seen.  We also talk about ways to drive additional value from the Cloud.TLDR:01:00 Anti-Compentative UK probe into Cloud Service Providers 04:40 Cloud conversation with Rob England and Cherry Vu44:13 Three actions to unlock greater Cloud Value51:50 Celebrating Robs 21st birthday and a Corporate Rebels write up! Further ReadingTeal Unicorn books: https://tealunicorn.com/books/Cynefin Framework:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynefin-Weaving-Sense-Making-Fabric-World/dp/1735379905/ref=asc_df_1735379905/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=463023885319&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1138553241603419895&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9180995&hvtargid=pla-1000081345849&psc=1&mcid=d8fac6716c5d3c1f88cb07d2dcb423a3&th=1&psc=1 GuestRob England: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robenglandattwohills/Cherry Vu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcherryvu/HostsDave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Sjoukje Zaal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjoukjezaal/Rob Kernahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/ProductionMarcel Van Der Burg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-van-der-burg-99a655/Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/SoundBen Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/Louis Corbett:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/

This episode is a continuation of the previous discussion of Bill Hartman's model of health and performance. There are a lot of voices out there trying to parrot what Bill is saying, but a lot of understanding is lost in translation. This episode is part 2 in a two part series trying to break down some of the fundamentals of the model. LIKE the podcast to help other see itSHARE it with anyone who you know is stuck in the land of fitness confusionJOIN Bill's Training Program RECON:Learn more at https://www.reconu.co FREE EBOOK by Bill about the RECON principles when you fill out your sign-up form. http://www.reconu.co Join the RECON Newsletter to learn more about the model behind the program:https://pr-performance.ck.page/92b1765527 SUBSCRIBE for even more helpful content:YT: https://www.youtube.com/@BillHartmanPTIG: https://www.instagram.com/bill_hartman_pt/FB: https://www.facebook.com/BillHartmanPTWEB: https://billhartmanpt.com/Podcast audio:https://open.spotify.com/show/7cJM6v5S38RLroac6BQjrd?si=eca3b211dafc4202https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reconsider-with-bill-hartman/id1662268221or download with YT PremiumBooks mentioned in this episode:Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke https://amzn.to/3YNXRKJ Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen https://amzn.to/3QNovl6 Behave by Robert Sapolsky https://amzn.to/3EaL63q Human Locomotion by Thomas Michaud https://amzn.to/45DHKBO Cynefin by Dave Snowden https://amzn.to/3QNtT7P All Gain, No Pain by Bill Hartman https://amzn.to/3Dy6vTN Reconsider… is sponsored by Substance Nutritionhttps://substancenutrition.com/A healthy brain requires a healthy body. Why not take care of both all at once by using Synthesis protein and Neuro Coffee? Use code RECON at checkout to get free shipping on all of your orders

You probably read that wrong in your head - it's pronounced ku-NEV-in (kəˈnɛvɪn) :-) In this LAST episode before our summer break, Lars talks to Danish longtime GTD'er Dann Bleeker Pedersen about his GTD practice and experience using the Cynefin framework. We'll dive into: - How Dann uses GTD, both as a father and in his role as Head of TECH in Retail for the fashion company BESTSELLER. - What the Cynefin framework describes and how it relates to projects - How the Cynefin framework impacts your projects list and use of the Natural Planning Model ..and much more, including how understanding the framework might help give you even more of a mind like water! Buckle up, there's a lot of good stuff in this episode :-) Thanks to Dann for taking the time to join us for the interview. If you have questions for us or ideas to cover, e-mail us at podcast@vitallearning.dk. Links: - Get in touch with Dann! You can find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bleeker/ - How does Dann use GTD? You can read about his GTD system in English here: https://vitallearning.dk/et-eksempel-paa-hvordan-du-kan-bruge-gtd/ - Introductoury video to Cynefin, where Dave Snowden (the original author), explains the Cynefin model: https://youtu.be/N7oz366X0-8 (8:36) - Hardward Business Review article that introduced the Cynefin model: A Leader's Framework for Decision Making https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making (potential paywall) - Official wiki from Cognetive Edge that introduces Cynefin and a lot of other interesting theories: https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin - Morten/Lars' channels on YouTube, if you want to watch the episodes: - Morten: https://www.youtube.com/c/MortenRøvikGTD - Lars: https://www.youtube.com/c/LarsRothschildHenriksen We really hope that this episode helps you on your GTD journey and, as always: If you have any feedback we'd love to hear from you via podcast@vitallearning.dk. Lastly, be sure to head on over to VitalLearning.eu to learn more about Getting Things Done® (GTD), Crucial Conversations and other offerings in the Nordics+!

If you want to know what kind of team culture really exists at a company, look very carefully at how product roadmaps are developed and executed. That, says Jenny Herald's guest on this episode of Dreams With Deadlines, is where you can see the “messy, bloody war” that may or may not be going on behind the scenes. Agile consultant Maarten Dalmijn, author of a forthcoming book about using sprint goals to deliver better products more efficiently, shares fascinating insights on project management and how to optimize it.Key things discussed Why agile software development isn't about delivering more stuff more quickly. How three common gaps in understanding, effort and results hobble projects. What the Cynefin Framework is and how to leverage its domains in managing complexity – along with chaos. Why less up-front planning and more adjustment along the way enables nimble project management and a quicker path to desired outcomes. Ways to identify and mediate opposing goals that can mire projects in constraint and micromanagement. The interplay between product goals, Scrums and OKRs. Show Notes [00:03:27] Diving into the “why” behind Maarten's decision to write his soon-to-be-published book – or any book – at this point in time. [00:04:30] What Scrum can look like (flexible and supportive of change) versus what people think it should be. [00:06:48] Why being agile is about more than just shipping more stuff faster. About Maarten's effort to define what makes a successful Scrum, the outputs that drive desired business and customer outcomes and obstacles commonly encountered. [00:08:57] "Succeeding with Sprint Goals: Empowering Teams with Better Ways of Delivering Value," which is forthcoming in May, is comprised of four parts. [00:09:32] Maarten shares in the book a personal story about a childhood exercise on a Dutch island that parallels the journey of discovery that is software development. [00:13:26] A closer look at the three gaps, a model originated by leadership strategist Stephen Bungay, including: The Knowledge Gap: What we know is less than we'd like to know. The Alignment Gap: What we're likely to do versus what we actually do. The Effects Gap: The difference between desired results and actual outcomes. [00:15:51] How to avoid getting lost in “the fog of beforehand,” which can result in overcompensation and analysis paralysis that constrains or slow decision-making. [00:18:28] Humble Planning: It's not about planning less. It's about reducing upfront planning in order to leave room for critical adjustments later in the project life cycle. [00:20:17] About Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework, designed to help manage complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis – a sort of field guide for decision-makers. [00:21:19] Delineating the domains encompassed by the Cynefin model and how they apply in a software development context: Confusion Clear Complicated Complex Chaotic [00:23:40] Understanding self-imposed friction and how rigid plans can lead to massive breakdowns in desired business outcomes. [00:27:16] How opposing goals fracture teams and slow – if not defeat – mutually desirable results while team alignment (internally and with partners) supports success. [00:30:21] Navigating “Roadmap Hell” and how a traditional project management mindset yield binary, inflexible processes that create conflict and self-defeat. [00:32:45] Want to see how agile a company culture really is? Look at their mindset around road mapping – that's where business and IT really come together and reveal the turf wars and rigidity! [00:34:06] Teasing out Part II – the “beating heart” – of Maarten's book: Sprint Goals: They depend on a clear understanding of intent, what the team is trying to achieve and why it matters. It's key to integrate foundational sprint goals into every Scrum. OKRs have a role to play in helping to prevent or break the feature factory loop. [00:36:32] Understanding the interplay between product goals, Scrums and OKRs; how they fit together in multi-faceted ways with multiple protocols. [00:38:42] About applying North Star Metrics – when and how they work and the constellation of factors that can influence measures and strategic adjustments. [00:41:42] What happens when companies don't use sprint goals? It disempowers teams. It restricts information, understanding and decision-making ability. It reduces flexibility. It leads to technical debt and prioritizing speed over quality. [00:44:42] Quick-Fire Questions for Maarten: What is Your Dream with a Deadline? Finishing up his book secure in the knowledge that he has delivered what he intended – and then some! How do you define a good sprint goal? It includes everything in the acronym FOCUS: Fun, Outcome-oriented, Collaborative, Ultimate and Singular. What's the takeaway he most wants for those who read his book? More joy, a sense of empowerment, flexibility, freedom, less effort that yields more results! Relevant links: "Succeeding with Sprint Goals: Empowering Teams with Better Ways of Delivering Value," by Maarten Dalmijn and Friso Dalmijn. More about leadership Strategist Stephen Bungay's The Three Gaps. More about Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Framework. About Our Guest:Maarten Dalmijn worked with award-winning start-ups, scale-ups and corporations in various roles before taking the leap as an independent Product Management, Agile and Scrum consultant. By blending the world of Product Management and Agile, Maarten helps teams beat the Feature Factory and uncover better ways of delivering value together.Follow Our Guest:Website | LinkedInFollow Dreams With Deadlines:Host | Company Website | Blog | Instagram | Twitter

In this episode of The Thinking Leader, Bryce Hoffman and Marcus Dimbleby talk with Dave Snowden, father of the Cynefin framework and Founder of The Cynefin Company. They discuss Dave's latest addition to the Cynefin framework, Estuarine Mapping. Dave talks about Estuarine Mapping's roots in the constructor theory of quantum mechanics, as well as its strong basis in philosophy and biology. Estuarine Mapping breaks down management into constraints and constructors, emphasizing the flows of possibility in any system. Dave also gives his opinion on Agile and how it has entered a commodification phase, particularly due to the introduction of SAFe. Bryce, Marucs, and Dave talk about the benefits of the different methodologies of Agile, how the Cynefin framework fits into Agile, and the future of Agile. In this episode: What is Estuarine Mapping and how it fits into the Cynefin ecosystem How to enable and govern your constraints to work for you How SAFe has caused the commodification of Agile Why companies don't always take the right path Listen to Dave's previous appearance on the show: https://www.redteamthinking.com/podcasts/the-thinking-leader/episodes/2147722270 Read Dave's EU manual here: https://op.europa.eu/s/yIv5 Sign up to the Red Team Thinking Community - Use the coupon code THINKINGLEADER for a free 30-day trial: https://community.redteamthinking.com/checkout/general-membership Want to find out if you're a Red Team Thinker? Click here to take a free assessment and get your personalized report: https://www.redteamthinking.com/rttassessment Visit our website: https://redteamthinking.com Watch this episode on YouTube: www.red-team.tv Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/redteamthinking/ Connect with Bryce: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brycehoffman/ Connect with Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusdimbleby/ Bestselling business author Bryce Hoffman and agility expert Marcus Dimbleby talk about decision making, strategy, resilience and leadership with some of the world's best CEOs, cognitive scientists, writers, and thinkers in this weekly podcast. Each episode offers new ideas and insights you can use to become a better leader and a better thinker – because bad leaders react, good leaders plan, and great leaders think!

  Jim talks with Dave Snowden about the document he co-authored, "Managing Complexity (And Chaos) In Times of Crisis." They discuss the Cynefin framework, its development into a complexity-informed framework, distinguishing complex from complicated, emergence, enabling constraints vs governing constraints, openness in complex systems, short-term teleology vs top-down causality, lines of flight, six sigma, Taylorism, distributed decision-making, the meaning of crisis, preparing for unknowable unknowns, plagues & heat deaths, false learnings of Covid, the order of origin of language & semiotics, building informal networks, exaptation, the right level of granularity, setting Draconian constraints, preserving optionality, anticipatory thinking, comprehensive journaling, LLMs & the recent open letter, the need for ethical awareness, scales of group decision-making, documenters & doers, the aporetic, Covid as a boon to complexity work, cadence vs velocity, ritual in American football, designing strategic interventions with stories, vector theory of change, constructor theory, making the cost of virtue less than the cost of sin, dispositional management, an upcoming book, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP11 - Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking "Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis," by Dave Snowden and others The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold J. Morowitz JRS EP138 - W. Brian Arthur on the Nature of Technology JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis 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. His 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.

Most software architects represent the environment in a very static way, and from that static representation, produce static software. As a result, the software structure they create is like a picture of a picture…used to describe what is actually a movie. This problem, rooted in a mechanistic worldview, is where Barry O'Reilly's Residuality Theory was born. Residuality Theory - in very few words - is a method of designing software architectures inspired by how the most talented architects do it: i.e. starting from the stress conditions that the system could eventually face as it operates. Barry O'Reilly is a software architect with 25 years of experience in the IT industry. He has held leading roles at global software companies and has spent many years educating architects and he is currently pursuing a PhD in Complexity Science and Software Engineering at The Open University. Residuality theory looks at the world not as a bunch of static things or still pictures, but as a constantly moving set of processes which we can't really see and grasp. It requires designers to move away from a static view of the system: by letting the architecture design be inspired by its “stressors”, O'Reilly thinks that not only can we design more resilient systems but also more efficient ones. In this episode Barry also describes the philosophical background behind the theory and why Residuality can be a viable approach to designing organizations too.  Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/barry-oreilly‎   Key highlights 

Digitalisation in an inherently complex activity, with unknowns being very high and experimentation required on an ongoing basis - there is no 'once and done'.  The changes in leadership framing, decision making and ways of working required are hugely under estimated in discussions and planning of 'transformation' and failure to engage with that could risk your success.Dave, Sjoukje & Rob talk with Dave Snowden, Director and Founder of the Cynefin Centre about his work on making sense of complexity, they discuss Dave's seminal work, the Cynefin Framework, how he has subsequently built on that thinking and how you apply that it in the digitalisation process of your organisation.  His insights are not to be missed.Finally, in this weeks Trend, we set out some perceived wisdom of what is required in digital leadership and see what stacks up.TLDR:00:43 Intros01:21 Cloud conversation with Dave Snowden24:53 Six Tips For CEOs for Leading Digital Transformations  40:31 Wainwright walks! Further Reading:https://thecynefin.co/

Dave Snowden is the Chief Scientific Officer of Cynefin. Head of Knowledge Management for 30 years. Author of Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World (https://tinyurl.com/4958x362)   When did knowledge management start in the 90s? The ultimate disciplinary field What is intellectual capital? Intellectual property What is the anarcha book? Knowledge management is information management What is relevant knowledge? What is messy coherence? What is exaptive innovation? How do you add value to organizations? Focus What is the difference between teleological idealism and realism? What is the KM process? Find out what is keeping middle management awake at night Do not want to be a CEO pet project How do you map what a company already knows? How do you map current knowledge from the things that keep people awake at night? Where are we on the cycle now? At the early stage of the hype cycle What is complexity theory? How do you map the unknown unknowns of a company? How do you create resiliency within an organization? How do you build informal networks across the organizations? European field guide on complexity management Does getting involved with tactics take away from strategy? Trying to make the cost of virtue greater than the cost of sin? How has knowledge management changed with Covid and remote work? How do you replicate pheromones in a remote environment? What are hexis? How does knowledge transfer work? How do you make decisions that keep options open? How do you create processes that stop ambiguity? Why are stories of linear processes greatly exaggerated? How do you deal with too much information? Focus on connecting people and storing information Entangled trios with task from different groups Run that every three months Secret is not to take an information centric approached Knowledge is only ever volunteered, not conscripted We always know more than we can say and we can always say more than we can write down What is necessary ambiguity? What is the role of narrative when it connects tacit to explicit information? Narrative asks you questions that make you think differently Lessons learning rather than lessons learned 90% of knowledge is walking out the door The danger of machine learning is dumbing down how we know things THE RIGHT SOURCE DATA IS THE KEY Machine learning is inductive  Feed ML better training data How did you get the role at IBM at knowledge management? Institute for knowledge management at IBM IBM center for complexity studies  How do you measure knowledge management? outcome/ouput measures Fine with predictable systems Outcomes produce a perverse incentive Vector measure for intensity of effort How do you structure KPIs? What are the power dynamics of exchange? Fear of abuse is the main reason people seek knowledge in organizations Art comes before words before human language Semiotics is symbols and signs UK is the most mapped country in the world We need renaissance instead of an enlightenment What is catholic with a small c? How do knowledge processers in goods work? What are things we need to know about oral tradition? What did you learn about debating without  What is a scientific model of rationality? What do we know about how humans make decisions? Adjacent possible, the frozen 2 strategy Avoid at all costs defining KM ideals Identify 30 micromodels Putting these into a matrix with knowledge  Less about me as an expert trying to understand How do you respect human judgment? What are the wrong cognitive models? What is assemblage? How is culture inherited? What is morphic resonance? What is the connection between culture and epigenetics? Eva Djblonka books on epigenetics Eva Jablonka How does RNA change epigenetics? Do humans work at the quantum level? What do you know about quantum biology? How do you reduce things to the smallest granularity possible? What is messy coherence? Why is the internet spreading clusters of prejudice? What is an assemblage structure? What is it like to be converted catholic rather than born that way? What is the relationship between abstractions and religion? What is a poly crisis? Exaptation  How is China distributed in its decision-making? What are microsacrfices? How do you change the ideation culture?  

Bio Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is a pioneer in the Beyond Budgeting movement and has been heading up the implementation of Beyond Budgeting at Equinor (formerly Statoil), Scandinavia's largest company. He led a similar initiative in Borealis in the mid-nineties, one of the companies that inspired the Beyond Budgeting model. He has helped numerous other companies globally getting started on a Beyond Budgeting journey.  Bjarte is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT).  He is a popular international business speaker and Beyond Budgeting coach, and a winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award. Bjarte is the author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the Performance Potential", where he writes about his almost thirty years long Beyond Budgeting journey.  His new book “This is Beyond Budgeting – A Guide to more Adaptive and Human Organizations” with a foreword by Gary Hamel is just out. Bjarte is available for speaking engagements and select consulting work through Bogsnes Advisory.  Episode Highlights  04:33 New book ‘This is Beyond Budgeting' 07:40 Beyond Budgeting 16:25The issue with the current performance appraisal process 19:45 The case for change 31:00 Becoming braver 33:50 ‘Losing' control 49:10 Reflect on the risk picture  Books ·         This is Beyond Budgeting: A Guide to More Adaptive and Human Organizations by Bjarte Bogsnes This Is Beyond Budgeting: A Guide to More Adaptive and Human Organizations: Amazon.co.uk: Bogsnes, Bjarte: 9781394171248: Books ·         Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential by Bjarte Bogsnes Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential: Amazon.co.uk: Bogsnes, Bjarte: 9781119152477: Books ·         Maverick by Ricardo Semler https://www.amazon.co.uk/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0712678867 ·         Humanocracy by Gary Hamel et al https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humanocracy-Creating-Organizations-Amazing-People/dp/B08F2TCKWN ·         The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Management-Gary-Hamel/dp/1422102505  Websites ·         Beyond Budgeting Institute https://bbrt.org ·         Bogsnes Advisory (Bjarte's consulting firm) https://bogsnesadvisory.com  Social media ·         LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjarte-bogsnes-41557910/ ·         Twitter:  @bbogsnes  Guest Intro (Ula Ojiaku) Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku Hello, Bjarte. Thank you for being my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast, it's a great honour. I remember meeting you for the first time last year in Copenhagen at the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, and you kindly accepted. So thank you for being here today. Bjarte Bogsnes Thank you for the invitation. Ula Ojiaku Great. So could you tell us any experience that you might have had growing up, that would have led to where you are today? Bjarte Bogsnes Well, the author Douglas Adams, he once wrote that: “I might not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I needed to be”, and that's basically the story of my life because it was in no way given that we should sit here today and talk about Beyond Budgeting, because my career started in a very different place. I'm a finance guy by education and after I finished my business studies, I joined a company called Statoil, it's today called Equinor, it's Scandinavia's largest company, it's an energy company, and my first management job in this company, the year after I joined, was actually Head of the Corporate Budget Department. So I have been heading up more budget processes in my career than I want to be reminded about in that job and in many other Finance Manager jobs in different, you know, jobs. I've been working abroad quite a lot for the same company. So I used to be a big fan of this way of managing, there is actually an interview with me from the company magazine at the time where I'm praising the brilliance of budgeting, and I hope that there are no more copies around. And another reason I like that quote from Adams is that I come from a teacher family. My parents were teachers, my sister was a teacher, so I was in the way, the black sheep in the family because I went for Business Studies. But these days I really feel that I'm back in the fold, because I feel that that is what I'm doing now, teaching, and trying to make a positive difference, just like my parents and my sister did. Ula Ojiaku So teaching, it seems like it's a full circle, but you wouldn't have gotten here without, you know, still going through that process of working in business. Bjarte Bogsnes No, I think I'm very glad I have that background because it means that I know what I'm talking about. I know most of the fix in the budget book and some of them are quite nasty, and so when I would discuss with managers, finance people and others then, I mean, I know the arguments, and I know how to respond. Another important part of this journey was that I am one of the few finance persons, I believe, who has also worked in Human Resources. I was heading up the HR function in a large European company for some years, and that experience was also a big eyeopener for me when it comes to the leadership, the people side of Beyond Budgeting, which is just as big as the kind of finance process side. Ula Ojiaku Nice. Now, I mean, we will be getting to talk about your book, which is This Is Beyond Budgeting, that was released this February, 2023. Congratulations! Bjarte Bogsnes Thank you. Ula Ojiaku What I noticed was that the difference between This is Budgeting, I mean your, your second book and, Implementing Beyond Budgeting, which preceded this, this is actually a quicker read, you know, smaller, it seems like it was condensed and it was done on purpose. Could you tell us about this book, the main message? Bjarte Bogsnes Yes. Now, first of all, I mean, that is a correct observation. This is a shorter book, on purpose, and the simple reason is that we need to reach people, busy people, with limited time to read, and they don't have time to read bricks. So, yes, it is a shorter book, it is recapping some key messages from my earlier books, but there's also a lot of new stuff in it. I have learned a lot since the other book you've shown was published back in 2016. I've written a lot, I've worked with a lot of great organisations. So, again, a lot of new learning also. And I really do hope to reach, I did reach a number of executives, managers with my previous book, and I know, because of nice feedback from many of them. But there are so many more of them that still needs to hear this message. So that is why it's the shorter one. And I'm also very grateful and happy that Gary Hamel agreed to write the foreword. I mean, he is such an inspiration when it comes to management innovation and has been for such a long time. I mean, hearing Gary speak is simply mind-blowing. I mean, he is dynamite as a speaker and I think he's written a great foreword, and there are also some, quite some nice endorsements from important people in the agile community and kind of borderline agile community, Rita McGrath, Dave Snowden and Julian Birkinshaw, Jos de Blok, the founder of Buurtzorg. So I'm also very happy that these people took the time to read it and write these nice endorsements. Ula Ojiaku Indeed, we will go into some key points in the book for the listeners or viewers, they would have to buy it to go through it, to know what it's all about. But can you tell us, because there might be some people listening to this that don't know, what Beyond Budgeting is all about. Bjarte Bogsnes No, that's obviously an important question and let me start with saying that Beyond Budgeting is a somewhat misleading name, we know. It was, Beyond Budgeting was invented, developed 25 years ago, and back then there was nothing called agility, agile, or business agility, so if that label had been around at the same time, maybe that would've been the name of this. But it is basically about business agility. And, as the subtitle in my book states, it's about creating organisations that are more adaptive and more human, and Beyond Budgeting is very much about changing traditional management. But at the core of traditional management, you find not just the budgeting process, but also the budgeting mindset, built on the assumptions that the world is predictable and plannable and that you can't trust people. These are assumptions that we really challenge in Beyond Budgeting, because it isn't true. So if you want to change traditional management, you need to do something with the elephant in the room, the budgeting process. And that is something that, if you look at Agile, I think Agile has kind of avoided that elephant throughout all these years. It's been regarded as something unavoidable, a lower business, which isn't true, because more and more companies are skipping this way, or managing. And talking about Agile, I'm a big fan of Agile, but what I'm going to say now is not criticising Agile, but I think it would also help to explain what Beyond Budgeting is. I think part of the success of what I call early Agile has to do with its birthplace in software development, and how teams are working. And I think in those early years, I think what executives in big companies, what they observed and heard about Agile was better projects, faster projects, more value, more engaged people, and who can be against that, wonderful, I love it, come on guys, Agile is great. Then for obvious reasons, companies started to scale Agile, right? And at one level it kind of reaches the executives and has consequences, implications for these guys' beliefs and behaviours. And then it isn't that it wasn't that fun anymore. I think that's one reason why scaling Agile has been difficult. Another reason is that you can't scale Agile using the same language and tools and frameworks that did wonders back in those days. I mean, for executives who don't play rugby and don't know Agile, they might think that Scrum is some kind of skin disease, or Slack is about laziness or that Sprint is about running faster, or continuous delivery is about 24/7. Right? So, I mean we need a language here that these guys can understand and relate to, and Beyond Budgeting is providing that language. They might still disagree, but they understand what we are talking about. And the last issue here is that, again, Agile was not designed as a way to run an enterprise. So when you try to scale it, these holes in Agile become visible, like how do you manage resources?  How do you do forecasting? How do you evaluate performance? How do you reward? Right? And these are the holes that Beyond Budgeting is filling, because, again, Beyond Budgeting was designed from day one as an Agile way of running an organisation. And that is why we never talk about scaling agile, because it comes scaled, it is scaled, right? But this is also why Beyond Budgeting in Agile is such a beautiful fit, and why so many companies on Agile transformation journeys are reaching out to us because they reach these insights and learnings and understand that there can be no true agile transformation without Beyond Budgeting. Ula Ojiaku That's an excellent overview of Beyond Budgeting. And I understand, you know, in Beyond Budgeting, there are 10 principles, and there is the leadership principles, if I may say, and then the management processes. Do you want to talk a bit more about this, please? Bjarte Bogsnes Yeah. So there're actually a 12 principles, and you're right, six of them are on leadership and six of them are on management processes, and if you look at what Beyond Budgeting is saying about leadership, it is not necessarily that unique. There are many other great communities and models out there saying similar things about leadership, right? Talking about purpose and autonomy, transparency, values, and so on. But very often these models and communities haven't reflected very much, it seems like, about what kind of management processes are needed to activate these leadership intentions, because what is often the case in organisations is that they might have the best intentions on the leadership side. They say the right things, they write the right things, but that doesn't help if the management processes are expressing the exact opposite use. Classic example, it doesn't help to talk loud and warm about how fantastic employees we have on board, and we would be nothing without you, and we trust you so much, but not that much. Of course, we need detailed travel budgets, right? This is hypocrisy, and people notice and the words become hollow, because the management processes has a different message. So that is why there is a strong focus in Beyond Budgeting on coherence between the two, between what is said and what is done, right. So I think that is one and very important aspect with Beyond Budgeting. The other is that, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think any other community out there has cracked the budget problem. The budgeting process is something that everybody complains about. It's maybe the most loathed corporate process out there, followed by performance appraisals, but again, it's kind of been left untouched until Beyond Budgeting came and offered great alternatives to this quite outdated way of managing because, it is fascinating, there are not too many other technologies applied in companies today that are a hundred years old, but that is the age of budgeting invented in 1922 by James O McKinsey, the founder of McKinsey Consulting, right. And I never met Mr. McKinsey, but I don't think he was an evil man. I actually think he had the best of intentions. I mean, he wanted to help organisations perform better. This was management innovation a hundred years ago, and it probably worked a hundred years ago, because the world was completely different, the quality and the capability, competence of people were very different, but today things have changed and that is something that our leadership and management models must reflect. Ula Ojiaku Okay, there's something you said, you know, the two things or two activities, that are probably most loathed in organisations would be the budgeting process and the performance appraisal. And you've talked a bit about the budgeting. So, for the performance appraisal, what exactly about it doesn't sit well with people? Bjarte Bogsnes Oh, that list is long. First of all, I mean, it's just like budgets, as I will come back to, has different purposes, so has the performance appraisal, I mean, one purpose is meant to be learning and development, that's a positive one, but another purpose is to determine rewards, right. So, if you are my manager and I'm coming in to a performance appraisal with you and if my mind is mainly on the reward side, the last thing I want to share with you is where I have learning and development needs, right? I want to brag about all my successes and how great I am and so on, and vice versa. So, kind of combining this in one process, with one outcome is meaningless, and also this focus on rewards and, which very often is about individual bonus, which is one of the problems in traditional management that Beyond Budgeting is strongly against, we believe in common bonus schemes, driven by joint performance instead of individual performance. So it is typically an annual event, right, an annual stunt, it's meaningless to talk about feedback and development once a year, that needs to happen much more continuously, right? So, I think budgeting is a bigger problem, it makes more damage, by all means. But performance appraisals come and the whole low performance management notion, it does almost as much damage. And by the way, that is a label I really dislike, performance management, right? Think about it. What are we really saying? Aren't we saying that if we don't manage your performance, there will be no performance, right? That is not a very positive message, and I also think there's quite a lot of illusion playing out here. I think our ability to manage performance, among knowledge workers in today's people and business realities is actually quite limited compared to what managers and HR people and some finance people often tend to think. So it's an awful label, and, you know, we need to stop thinking about managing people, we need to start thinking about how we can create conditions for people to perform, how we can enable performance, not managing performance. Ula Ojiaku That's a great point Bjarte. So what's the solution? What is the solution that Beyond Budgeting is going to offer? And the next one following it would be, how do we apply this? Bjarte Bogsnes Oh, most people actually who are blank on Beyond Budgeting, when they hear about this, they like it, they see that this makes sense. It's only common sense in a way, this is about taking reality seriously, and it is addressing so many of the pain points they experience working, especially in big companies. But then of course the next question is, well, how do we get started? And we have two general recommendations here. The first one is about the case for change, which simply means that the whole organisation, or as many as possible, has to understand that all those complaints about traditional management, including budgeting, the time it takes, the gaming, the narrow performance language, the outdated assumptions. I mean, these are more than irritating itches, right? These are symptoms of a big and serious problem, namely that this way of thinking, this way of managing originally meant to help organisations perform better is today doing the opposite. It has become more of a barrier than a support for getting out the best possible performance, and the more there is a common understanding of what kind of problems the organisation is trying to solve, the easier everything afterwards is. Because if you are unclear about that, I mean, how can you make your choices about alternatives, right? But the clearer the case for change, the better the problems are defined, the easier it is when you have a choice of design, should we go this way or this way? Well, which solution would best solve the problems they are trying to solve? So the case for change has to be created, a solid one, then getting started. We know that many, having seen the Beyond Budgeting principles for the first time, might feel this is a bit overwhelming, right? With all these bold ambitions around leadership, these major changes towards the traditional management processes. I mean, it is a mouthful, it is quite a comprehensive leadership and management model. And if some are kind of a bit scared, I can understand that. If that is the case, we have a very simple, tested, practical, logical way of getting started, which is more budget-oriented than Beyond Budgeting itself, but it is a great way to get started, and it is simply about asking a very simple question, namely, why do you budget? Right? What's the purpose of a budget? And most people that I've asked that question, when they have thought a little bit about that question, they actually realise that there are more than one purpose with a budget in a typical, and when I say budget, I mean more than project budgets, more than cost budgets, I'm talking profit loss, cash flow, balance sheet budgets, the whole finance definition. And the purpose of these budgets are the following. First, companies make budgets to set targets. It could be financial targets, sales targets, production targets, right? So that's one purpose. Second, companies and organisations use these budgets to try to understand what next year could look like in terms of profit and loss cashflow. So it is a kind of forecast of what next year could look like. So, that's the second purpose. The third purpose is resource allocation. The budget is used as a mechanism for handing out bags of money to the organisation on operational costs and on invests, and it might seem very efficient, practical to solve all three purposes in one process and one set of numbers. But that is also the problem, because what happens if we move into the budgeting process in a company, and upstairs finance want to understand next year's profit and loss and they start on the revenue side asking responsible people, what's your best number for next year? But everybody knows that what I'm sending upstairs will most likely come back to me as a target for next year and often with a bonus attached to it. And that insight might do something to the level or numbers submitted, and I think you know, which way those numbers will go, namely down. Moving to the cost side, operational cost investments. The same people, other people are asked, what's your best numbers for next year? But everybody knows that this is my only shot at getting access to resources for next year, and some might also remember that 20% cut from last year and that insight and that memory might also do something to the level of numbers submitted. And I can see you're smiling a bit, and a lot of people do. Ula Ojiaku I'm smiling because I'm just kind of thinking of incidents in past, you know, in past organisations that it has happened. You know, you just sandbag it and give a very high number, knowing that there might be a challenge. Bjarte Bogsnes And you're in good company when you're smiling, but at the same time, I mean, this is actually quite a serious problem, not just because it destroys the quality of numbers, but even more because it actually stimulates behaviour, which I would call at least borderline unethical. The road-balling, the gaming, the sandbagging, the resource hoarding, I mean, all the kind of behaviours that we wouldn't like to see between colleagues. At the same time, I'm not blaming anyone for behaving like this, right? Because then people are just responding to the system we have designed for them to operate in. So if we want to change behaviours, it's not about fixing people, it's about fixing systems, which again, will change behaviours. So that's the problem, three different purposes in one process, in one set of numbers. Fortunately, there is a very simple solution. We can still, and in many cases, should still do these three things, but we should do them in three different processes because these are different things. A target, that's an aspiration, it's what we want to happen. While a forecast is an expectation, it's what we think will happen whether we like what we see or not, right? Brutally honest, the expected outcome. And last but not least, resource allocation is about optimisation of what is often scarce resources. When we then have separated, then a target can be more ambitious than a forecast, which it typically should be. But the most important thing is that that separation opens up for big and important improvement discussions. We can now improve each of these in ways impossible when it was all bundled in one process and one set of numbers. So we can have great discussions around targets. How do we set better targets that really inspire and motivate people, without people feeling stretched? How can we set targets that are more robust against the volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity, and the ambiguity out there? Forecasting, how can we get the gaming and the politics out to the forecasting? And we don't need a million details here, we are looking at the future. There's uncertainty, which is a big difference on looking at the past through accounting, where details and decimals make sense and is often required. But looking at the future, there is uncertainty and that must have implications. So this isn't a good example of, in this stuff, we have to leave behind that accounting mindset that is applied for describing the past recounting, right? When we look at the future, then we need to accept the ambiguity, the complexity, and not just accept it, but embrace it. And last but not least, resource allocation. How can we find better and more intelligent, more effective ways of managing cost than what a certain Mr. McKinsey could offer us a hundred years ago, under very different circumstances? And this is the important discussion, that separation of purposes that just enables these improvement discussions. And in these discussions, having these discussions that is a kind of not scary organic backdoor into those 12 principles, especially in your leadership, right? Target setting, what really motivates people? Resource allocation, again, do we need detailed travel budgets, if we say we trust people? So, again, it is pure logic. I have yet to meet a CEO, a CFO, that didn't come up with that list of three purposes, didn't understand, when helped a little bit, that that's problematic, and didn't see that there are much better ways when you can improve each one separately. And last but not least, we can also then do something with the cadence, with the rhythm of each one. So now we can organise each of the three: target setting, forecasting, resource allocation, on a rhythm that not just reflects the kind of business we're in, but also the kind of purpose, right. So you would set targets or chase targets much less, I mean, not that often as you would change your forecast, and resource allocation is something that you would do all the time, right. So, and also another beauty of this approach is that when people tell me it's impossible to operate without the budget, then my response is, having explained this, that here we still do what that budget try to do for us, but because we have separated, we can do each one in so much better ways, right? And when people say, well, the bank want a budget, the reason why banks ask for budgets is that they have never really realised that there was something else to ask for. So if you can tell the bank, I won't give you a budget, but I will give you my targets and my reliable forecasts, the bank will be more than happy. So I'm spending a little bit of time on this because it is the more finance-oriented part of Beyond Budgeting, but it is a great way to get started. And I helped so many companies over the years and with the big majority, this is where we started out and what we observe over and over again, is in having those improvement discussions the first year, people are a little bit cautious about how radical shall we be, but then it turns out that things work. And what was scary today is not scary tomorrow because it did work, which means that the appetite for being braver increases, so we typically see that organisations get braver along the way, and when it comes to targets, some, after some years of setting better targets, actually decide to skip targets, right? They realised that they are absolutely able to create direction, create motivation, evaluate performance without traditional targets, some even skip forecasting. I haven't heard anyone skipping resource allocation yet that you need to have, but my point is that people and companies tend to get braver. And a final important message, very few companies that have embarked on a Beyond Budgeting journey go back, very few. I don't need one hand to count the number, and the few who did go back, the reasons fall in two categories. Either a flawed implementation, typically, an unclear, weak case for change, or starting only with rolling forecasting. The other typical reason has to do with a significant change in top management at the very early part of the journey. That's actually something I've experienced myself. Ula Ojiaku Great explanation, Bjarte. So you mentioned, you know, about separating the budget into three distinct parts, the target, the forecast, the resource allocation. Now at the organisations where you've implemented this, did you get any resistance from, you know, the top level leaders, managers, because you know, traditionally whoever has the budget, who controls the money, tends to wield power in any organisation. Was there any resistance? Bjarte Bogsnes Well, I think there has been maybe more fear and confusion than outright resistance, even if the resistance sometimes is hidden behind those two. And of course, one word that keeps coming up over and over again when I discuss Beyond Budgeting with people is the word control, right? The fear, and the context is of course the fear of losing control, but the interesting thing with that word is that, when I ask people to be a bit more specific to define what they mean with control, after people have said cost control, actually many go quiet. They struggle with defining what they are so afraid of losing, and that is quite interesting. And if you look at Oxford Dictionary's definition of control, it is the power to influence people's behaviour or the course of events which, again, then for an organisation typically means controlling people and controlling the future. And again, those are the two assumptions that we challenge in Beyond Budgeting, because it is about not trusting people and thinking that the future is predictable and untenable and on control, what I often tell these people is that, yes, you will lose control, but the control that you lose are the bad controls. What you will get more of is good controls, and I wouldn't call that losing control. And one example of a good control in Beyond Budgeting is transparency, right? And let me give you one classical example of how it can be applied, ad this is a real example from a Swiss's pharmaceutical company called Roche, quite big, and they are today on a Beyond Budgeting journey, but some years ago they did a very interesting experiment around travel cost. In the pilot, they kicked out the travel budget, and most travel groups and regulations, and replaced it with full transparency. So with a few exceptions, everybody could see everything. If you travelled, to where did you fly, sleep, eat, cheaper, expensive, open for your colleagues to see and vice versa. And guess what happened with travel costs in that pilot? We'll Go Down Costs came down through a very simple self-regulating control mechanism. This was about tearing up pages in that rules book instead of doing the opposite. At the same time, we need to remember that transparency is a very powerful mechanism. It has to be applied with wisdom. So if it becomes naming and shaming, it doesn't work. And that is why I would always recommend companies to position transparency more from a learning perspective than from a control perspective. I mean, how can we learn from each other if everything is secret? And that control, that shock control effect, you would get in any case as a nice side effect. But again, it must be applied with wisdom. It is fascinating that the biggest fear managers have is to lose control, but what they haven't understood is that a lot of these controls are nothing but illusions of control. Ula Ojiaku That's very interesting. And another thing that I know that some, or if not most of the listeners will be wondering is, okay, you've talked about how, and in your… in both your books… actually the Implementing Beyond Budgeting and your latest one, This is Beyond Budgeting, you did mention something about “you can't get rid of Command and Control via Command and Control”. And in that part of the book, you were saying something that in terms of implementing it - it's something that you recommend the organisations do themselves. Can you elaborate on this? Cause someone, you know, might wonder, is it that you are against getting consulting help? Bjarte Bogsnes So, consultants and Beyond Budgeting. I think what you refer to is, I have a chapter about implementation advice, and one of these is that nobody can do this for you. And what I mean with that, and I explained this in the book, is that, I mean, I'm not saying that companies shouldn't ask for external help, and I'm offering external help, but what they typically should ask for is some inspiration, some guidance on implementation, connections to other companies that have implemented this, but it is not something that an organisation can delegate to consultants. This is not something consultants can do for you. You have to be in the driver's seat, and the more transformation- oriented your ambitions are, the more the executives need to take this role themselves. And I'm saying this because implementing Beyond Budgeting can be anything from a more cautious improvement of finance processes to a radical organisational transformation, and anything in between. And the higher your ambition levels, the higher the ownership in the organisation has to be. When it comes to the consultants, and I also write about this in my book, this is something that has happened just over the last few years, that is that the big consulting companies have gotten seriously interested in Beyond Budgeting. That was not the case before. And the reason for it is that their clients are getting interested, asking for it. And so most of these would like to work with us in some form or shape. Ula Ojiaku Sorry to interrupt, Bjarte. So by ‘us', you mean the Beyond Budgeting Institute)? Bjarte Bogsnes Yeah. Yes. They want to work with the Beyond Budgeting advisory, the Beyond Budgeting Institute. And again, we are not naive. I mean, we come from different places, we might have different agendas here, but at the same time, these companies, they have channels and muscles that we don't have to the same extent, at least not yet. So we have actually decided to say yes to work with them, because we would rather help them and their clients succeed than to stand on the outside and watch them fail, right? So, we have been working, are working with a number of big companies, together with some of these big consulting companies. Ula Ojiaku That's great. And if I may just point to, because you spearheaded this in Statoil, now known as Equinor, and actually this was, I read this in your Implementing Beyond Budgeting book that your approach was based on two principles, no fixed implementation schedule, and no consultants. So how did that work, not having an implementation schedule. Bjarte Bogsnes Well, if we take the first implementation in Borealis back in the mid-nineties where we had a chance to do this, before there was anything called Beyond Budgeting, this company that was partly owned by Statoil, then, I mean, this wasn't an issue because there was no consultants. Even if we had wanted consultants, there was no one to reach out to. So then it was quite easy.  In Statoil, later Equinor, it was more about the fact that I had that implementation experience from Borealis, which kind of, I became some kind of an in-house consultant. And again, as I said, I'm not saying that companies shouldn't use consultants, but you have to use the right ones and use them in the right way. Ula Ojiaku Okay. Thanks for clarifying. Okay, it seems like, you know, Beyond Budgeting would be something that we should seriously consider implementing in our organisation. What else should we be aware of?” Bjarte Bogsnes Well, I think it is important for everybody, also executives to understand that Beyond Budgeting changes work and how you work in a positive way, and for executives, I mean, the role becomes more strategic, more longer term. It's more about coaching, it's less about micromanagement, and maybe most important, there's a new credibility between what is said and what is done, right, which the organisation will notice. When it comes to other functions like finance, it also has a very positive effect. The job becomes much more business-oriented, less annual stunts, more forward-looking, less backwards-looking, more cooperation with other functions like for instance, human resources. And I can't think of a single finance person in Equinor that wants to go back to the old days and the time before 2005. And I think that provides an indication as well. And another key message is that what we have been talking about today, it will happen. It will happen. I don't care if it will be called Beyond Budgeting, or business agility or whatever, that is not important. But in 15, 20 years time, maybe earlier, when we look back at what was mainstream management in 2023, I think we will smile, maybe even have a laugh, just like we today smile about the days before the internet or before the smartphone. And how long ago is that? It's not that long ago. So organisations have a choice here, they can choose to be early movers or vanguards, understanding that you can get just as much competitive advantage out of management innovation as you can get from technology innovation. Or they can choose to be laggards, dragged into this as one of the last ones or anything in between. And every year you wait, competitors will be ahead of you. And I don't think that choice should be very difficult, and again, it should b. easier to make today, when so many organisations are embarking on a Beyond Budgeting journey. It was a bit tougher and a bit more scary 25 years ago when, when this started out, right. But again, it will happen. Ula Ojiaku I'm going to ask you a question I ask all my guests. What books have influenced you and would you recommend to the audience? Bjarte Bogsnes Well, many, many years ago, when I was an ardent budget supporter and believer, I read Maverick by Ricardo Semler, the former CEO of Semco, and I was mind-blown, simply mind-blown. It, kind of yeah, it really, really moved me, even if I kind of didn't have the chance to adopt any of that thinking before, many, many years later. Lately, again, I've mentioned Gary Hamel, and his co-author, Michele Zanini, they have written great books. The last book Humanocracy is a great one, and, a previous one by Gary Hamel, The Future of Management is also a book that I really like and I recall giving that book to the CEO of Statoil quite early on the journey, and he liked it so much that he gave it as a Christmas present to the rest of the executive committee. Ula Ojiaku Thank you, and of course I would add to the list This is Beyond Budgeting. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way of getting to you? Bjarte Bogsnes Yeah, then I will think about this as getting in touch with us, and when I say us, I mean that there is a core team of five, six people who are kind of driving this. And we have a website called, bbrt.org. That will give you more information about the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, which is a global network of companies interested in this and individuals interested in this. And that is where you can sign up as company member, individual member. And I also recommend to subscribe to our newsletter, and if you're curious about this guy and all of this then I made that difficult decision a few years ago to leave Equinor, to start Bogsnes Advisory to be able to work full-time with this. And so I have my own small simple website called bogsnesadvisory.com And on bbrt.org you will also find a list of more books that I can highly recommend on this topic. Ula Ojiaku That's great. Are you on social media, Bjarte? Bjarte Bogsnes I am, I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter, and the only thing I write about is this stuff. There are no cats and dogs and grandchildren or anything, so that's why it's highly appreciated if somebody wants to follow me. Ula Ojiaku So any final words for the audience in terms of an ask? Is there something you want them to do? Bjarte Bogsnes Reflect a little bit about the risk picture here, because there is a very compelling risk picture, right? If you are afraid that it won't work in your organisation, well, what's really the downside risk? Because if you're right, if it doesn't, you can go back to the old way tomorrow. Not the single soul in the company would've forgotten how to budget as one example, and compare that minimal downside risk with that huge upside potential performance-wise. And I'm saying when this is working, not if it's working, as we have seen in so many organisations. So a very compelling risk picture. I think that is worth reflecting on as well. Ula Ojiaku Well, it's been great speaking with you, Bjarte. Thank you so much for those wise words and the advice, and I would again say to you, the audience, please go grab your copy of Bjarte's book, This Is Beyond Budgeting, which is now out. And I hope we'll definitely have another opportunity to have a conversation and speak about Beyond Budgeting, since you don't want to talk about any other thing. Anyway, so thank you again, Bjarte. It's a pleasure having you on. Bjarte Bogsnes Thank you, Ula. Thank you very much for the invitation. Ula Ojiaku That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

In this conversation with Bonnitta Roy we explore Bonnitta's key critiques of Dave Snowden's views on developmental Stage Theory and metamodernism, the empirical fallacy, the nature of mind, action protocols for development and moving away from Stage Theory. Bonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from limiting patterns of thought. She teaches a masters course in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology at the Graduate Institute. Her teaching highlights the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge. Bonnitta is the author of the popular Medium publication Our Future at Work. She is an associate editor of Integral Review where you can also find her articles on process approaches to consciousness, perception, and metaphysics. Visit coachesrising.com to see our acclaimed online coach trainings and other offerings.

Bio Dave West is the Product Owner and CEO at Scrum.org. In this capacity, he engages with partners, and the community to drive Scrum.org's strategy and the overall market position of Scrum. Prior to joining Ken Schwaber and the team at Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company's executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organisations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile-based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise. Email –  Dave.west@scrum.org Twitter - @davidjwest LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjustinwest   Interview Highlights Growing up with dyslexia 03:10 & 10:20 Water-Scrum-Fall 07:40 Psychological safety 15:40 Lilian the rockstar - 'who have you helped today?' 18:55 Is 'project' a taboo word? 21:53 'Humble and Kind' - not just for country music 44:30 Books ·         Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Dave West, Brett McLaughlin and Gary Pollice https://www.amazon.co.uk/Head-First-Object-Oriented-Analysis-Design/dp/0596008678/ ·         The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum by Dave West, Kurt Bittner and Patricia Kong https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nexus-Framework-Scaling-Scrum-Continuously/dp/0134682661 ·         ARTICLE: Why Kindness Matters by Dave West https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-kindness-matters ·         Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L Friedman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp/0141985755 ·         Scrum: A Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scrum-Pocket-Companion-Practice-Publishing/dp/9087537204 ·         The Professional Scrum Series by various authors https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+professional+scrum+series&crid=1WVNY1VHR0QAQ&sprefix=professional+scrum+series ·         Zombie Scrum by Christiaan Verijs, Johannes Schartau and Barry Overeem https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Scrum-Survival-Guide-Professional/dp/0136523269 ·         The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations (The Professional Scrum Series) by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, Laurens Bonnema, foreword by Dave West https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Agile-Leader-Growing-Organizations-dp-0137591519/dp/0137591519/ Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku (Guest Intro): Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. It's my honour to introduce my guest for this episode. He is Dave West. Dave is the CEO of Scrum.org and prior to joining Scrum.org as CEO, he led the development of the Rational Unified Process, also known as RUP with IBM. He was also Chief Product Officer for Tasktop Technologies and Managing Director of the Americas at Ivar Jacobson Consulting. He is a widely published author of several articles and research reports, as well as the books The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. In this conversation, Dave talked about growing up in the council estates, being raised by his grandparents who were of great positive influence in his life, especially his grandmother. He also talked about navigating the challenges of being dyslexic, especially as a student in secondary school with the silver lining being that he got introduced to computers. Dave also gave his perspective on one of the ongoing “agile wars” quote unquote, on the concept of projects and whether they still have a place in agile or not. Without further ado ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dave, I am sure you would find it very, very interesting, relevant and insightful. Thanks again for listening. Ula Ojiaku So we have on this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, Dave West, who is the CEO of Scrum.org. Dave, it's a pleasure to have you on this show, thank you for making the time. Dave West Oh, well, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad we've finally managed to make the time to do this. It's great to talk to you. Ula Ojiaku Yes, well, the honour is mine. Let's start by talking about, you know, getting to know about the man, Dave. Can you, you know, tell us a bit about that? Dave West Yeah, I'll try not to bore your audience. So I was brought up on a council estate in a little town called Market Harborough, just outside Leicester. I lived with my grandparents, and which has definitely, my grandmother's definitely shaped who I am, I think, which is fantastic. So I got into computers, sort of a little bit by accident. I'm dyslexic and I found school, particularly secondary school, very challenging. I don't know if any of your audiences had a similar experience, but, you know, I went from a very protected environment and secondary school is a, oh my gosh, it's like an experience that could scare any human being. And so my dyslexia really was a challenge there and there was a teacher at secondary school called Phil Smith. He drove a sports car, he was sort of like that young, you know those teachers that you remember from school that are the good looking young ones. And he ran a computer lab and it had, you know, RS236, it had these really old computers, well, now we would look at them, they were brand new at the time, computers and some BBC model As and some other things. And I helped him and he gave me a lot of time in the lab and it was my sort of like escape. So I got very into computing and helped him and helped other teachers who were rubbish, I'm not going to lie, with computing. So that allowed me then, you know, I went through, managed to survive school, went to a further education college called Charles Keene where I studied, well I did a computing course, so not traditional A'levels and all of that. And then got into Huddersfield that was a poly at the time, became a University whilst I was there. And I think that that gave me a great opportunity, it was a fantastic university, it was a very practical course. My dyslexia became less of an issue because of, you know, word processing and I'd be honest and, you know, the ability for it to read back, even though it was an awful read back, it was like listening to say, you know, to like an old fashioned Stephen Hawking, you know, sort of, and then got me a job at Commercial Union, which then led to me doing a Masters, which then led me to move to London, all this sort of stuff. The adventure was great. The thing about, I guess, my journey is that it, I was driven at a certain point, I became very driven by the need to improve the way in which we delivered software development at that time, and that led me through my Masters and, you know, Object-Oriented and then to a company called Rational Software where I became the Product Manager for RUP, the Rational Unified Process. Now for the agilists listening, they're probably like, oh, boo hiss, and that's totally legit. It was in fact, that's when I first met Ken Schwaber and he told me I was an idiot, which turns out he was right. Ken Schwaber the creator (of Scrum), who I work for now. Anyways. Ula Ojiaku I mean, who wouldn't know Ken Schwaber if you're a self-respecting agilist.  Sorry, go on please. Dave West Yeah, he's an interesting character for sure. Anyway, so I was the RUP Product Manager and I realised I went to this large insurance company in the Midwest and it's a huge organisation and I met this lady and she said, I'm a use case. I said, what do you do? She said, I'm a use case specifier, and meet my friend, she's a use case realiser and I'm like, oh, no, that's not the intent. And so I realised that there was this process that I loved, and I still definitely love elements of it, but was fundamentally flawed in terms of helping actually people to work together to work on complex problems and solve them. So that, you know, and I'd written a book and I'd done some other things on the way to this point, but this point really did make me realise that I was going wrong, which was a little scary because RUP was incredibly popular at that time, and so then that led me to work with Ivar Jacobson, tried to bring in Scrum to the unified process, spent more time with Ken Schwaber who'd finally realised I may still be an idiot, but I was an idiot that was willing to listen to him. Then I ended up at Forrester Research, running the application development practice, I became a research director there, which was super interesting, because I spent a lot of time looking at organisations, and I realised a really fundamental problem that I think probably will resonate with many that are listening to this podcast, that people were doing Scrum yeah, Scrum was incredibly popular and people were doing Scrum, but they were doing it in an industrial context. It was more like Water-Scrum-Fall. And I coined that term in a research document, which got picked up by the, InfoQ and all these magazines, it became this sort of ‘thing' – Water-Scrum-Fall. You know, they were doing Scrum, but they only liked to plan once a year, and there's a huge planning sort of routine that they did. They were doing Scrum, but they rarely released because the customers really don't want it - it's incredibly hard and dangerous and things can go horribly wrong. And so they were doing Scrum, but they weren't really doing Scrum, you know. And so that was super interesting. And I got an opportunity to do a number of workshops and presentations on the, sort of like the solution to this Water-Scrum-Fall problem with Ken, I invited him and we did this very entertaining roadshow, which I'm surprised we weren't arrested during it, but we were, it was a really interesting experience. I then decided like any good practitioner, I had to do a Startup. So I went to Tasktop working with Mik Kersten and the gang at Tasktop, and the great thing about Tasktop was it was a massive fire hose of doing Scrum, trying to make payroll, learning about everything around delivering a product in a market that wasn't really there and that we had to build. And it was just fantastic working with a lot of OEMs, a lot of partners and looking at, and then we got funding. We grew to five teams. I was running product and engineering. And Ken was continually talking to me through this time, and mentoring me, coaching me, but I realised he was also interviewing me. So he then said to me, one day, Dave, I don't want to be the CEO of Scrum.org anymore. I'd like you to be, when can you start? Ken doesn't take no for an answer, and I think that's part of the success of Scrum. I think that his persistence, his tenacity, his, you know, sort of energy around this, was the reason why Scrum, part of the reason him and Jeff, you know, had different skills, but definitely both had that in common, was successful. So I then came and joined about seven years ago Scrum.org, to run Scrum.org and it's an amazing organisation Ula Ojiaku And if I may just go back a bit to what you said about your time in secondary school, you said you were dyslexic and apart from the fact that you discovered computers, you had a horrible experience. What made it horrible for you? Dave West I think it was, you know, there's no support network, there's nobody checking in on you, particularly at secondary school. At primary school, you have a teacher that you're in the same room, you've sort of got that, you're with the same kids, but you go, you know, you, you go from one lesson to another lesson, to another lesson and if you're a little bit, well for me, you know, reading and writing was incredibly difficult. I could read and write at that point. I was about nine and a half, 10 when I finally broke through, thanks to an amazing teacher that worked with my primary school. And, but I was way, way behind. I was slower. I, you know, and teachers didn't really, it was almost as though, and I'm sure education's very different now, and both my children are dyslexic and they go to a special school that's designed around this, so I know that it's different for them, but the teaching was very much delivery without inspection and adaption of the outcome, you know, just to make it a bit agile for a second. So you go through all this stuff and I wasn't able to write all the stuff down fast enough. I certainly wasn't able to process it, so because of that, it was pretty awful. I always felt that I was stupid, I was, you know, and obviously I relied on humour and I was a big lad, so I didn't have any bullying issues, but it was very, very challenging. And I found that I could be good at something with computers. And I sort of got it, I understood how to write, you know, BASIC very quickly and maybe even a little Assembly. I knew how to configure machines, it just seemed natural, it certainly helped my confidence, which, you know, maybe I'm a little too confident now, but definitely had an impact on my future life. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, and I'm sure there are people who would be encouraged by what you've just said, so I wanted to begin there. Thanks for sharing. Now, what about, what do you do when you're not working? Dave West What do I do when I'm not working? Well, I'm a, that's a hard question. Gosh. So I have a nine year old and a six year old, and two boys, so, you know, sometimes I'm refereeing wrestling matches, you know, I'm definitely dealing with having children, I was late to life having children. I'm 52 and I have a nine year old and a six year old. I thought that, you know, a single lifestyle, a bachelor lifestyle in Boston and, you know, loving my work, writing books, you know, doing this traveling the world was going to be survive, and then I met the most amazing girl and, who persuaded me that I needed to have children, and I thought, well, I really like you, so I'd better. And it's been an incredible adventure with these children. They've taught me so much, the most important thing I think they've taught me is patience. And it's making me a better human being, and many of those traits, just to bring it back to Agile for a second, are things that we need to build better into the way that we turn up at work because you know, the project, I think it was called Aristotle, the Google big project where they looked at the successful teams, they found a number of traits, but one of those traits that was so important was psychological safety, right? And that requires you to attend every interaction with a mindfulness, not of doing things that you want to do to yourself, which is that sort of golden rule, but that platinum rule, do unto others as they want be done unto. And, and I think that is so, so important and crucial, and it's something that I aspire to, I don't always succeed every day as a human being, you know, whether it's at the checkout at the supermarket or whether it's waiting in line, particularly at the moment in an airport, and it's just, you know, something that I think in an agile team is so important because that safety is so, so required to create that environment where transparency happens, to create that environment where you can have those honest conversations about what's happening next, or what's happened previously where you're running those retrospectives, where you're trying to really plan when there is not enough knowledge to plan. You know, those sort of things require that kind of environment to be successful. So, you know, though, yes, I spend my life either working or really spending it with my children at the moment because of the age they're at, I think it's helping me, the time I'm spending with my children is helping me be a better human being and be a better Agilist.  Ula Ojiaku There's something you said, you know, about psychological safety and being kind, it just reminded me that, you know, of that, the need for also to be respectful of people, because when you are kind and you're showing people respect, they would, that brings down the barriers and makes them, you know, more inclined to be open and to participate. What do you think about that? Would you say there's a link between respect and kindness, I know we're being philosophical right now… Dave West Well actually, yes, but no, it's incredibly practical as well. I think that kindness, so I've written quite a lot about kindness, because it's a trait that we, as a community, our professional Scrum trainer community, manifests and lives. It's something that we actually interview for when you join our community, and the reason why we do that, isn't because we're a bunch of hippies that just like kumbaya, want everybody to hold hands and be nice to each other, I mean, that would be great as well and who doesn't like a good rendition of kumbaya, it's a great song, but it's because we believe that kindness, ultimately, is beneficial to both parties, particularly the person that's being kind, because it creates, not only does it create levels of karma, but it creates that transparency, it creates that opportunity to learn that you may not get, if you go in in a very confrontational way and people don't intentionally be confrontational, but it's so easy for it to happen. You know, it's so easy for you to question, because, you know, somebody says something you're like, well, I don't agree with that, and that instantly creates an environment or a connection that is, you know, confrontational, you're in this position, it spirals, blah, blah, blah. So, but you can, instead of saying, I don't agree with that say, hey, well, that's interesting, let me have a look into that, and you're inquisitive. And if you try to approach everything with that sort of like kindness model, and I don't mean always being nice. Nice is different to kind, nice is like faking, I think, sometimes, you know, it's funny, you don't have to be kind to be nice, but you have to be nice to be kind if you understand what I mean. So you can fake niceness, niceness is part of being kind. So, you know, if you approach it in the right way, where you care about people and you care about what they're bringing to the table and you care about the environment that they're in, whether it's just simple things like checking in more frequently, you know, whether it's actually making time in this very scheduled life that we live now with zoom call after zoom call, to check in with the team, or the person that you're talking to, to see how are they turning up today? How has their day been? And I think that's, you know, super, super important. The other important element of kindness that comes out is this helping others element, you know, my gran, God rest her soul, Lilian, she was a rockstar on so many levels. And she used to say to me, when I came home from school, particularly from elementary school or primary school, I think we call it in England, right? She'd say things like, not what have you done today, I mean, sometimes she said that, but she'd say, who have you helped? Who have you helped? I'd be like uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and she said it enough that I realised it's important, you know, it's important that you spend time with others, help them in their tasks, you know, because I think you can learn so much and build those relationships, build that safety that is so, so important to really develop. We work in complex environments, right, that's the whole point of agility. Complex environments require people to collaborate, they require people to look at things in different ways. They really benefit from diversity, diversity of mind, diversity of experience, diversity of skill. And you bring that together, but you can only bring all these different parts together when you have an environment that allows for it, and traditional project management techniques, fabulous as they were for building bridges and tunnels and everything like that, didn't allow that, they don't encourage that. They encourage people to be focused, to be efficient, to be managing to that model. And I think we have to step away from that and work in a slightly different way where kindness, psychological safety, trust, respect, use the word respect. And I think it's, you know, obviously it's a Scrum value, but it's crucial to effectively allowing independent people with diverse perspectives to work together in an effective way. And to be honest society doesn't have enough of that in general. I think we've definitely moved away from respect and trust. We don't trust in our governments, we don't trust in our institutions, we don't trust in our fellow human beings and we've become very much focused on ourselves and our individual needs. And the reality is there's no such thing as a self-made person, you're only there because of the success of previous generations. As you drive to work on a car, on a road that has been built by others, that's been funded by others, you know, so this idea that you are in it alone, you know, is completely wrong, and I think sometimes we bring that to the work and it creates an environment that is not as successful. Ula Ojiaku True, true. No, thanks for that, Dave. I completely agree. Now there are people back to this project program that feel like, you know, the word project in agile is a taboo, almost a swear word. What's your perspective on this? Dave West I don't think it's a swear word, I don't think it's taboo. I think, you know, Mik's book is a fabulous book and he's a fabulous person, but he was using it to emphasise the fact that, you know, that we have become too focused on this, you know, investment paradigm, this organisation paradigm, this structural paradigm of the project and that, ultimately, the idea of a product, this idea of a cohesive set of capabilities that's packaged in some way that has a clear boundary, that has a clear set of customers, that has some clear value, is a much better way of aligning your people and your investments. And so he was emphasising that, and obviously he emphasised the idea of value streams being the mechanism that we deliver value in this construct to these people in this packaging of products, and it's a great book and I recommend everybody should read it. Ula Ojiaku I have mine here. Dave West No, that's good. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of the book a little, working with Mik, providing a lot of feedback and I think it's a great book. However, the idea of a project doesn't go away and all of that work that we did, that organisations that I respect deeply like the PMI and, you know, that even, dare I say, things like Prince2, all of that work, isn't wrong. It's just, we need to look at it from a different lens. The idea that complex work is there changes certain things, the fact that requirements and understandings and appreciation of what we're doing emerges over time, that is just a truth, and that was true of projects as well. We just need to build in the mechanisms to be better able to deal with that. The fact that we would invest hundreds, if not thousands of hours planning things that ultimately fell apart when some underlying assumption changed and then we'd create a change order to deal with the chaos that that created need to be, we need to step away from those ideas. Do we still have projects? I think yes, sometimes you will have something that has a, you know, put a man on, or hopefully it's not a man, hopefully it's a woman, but a woman on Mars. I don't trust men on, I think it'd be much more successful if it was a woman, but, anyway, or person. Men get old, they don't grow up, right? Isn't that the saying, but anyway, so putting that person on Mars is a project, right? It has a definitive, you know, plan, it has an end goal that's very clearly underside. It's very likely that we're going to build a series of products to support that, you know, there is, I don't think we need to get tied up so much on the words, project and product. However, we really need to step back a little bit and look at, okay, you know, like treating people as resources, breaking up teams and reforming teams continuously, treating people as fungible or whatever that is, they're just unrealistic. It's not nothing to do with project or product, they're just silly, you just can't deal with this. The fact that teams take time to form, you know, the fact that, you know, the most successful agile teams I've ever seen are teams that have a clear line of sight to the customer, clear understanding of what they're trying to do for that customer, have guardrails, have an enabling management structure that provides support to deliver that value to that customer. As long as you think about those things and you don't get so tied up with the dance or the routine of project management that you forget that, then I'm not concerned. You know, there's this big thing about, oh, should project managers be Scrum masters? I don't know, it depends on the project manager. Sometimes project managers make very good product owners because they take real clear ownership of the outcomes and the value that's trying to be delivered. Sometimes, you know, they make great Scrum masters because they care very much about the flow of work, the team dynamics, the service to the organisation, the service to the business, and they want to act in that way. And sometimes you just want to get stuff done and work in a team, as a developer on that increment. You know, I don't know, you know, people are like, oh, because, and I think this is the fundamental problem, and you've got me onto my soapbox here and I apologise, but the thing that I see over and over again is the use of agile in an industrial, mass production oil and mass production way of thinking about the world. So what they do is that it isn't agile or project management that's at fault. It's the paradigm that's driving the use of agile or the use of project management. You can do agile in a very waterfall way, don't get me wrong or a very industrial way, I almost don't want to use the word waterfall, but this idea of, you know, maximizing efficiency. I mean, gosh, the word velocity has been as synonymous of agile forever when ultimately it's got nothing to do with agility, you know, it's a useful mechanism for a team to help them run a retrospective sometimes. But it isn't a mechanism that you use to plan, you know, the capacity of your organisation and all this sort of idea,  what they're trying to do always is use an industrial, you know, sort of mindset in an agile context, in a context that doesn't support an industrial mindset or a traditional mindset. And that drives me mad because I see agility being used to deliver work rather than value, I see agility basically being missed, sort of like, almost jimmied in with a crowbar into these massive projects and programs where you've got fixed scope, fixed budgets at the start. They don't actually know what they're trying to achieve, but you've got all these contracts in place that describe all this stuff, very detailed up front. And then they say, we're going to use agile to do it, and you're like, okay, what are we, you know, what happens if the first sprint uncovers the fact that the product goal was fundamentally flawed? Oh well, we can't change that because the contract says, well, hang on a minute, what are we in this business for? Are we actually trying to deliver value to customers and help them solve a particular problem to deliver? Or are we trying to do something else? And they're like, no, we're trying to deliver on the contract. Oh, but isn't the contract a mechanism that describes that? Maybe, but that's not why we're here. And that's when it starts getting, going wrong, I think,  that industrial mindset that I just want, tell me what to do, give me a job, let me sit down, just give me that change order and I will start work. It's just wrong. And for certain types of project, and certain types of product and certain types of problem, you know, it probably works really well if we're building the 17th bridge or we're, you know, doing those sort of things. But the reality is in the digital age, that most knowledge workers, who are the people that really benefit from agile the most, that aren't working in that way, they're working with very changeable environments, very changeable customer understanding very, you know, it's a little bit more complex. Ula Ojiaku True, true. And what you're saying reminds me of my conversation with Dave Snowden, he's known for his work on complexity theory, Cynefin, and if it's in a complex adaptive environment, you know, you need to be agile, but if it's a complicated problem or a simple problem, so complicated is really about, you know, breaking it down into a series of simple problems but it's still sequential and predictable, you could use, you know, the traditional waterfall method, because nothing is going to change, it's really putting all those pieces together to get to a known end state, and so I am of the same mindset as you, in terms of it's all about the context and understanding what exactly are you trying to achieve, what's of value to the customer and how much of it do we know and how much learning do we have to do as we get there. Dave West Exactly. I'm obviously not anywhere near as smart as somebody like a Dave Snowden who just, I think he has forgotten more things than I've ever understood, but yeah, I mean he's an amazing thought leader in this space, but the challenge and he talks a little bit about this sometimes, or I think he does, is that we don't always know what's complicated or complex or the amount of unknown. And this is, you know, this is the classic sort of entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren't necessarily working in complexity, they're working in unknown. But the nature of complex unknown is really tricky because you may discover that something that you thought was known is not known, and then you then have to change how you approach it. So the reason in Scrum, what we do is we deliver frequently and that, ultimately, and we deliver the most valuable things or the things that will give us the most value, thus that uncovers those misunderstandings early in the process. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, completely true. And just to build on what you said in terms of understanding or realising that your product goal was wrong, you're working on the wrong thing. Sometimes you might have to also kind of say goodbye to the project or pull the plug. It depends. Dave West Yeah. And that's incredibly hard, sorry, just to lean into that. It's very hard because you've got people that are there and you've invested time, you know, there's the sort of classic fallacy of sunk costs, all that stuff, but the reality is it's not a fallacy of psychological sort of like sunk energy. You've invested all this time and money and effort and motion to get where you're at and then you're realising it's wrong. It's incredibly hard to step away from that. And so what you do, and you see this with startups all the time is, you know, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, but you don't really pivot, what you're doing actually is trying to find a way to get all that investment that you've spent to be useful to deliver some value, you know, and whether it's repackaging or whatever, so that you can say, oh, that's okay when actually, and you can spend as much time doing that as you did the original thing, and now you are even worse, in a worse situation and it's hard. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Completely agree. So there's something you said about, you know, you gave an example of people doing, if I will use your term, Water-Scrum-Fall, in their delivery. And sometimes, you know, they go into detailed requirements, you know, specification, and this is, and they write an iron-clad contract that would, you know, kind of specify all these requirements have to be met, and whilst from the delivery perspective, in terms of the teams who actually do the work, it's they are, they get it, they want to be agile, but it's always these constraints. And whenever we, as an agile coach, you know, you go into the root of the matter. It's the typical root causes of why there is this inflexibility it's either, you know, the leadership and/or, you know, the business or their clients not wanting, you know, having that traditional expectations, any advice on how to effectively deal with this sort of blocker? Dave West I think it's very difficult, particularly when it's like outsourced or you've got, you know, that sort of it's contract-based as opposed to internal in terms of commitments. So it's not budgeted it's actually contracted. And when, when that happens it's very difficult, because you know, you've got the deal because you know how to do stuff and you've done it before, and you've got all that experience with the customer of course, so it's well, because you've done it before and you've invested all this experience, you must tell us exactly what it is that we are going to do. And the reality is the customer themselves doesn't know what they want, really. And until you actually get into the process, it's very difficult. I think one of the big things that's going to happen over the next few years, and we're starting to see some of this with things like Beyond Budgeting, the new procurement contract models that the US is, is perpetuating with 18F and the work of the central government. It would sort of stop during the previous administration, but it's now back, you know, how do you do agile contract management, what does it mean? Speaking from personal use, you know, of external companies to do work for Scrum.org, we pay for sprints. We define a clear product goal that we evaluate continuously, that's measurable. We, you know, we have a product owner from Scrum.org embedded in the Scrum team, even if the Scrum team or in the Scrum team, so of course, if the product owner, they are part of the Scrum team, but even if the Scrum team is predominantly a third party. So we do things like that to, and because you can't just fund one sprint at a time. It's very, you know, these people have got to pay mortgages and you know, they've got payroll to hit, so you have to negotiate a number of sprints that you would do it that allows them the flexibility to manage those constraints whilst being realistic, that at the end of a sprint review, you may discover so much stuff, or even during a sprint, that questions everything, and requires a fundamentally, you know, shifting of the backlog, maybe a change to the backlog, assuming that the objective and the product goal is still valid. You know, so putting those things in place, having those honest conversations and partnership conversations with the client is crucial. And the, you know, service companies that serve Scrum.org are a little bit luckier because we actually come at that from a, we know that we don't know what we want, whereas most clients, it's a lot harder to get them to say that. We know what we'd like to achieve, so the other thing that's important and I think that OKRs are maybe part of this, we have a thing called EBM, Evidence Based Management, which is a sort of like an agile version of OKRs. The OKRs and if defining the outcomes that you're trying to achieve and how you're going to measure them up front, validating them continuously, because it's possible you're wrong, but it's a much less of a scary prospect than not describing anything at all, or just having some very highfaluting goal. So getting very clear and precise in what you're trying to achieve and actually investing the time up front to work out what that means, and getting everybody on the same page around that can really help solve those problems long term, because you build to that, and that ultimately becomes the true north that everybody's working to. So when you have those moments of oh, that's not what we thought then, you know, that's okay, because you are validating against at least something, you have some level of structure in all of this. Ula Ojiaku So let's get to some other questions. What books have you, you know, read that you would say have kind of impacted the way your outlook on, or view on the subject of agile agility or anything else, what would you recommend to the audience? Dave West So the books that really changed my life around thinking about this in a different way, there was a few. The one that actually has nothing to do with agile that made me step back from the way I was looking at the world was Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman. That book really sort of like reinforced the fact that the world is incredibly complex and is, you know, he's famous for The World is Flat, you know, the sort of like global supply chain thing, which we are all very aware of and it's fundamentally having a huge impact now on prices and inflation and the like because of, you know, it's been such a mess over the last two and a half years. So that changed my outlook with respect to the world that I'm living in, which I thought was quite interesting. In terms of straight agility, you know, I'll be honest, there's Scrum – A Pocket Guide that taught me professional Scrum, that's Gunther Verheyen's book that I'd never really thought about Scrum in that way. And then I have to plug the series, The Professional Scrum Series from Addison, well, it's Pearson now, sorry. There are some great books in there, Zombie Scrum is absolutely fabulous. And actually, coming out on the 17th of June is a new book about leadership, The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations. I just read that, so I did not remember it, but it's by three people I adore, Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema. They're awesome, you know, had lots of leadership positions, written a great book. I wrote an inspired forward just in case anybody's checking that, you know, that confidence thing certainly came back after middle school, right. But that's a really interesting book that talks about the issue that you highlighted earlier, that leadership needs, we've spent a lot, we've spent 25 years teaching Scrum to teams. We need to spend the next, probably 60 years, teaching Scrum to leaders and trying to help, and it's not just Scrum, it's agile, hence the reason why this isn't just about Scrum, you know, whether it's Kanban, whether it's Flow, whether it's Spotify Model, whether it's whatever, but the essence of that, you know, empiricism, self-management, you know, the continuous improvement, the importance of discipline, the importance of being customer centric, the value of outcomes and measures against outcomes, the value of community and support networks, you know, all of this stuff is crucial and we need to start putting that thing, you know, whether it's business agility, whether you call it business agility, you know, all organisations, I think the pandemic proved this, need to be more agile in responding to their market, to their customers, to their employers and to the society that they contribute to. We get that. Leadership needs to change, and that's not a, you're wrong and awful, now sort of old leadership bad. No, it's just the reality is the world has changed and the more mindful leaders step back and say, oh, what do I have to do differently? Now, my entire team is remote, my, you know, my work is hard to plan, the fact that we, you know, our funding cycles have changed, our investment models have changed, you know, stepping back a little bit. So this professional, agile leader book I do recommend. Obviously I had the benefit of reading it before it became a book and it's very, very good and fun to read. Ula Ojiaku Awesome, we will put the list of books and links to them in the show notes, so thank you for that. Now, is there anything you'd like to ask you know, of the audience? Dave West Oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, my only sort of like, if it's sort of closing, if we've unfortunately come to the end of our time together and I, you know, I did waffle on, so I apologise for using far too much of it. But I guess the question I, and we talked a little bit about this, but you know, this sort of, there is a propensity in our industry, like every industry, and every moment, and every movement to become very inward looking, to become very like my way is better than every other way, you know. And obviously I'm very into Scrum and I apologise, I accept that I am. But I'm not arrogant enough to believe that it is the only way of solving complex problems. I'm also not arrogant to believe that it is sufficient. You know, I love the work of the Lean UX, Agile UX, we loved it so much we worked with Jeff and Josh to build a class together. I love the work of Daniel Vacanti and in professional Kanban and the Kanban community in general, I love, you know, I love the work of the professional coaching organisations and what they're really doing to help me be a better human being dare I say. You know, the point is, as you sit at this moment in time, you as an agile practitioner, have the opportunity to draw on many different disciplines and many different experts to really help to create that environment. That can allow agility to thrive and value to be delivered. And I think the only thing that's getting in the way of you doing that, or the only thing that was getting in the way of me doing that, and it still does sometimes is uberous arrogance and just a lack of, I don't know, not willing, not being willing to step out of my comfort zone and accept that my predefined ideas and my experience, my diversity that I bring isn't necessarily always right and to be more humble and to be more kind. I know it's a country song, you know, humble and kind, right, which I'm, you know, obviously I live in America, so I have to like country music, it's mandatory, but if you can be a little bit kinder and to do what my gran asks, right? Not what did you do today, but who did you help? What did you learn? How are you going to be better tomorrow? If we can do all of those things, then not only are our projects and teams and products better, but our lives better, and maybe society could be a little bit better. Ula Ojiaku Those are great words, Dave, thank you so much for those. One last thing, are you on social media? How can people get in touch with you? Dave West Well you could always dave.west@scrum.org if you want to ping me on this thing called email. If you are under 30, it's this thing that old people like, it's called email. If you're younger and cooler, I do not have a TikTok account, I don't totally know what it is. My son says we need it. I'm not a totally sure that we do, but it's not about clocks as well, who knew that, what was all that about? Ula Ojiaku Well, just like Apple isn't the fruit… Dave West Isn't about fruit, how annoying is that as well? Anyway, and so many misconceptions in the world, right. Anyway, but, and M&Ms aren't Smarties, I know I get it. But anyway, sorry, David J. West is my Twitter handle, you know, but, you know, whatever, LinkedIn, you can always find me on LinkedIn, just do Dave West Scrum.org and you will find me on LinkedIn. Love connecting, love talking about this stuff, maybe a little too much. You know another saying that my gran used to say, “you've got two ears and one mouth, shame you never used it like that, David”. I was like, yes, gran, I know, yeah. She also didn't by the way, just for the record anyway. Ula Ojiaku Oh gosh, your grandma Lilian sounds like she was one awesome woman. Dave West Rockstar, rockstar. Ula Ojiaku Well, thank you so much, Dave. It's been a pleasure and I thoroughly enjoyed having this conversation with you, actually more learning from you and I hope sometime you'll be back again for another conversation. Dave West I would love that. Thank you for your audience. Thank you for taking the time today. I appreciate it. Let's stay in touch and I hope that we'll see maybe in person again soon. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, that will be wonderful.

Dave Snowden is a consultant and researcher in government and industry specializing in complex issues and how they relate to strategy and organizational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organizations through anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. Listen in on how to approach complex issues in your business. 

In this conversation with William Torbert we explore his perspectives on Dave Snowden's critiques of vertical development, including the concern about elitism, action logic perspectives, post cognitive consciousness, the 4 territories of experience and a more inclusive way of being. William R. Torbert is the Principal of Action Inquiry Associates LLC, Co-Founder and Director Emeritus of Global Leadership Associates, Director of the Amara Collaboration and a Founding Member of the Action Inquiry Fellowship. His groundbreaking work on Developmental Action Inquiry is the foundation for the work of Global Leadership Associates. Bill has enjoyed an distinguished academic career: Yale, Southern Methodist university, Harvard, Boston College, Leadership professor Emeritus, and is an award winning teacher. He is the author of a dozen books, including Seven Transformations of Leadership, selected as one of the top ten Harvard Business Review leadership articles of all time and his most recent book, Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry. See our latest training, The Power of Embodied Transformation (registration open until March 2nd): https://www.coachesrising.com/powerofembodiedtransformation/

Hosts Andy Cleff, Ben Au-Yeung, Serge Marten, and Jay Hrcsko chat with Dave Snowden about Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, and Metamodernism.  We explore thru a Boxian lens "All models are wrong, but some are useful."  Are these effective tools for organizations to gain new perspectives on themselves? Are there other potentially better ways to journey in complex adaptive systems? Contact Information http://cognitive-edge.com/contact/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowded Website http://cognitive-edge.com/ Books/Articles/Videos https://cynefin.io/index.php/Publications_by_Dave_Snowden Triopticon Storyboard v2 Events http://cognitive-edge.com/events/ About the Agile Uprising If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review, a rant, or leave comments on your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps others find us.  Much thanks to the artist Krebs from Machine Man Records who provided us our outro music free-of-charge!  If you like what you heard, check out these links to find more music you might enjoy! If you'd like to join the discussion and share your stories,  please jump into the fray at our Discord Server! We at the Agile Uprising are committed to being totally free.  However, if you'd like to contribute and help us defray hosting and production costs we do have a Patreon.  Who knows, you might even get some surprises in the mail!

This week, Matt and Mike and then just Mike Talk with Dr. Dave Snowden about working with men in the military. Rob is out sick...or is he? Dr. Snowden did mention the DOD and other important agencies and that his opinions don't represent the US government. Maybe they're on to Rob and had him snuffed. Or maybe, Mike and Dr. Snowden have a very helpful and enlightening conversation about balancing military and home life and how we can better understand men who serve. Maybe Rob'll be back next time. Maybe Matt will too. Is it all a conspiracy? Listen in and enjoy the Mike show. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger has a new book out, called Unleash Your Complexity Genius.It is the fourth published work by the co-founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, and when she says that her books are getting shorter there is a sense that it's because she's honing in on the rich essence of her life's work.In this episode of The Coach's Journey Podcast, Jennifer and I share a conversation that traverses adult developmental theory, complexity, vulnerability, and the transformative power of community and of "fierce friendship". We explore the junctures of growth that often appear as binary choices, and how the way forward tends to spring from a more balanced or holistic approach.Jennifer pulls these strands together into something of a manifesto for the power of connection between coaches, leaders and people who together can hold uncertainty, and support each other to dream bigger and create a future filled with possibility – even as the world around us changes beyond recognition. In this episode, we talk about:The necessary terror of changeDevelopmental theoryThe trap we fall into when comparing ourselves to othersThe simplicity on the far side of complexityPolished and unpolished vulnerability, and how to create more love in organisationsJennifer also shares personal reflections on growth, and the inspiring story of how she came to live and work with her friends in a shared house in France.To learn more about Jennifer, visit https://www.cultivatingleadership.com/team-member/jennifer-garvey-berger or https://twitter.com/jgberger.For information about my wider work, my writing or to buy my books, visit www.robbieswale.com.Music by My Good Man William: listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4KmeQUcTbeE31uFynHQLQgTo support the Coach's Journey, visit www.patreon.com/thecoachsjourney and to join the Coach's Journey Community visit www.thecoachsjourney.com/community. Things and people we mentioned (that you might be interested in):- Unleash Your Complexity Genius by Carolyn Coughlin and Jennifer Garvey Berger https://www.cultivatingleadership.com/book/__trashed- Jennifer's other books https://www.cultivatingleadership.com/books - Joel Monk on the Coach's Journey Podcast https://www.thecoachsjourney.com/podcast/episode-6-joel-monk-conversations-at-the-cutting-edge-of-coaching - Art of Developmental Coaching with Coaches Rising https://www.coachesrising.com/artofdevelopmentalcoaching/ - A preview of the book that Robbie mentions, that isn't out yet, The Power to Choose https://www.robbieswale.com/writing/2020/3/23/why-am-i-sharing-parts-of-my-forthcoming-book-the-power-to-choose - Robbie's 12-minute series of books https://www.robbieswale.com/the-12minute-books - Catherine Fitzgerald https://changeelemental.org/people/catherine-fitzgerald/ - Executive Coaching, by Catherine Fitzgerald https://www.amazon.co.uk/Executive-Coaching-Practices-Perspectives/dp/0891061614- Robert Kegan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan- In Over Our Heads, by Robert Kegan https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674445888 - Dave Snowden and Cognitive Edge https://thecynefin.co/- Jean Piaget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget- Cathy Presland on The Coach's Journey Podcast https://www.thecoachsjourney.com/podcast/episode-17-cathy-presland-government-advisor-to-three-principles-coach - Brené Brown https://brenebrown.com/ - Amy Edmondson https://amycedmondson.com/ - The article about Jennifer's dream of moving to France: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dreaming-good-company-jennifer-garvey-berger/ - Wendy Bittner http://www.cultivatingleadership.com/team-member/wendy-bittner - Nicole Brigandi https://www.nicolebrigandicoaching.com/

Lately various voices have been raised in critique of adult development models, and the way coaches implement them in their work with clients. In this conversation with management consultant and researcher Dave Snowden we explore some of the fundamental issues with models of adult development, how more fluid stories of self can be more constructive in facilitating change and Dave's complexity science-based approach to coaching. Dave Snowden is a management consultant and researcher in the field of knowledge management and the application of complexity science. Known for the development of the Cynefin framework, he is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking. He has authored several articles and book chapters on the Cynefin framework and the role of complexity in sensemaking. → Our live online coach training “The Neuroscience of Change” starts September 29th 2022 ← Visit coachesrising.com to see our acclaimed online coach trainings and other offerings.

He is the creator of the Cynefin Framework, and originated the design of SenseMaker®, the world's first distributed ethnography tool. He is the lead author of Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision makers, a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service, and the Cynefin Centre.He divides his time between two roles: founder Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the founder and Director of the Cynefin Centre.  His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making.  He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. By using natural science as a constraint on the understanding of social systems this avoids many of the issues associated with inductive or case-based approaches to research. This episode ranges widely across the path of his life and his ideas, aiming always at the core question of our time: how do we create the best conditions for a generative future we'd be proud to leave to future generations?  Dave is engaged in large-scale projects with, for instance, the NHS, and world governments to work out how to gather real information from people in ways that work and that can lead to generative outcomes. We explore ways to change the substrate of our culture, not by jamming new technology into the toxic niches of Facebook and Twitter, but by evolving new ways of engaging with each other that allow us to find the 'adjacent possible'  - the next best thing that we can do in any situation. If you want to connect more with the work that the Cynefin Company does, or to listen to aspects of Dave's work in more detail, please follow the links below. Dave's TED talkDave Snowden blogThe Cynefin Company

In this episode, Dale and Val talk to Dave about the additional elements of the Hexi approach and implementation guide for the Cynefin Framework and facilitation in your organisation. Following on from our previous discussion with Dave (Episode 83), Dave takes us on a linguistic trip of rhetoric and insight on his views about projects and how Hexi can be utilised. David John Snowden (born 1954) is a Welsh management consultant and researcher in the field of knowledge management and the application of complexity science. Known for the development of the Cynefin framework,[1] Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management consulting firm specialising in complexity and sensemaking.[2] Dave is the Director of the Cynefin Centre, Chief Scientific Officer Cognitive Edge. Creator of the Cynefin Framework. Lead author EU Field Guide to managing in Complexity (and crisis). His focus is on naturalising sense-making as an emerging trans-disciplinary field of study. Here are links to some of the topics that were discussed: Cynefin Framework – A Leader's Framework for Decision Making (hbr.org) Cynefin Method Kits (Hexi) - https://thecynefin.co/method-kits/  Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness (PDF) Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness (researchgate.net) —————————————– Proudly sponsored by: JustDo – https://www.justdo.com/ PlanAcademy – https://www.planacademy.com/chatter/ ($75 off any course) InEight – https://ineight.com/ Prosci – https://empower.prosci.com/project-ch… (FREE resource kit)Stay safe, be disruptive, and have fun doing it! #ProjectManagement #Cynefin #PMO #ProjectControls #Leadership #Culture #ProjectCertifications --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/project-chatter-podcast/message

In this week's pod, we were joined by Magnus Olsen to discuss career challenges, opportunities and trends - a student's perspective. Magnus has a background in the science of learning, having been a headmaster for a decade, managing organisations with complex stakeholder context. He has five years' experience as a strategy advisor in public management and is now an entrepreneur engaged in multiple start-ups including own his consultancy firm. Magnus has always been a student but for the last two years he been taking a life changing Master of Science in Project Management at Karlstad Business School in Sweden. The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows: We need to understand what technology will help us with on projects. It will not give us everything! Project Managers need sustainable working conditions in order to deliver more sustainable projects Higher education should aim to develop experiences for students by giving them more practical experiences before they join the workplace There may be trend towards universities offering shorter degrees and people re-training later in their careers to learn new skills to adapt to the ever changing workplace As a project manager, it is better to work in different industries in order to get the best experience to Use toolsets such as LinkedIn to build a network when starting out in the industry Start-ups are often the best companies to gain experience as a project manager as they may focus too much on the product rather than the business Knowledge isn't worth anything if you don't know how to use it. Find your tribe! Here are links to some of the topics we discussed: Magnus Olsen - Political Astuteness in Project Management: http://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1653426/FULLTEXT01.pdf Tune in next time when we're re-joined by Dave Snowden to talk about the hexi approach and what it means to Cynefin Framework. For more information, blogs or to support our charities visit www.projectchatterpodcast.com If you'd like to sponsor the podcast get in touch via our website. You can also leave us a voice message via our anchor page and let us know if there's something or someone specific that you would like on the podcast. Proudly sponsored by: JustDo - https://www.justdo.com/ PlanAcademy - https://www.planacademy.com/chatter/ ($75 off any course) InEight - https://ineight.com/ Prosci - https://empower.prosci.com/project-chatter (FREE resource kit) Stay safe, be disruptive and have fun doing it! #ProjectManagement #PMO #ProjectControls #Leadership #Culture #ProjectCertifications --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/project-chatter-podcast/message

In this conversation, Philip spends time with Dave Snowden, creator of the Cynefin Framework and Founder/Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the Founder/Director of the Cynefin Centre. In their wide ranging conversation they discuss how the Cynefin Framework applies to solving complex problems and how we make sense of the world around us. The Drop – The segment of the show where Philip and his guest share tasty morsels of intellectual goodness and creative musings. Philip's Drop: Abolition Language//Resources: http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ http://mariamekaba.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html Dave's Drop: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/5-surprising-benefits-of-walking https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-top-5-benefits-of-cycling Special Guest: Dave Snowden.

Gift culture and Place. Two terms that have been a common thread throughout all the conversations I've been having with Matthew and Inma in this season, and this, the fifth and final conversation, is no exception. Inma shares a lovely story of her grandmother always giving her this big box of chocolates on her Name Day, a day always celebrated with the entire extended family present, all the while knowing that Inma isn't very fond of chocolates [I know. Just the idea that there are people out there who aren't very fond of chocolate is enough of a tankespjärn to last me a day or two, that's for sure!]. After many years of this, when Inma finally actually asked why, her grandmother's response was: “I know that you don't like chocolate, but because you don't like chocolate, you are the only one who is going to open the box here and share it with everyone.” Which is another way of pointing to what Matthew heard Dave Snowden say: “Giving a gift is an indication that you want to be in community.” Without a social fabric tying us all together, our world, our lives, would fall apart. Community – a weave of individual strands – forms the basis of gift culture. “The presence of social fabric is a way to guarantee that abundance always flows into the direction of greatest need, that surplus always flows in the direction of greatest need, that people don't hoard wealth, because that doesn't make any sense in the gift culture.” ~Matthew The giving of gifts. Sitting in the garden, gifted the warm shine of the sun, the laughter of a neighbor kid down the street, the clean water in my cup next to me, birds chirping away, thrilled at the coming of spring, the jingling of the little bell on Pop the cat's collar as he makes his way over to me for a cuddle… All of them gifts. None of them ostentatious, apparent, obvious. All of them subtle, easily overlooked, but oh so precious if, and when, I acknowledge them. Perhaps the chocolate-thing was enough tankespjärn for you, perhaps you are eager for more… if so, join us and let me/us know your thoughts, by writing a comment or reaching out to either of us. It would be a gift. In the same way we gift you this conversation-turned-podcast. Links: Matthew Word Bain on Medium and Instagram Inma J Lopez, sommelier and writer on Attention Nilofer Merchant and onlyness The Emerald podcast, the episode with Tyson Yunkaporta on Pattern, Kinship, and Story in a World of Decontextualized Minds

Did you ever think that you could use a song from "Frozen 2" to help you with your management decisions? Neither did we—that is, until Jason sat down with Dave Snowden. Dave is an expert in complexity, and he excels in helping organizations navigate through strategy and decision making. His work on complex adaptive systems theory has positioned him as the sole leader in his field. He leans on some of his experiences to help Jason think through common entrepreneurial complexities. This episode is truly fascinating—Dave is probably among the most unique guests we've ever had!

Dave Snowden is the founder and chief officer of Cognitive Edge. He is a pioneer in the field of complexity science and sensemaking, and is perhaps best known for developing the Cynefin framework as a sensemaking device for decision-makers. In this conversation, we talk about Neo-Darwinism, the trouble with specialisation, why democracy is failing, radical sacrifice, and much more. Dave blogs here: https://thecynefin.co/author/dave-snowden/ You can find more out about Cognitive Edge here: https://www.cognitive-edge.com/ We discussed: ‘A Leader's Framework for Decision Making' (with Mary E. Boone), Harvard Business Review, Nov 2007: https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

Welcome to another episode of The Thinking Leader podcast, brought to you by Red Team Thinking. In this episode, Red Team Thinking Vice President Marcus Dimbleby turns the table on Bryce and interviews him, discussing the origins of red teaming, why we need more critical thinking, how to enable distributed decision making and create psychological safety in your organization, why leaders need to listen, and why new ways of working can't work without new ways of thinking.  Bryce Hoffman is a bestselling author and speaker, as well as the president of Red Team Thinking. Bryce calls himself an “unconsultant” and teaches organizations and individuals around the world how to engage critical thinking, enable distributed decision making, and encourage diversity of thought. Prior to founding Red Team Thinking, Bryce spent 22 years working as a financial journalist. In 2015, he became the first and only civilian from outside government to graduate from the U.S. Army's elite red team leader training program, then worked with renowned business leaders from around the world to develop a model for business red teaming that evolved to become Red Team Thinking.  In addition to his work with Red Team Thinking, Bryce lectures on red teaming worldwide, including at U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Warwick Business School, and the National University of Singapore.      Top 10 Takeaways:  01:58 What is Red Team Thinking?  11:05 How Bryce learned about Red Team Thinking.  16:46 What is the difference between red teaming and Red Team Thinking?  20:59 Decision making should be a practice, not a process.  23:53 How to foster real diversity and inclusion – not just tokenism.  26:13 New ways of working require new ways of thinking.  27:24 Don't outsource thinking!  41:24 Daniel Kahneman and Red Team Thinking.    48:10 Leaders have to have the courage to ask the tough questions – and listen to the answers.  53:13 How to become a "thinking leader."         Mentioned in this episode:  Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything, by Bryce G. Hoffman  American Icon: Alan Mulally and the fight to Save Ford Motor Company, by Bryce G. Hoffman  9/11 Commission Report  CIA Director George Tenet  Red Cell  General Peter Schoomaker  University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies  Alan Mulally, Ford Motor Company  Detroit News  Dr. Daniel Kahneman  Dr. Gary Klein  Dave Snowden  Barry O'Reilly      Find Out More  Sign up for Bryce's newsletter  Connect with Bryce on LinkedIn  Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn  Follow Bryce on Twitter  Follow Marcus on Twitter 

Resourcefulness and ingenuity are often found in rural America, and the foundation of both of those things are connection and community, and this week's episode is all about how to go about fostering connection, how we invite people in, and what happens when people feel invested in their small towns. As someone who grew up in a small town (in our very own North Dakota!) but who has lived and traveled in communities of many sizes and is now a researcher and expert in rural resiliency, our guest for episode 89, Dr. Kendra Rosencrans, understands the power of community. In this episode, she shares her wisdom plus some amazing actionable tips and tricks for building community and inviting connection into our own lives to foster resourcefulness and ingenuity to help our small towns grow and thrive.    About Kendra Dr. Kendra Rosencrans is a consultant and researcher focusing on ways to encourage creative, inventive change through shifting organizational or community imaginations about what's do-able, what's possible, and what's good for a healthy, vibrant future. She is also a postdoctoral fellow with Cynefin Centre Australia, studying how groups that change their stories can change their futures. Rosencrans earned a PhD in complex organizational systems from Saybrook University in 2019. As a doctoral student, she received the Margaret Mead Memorial Student Award from the International Society for the Systems Sciences. The award, named for the anthropologist Margaret Mead who was a co-founder and the first woman president of the ISSS academic society, recognizes doctoral research that addresses contemporary challenges within communities in ways that empower agency with integrity, imagination, and well-being. Rosencrans is also the co-founder of a new digital academic publication, the Systemic Change Journal.    Prior to her doctoral work, Rosencrans earned a master's of divinity degree in 2004 from Luther Seminary in St. Paul. She also holds a master's of journalism degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  Rosencrans started her newspaper reporting career at the Jamestown (ND) Sun in 1990. In 1997, she was part of the Grand Forks Herald-Knight Ridder reporting team that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Red River flood.    Kendra grew up in Hettinger, ND, where her dad was the county extension agent and her mom was a reporter, social worker, and teacher. Being a county agent's kid, Kendra was deeply involved in 4-H, and will always view being named North Dakota's 1983 Swine Project Champion as one of her biggest accomplishments.     Kendra lives in Kirkland, WA, with her husband, their 3 teenagers, a cat, and a dog, but no pigs.   Some thoughts from Kendra: I grew up in an extraordinary small town in southwestern North Dakota that never acted like it was too small to accomplish big things. While Hettinger has been impacted by the shifts in agricultural markets and other forces that continue to challenge rural areas across the country, the community and people I know there continue to impress and stand as one of many examples of what can happen when people in small towns choose to work together to invest in themselves and love where they live. Hettinger, now with a population edging 1,110, has a nationally recognized rural medical center, a newly restored bowling alley, a coworking/rural incubator space, plans to upgrade its indoor swimming pool -- and-- continues to demonstrate that small towns succeed in the face of their challenges with big hearts and big imaginations.    I've lived in the nation's biggest city  -- New York City -- and in one of the fastest-growing cities -- Austin, TX. I currently live with my family in Kirkland, Washington, which is considered one of the nation's top 25 "best" small cities and sits on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, across from Seattle.    Each of these places are really a series of small towns, knit together within a larger governing fabric called "Manhattan" or "Kirkland." To thrive, everyone needs a small town -- and but some small towns are more spread out than others. Within the relationships and imagination that drive what a small town is and can be -- come the strengths and vulnerabilities that make a neighborhood or community what it is. We all have our small towns -- no matter where we live geographically. However, I do believe there is something incredibly special and important about rural small towns -- and that for health, success, and future of our nation -- we need to invest in, restore, and nurture small towns.   As a journalist, I dedicated my career to telling the living stories of incredible small towns in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota. I saw what kinds of transformation can happen when small towns and small cities in these rural states shift their imaginations about their future -- and work together to create a new story about who they are and will be in the 21st century. This happened when I was a reporter for the Aberdeen American News in South Dakota -- and it was the experience that drove me to get my doctoral degree in complexity, stories, and organizational systems.    I want to work with organizations and communities that are interested in doing more with their imaginations and their superpowers for making do. The ingenuity that propelled the founders of these communities to lay the groundwork for the future is needed today -- and the key to unleashing this inventive energy can be found in the stories that people tell about what's happening, what's possible, and what they are willing to do -- or not -- to make things better today, tomorrow, and in the future.    Ingenuity is a creative solution-crafting skill and an inventive, adventurous spirit that finds a way around obstacles and moves into the unknown one step at a time, trusting that each move opens the way to resources, ideas, and solutions that are more resourceful, more effective, and a much better fit, for what's needed to create a vibrant small town with a higher quality of life for all residents -- present and future.    It all starts with curiosity, and a willingness to look at what's happening, and what's possible, differently.    At the moment, I'm doing some of this work in my role as a resiliency specialist with the Red River Regional Council in Grafton, working with the amazing Dawn Mandt and her team there, and I'm doing some of this work in the course I teach on organizational theory for the University of Jamestown's Master's of Arts in Leadership program. I'd like to do more, and that's why I'm excited to connect with Rebecca and Growing Small Towns.    In this episode, we cover:   The role of connection in small town development How to be resourceful in a small town The value of practicing being invitational What belief and creativity have to do with building the future The power of asking “What if we…?” to get your idea going   Kendra's Published Works: Rosencrans, K., (2020). Tohu va-Facebook and Dave Snowden. In (D. Snowden, S. Blignaut, Eds), Cynefin -- Weaving sense-making into the fabric of our world. Singapore: Cognitive Edge.  Download a sample here: http://cognitive-edge.com/cynefin-wearving-sense-making-into-the-fabric-of-our-world/   Rosencrans, K. (2019). Narratives of Ingenuity: Using Coworking Space Stories to See Systems Change. (Doctoral dissertation). Saybrook University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 13898081.   Rosencrans, K. (2017). Pilot case study: How two nonprofit education foundations use social media to support systemic engagement. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2017 Vienna, Austria, 2017(1). Retrieved from https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings61st/article/view/3129   Rosencrans, K. (2016). Proposing values and practices for a culture of organizational ingenuity: Hacking systems thinking to pursue the preposterous and produce the impossible. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2016 Boulder, CO, 2016 (1). Retrieved from https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings60th/issue/view/16   Rosencrans, K. (2014), Nurturing Faith for Action: Theological Education and Global Responsibility. Dialog, 53: 304-311. doi:10.1111/dial.12133     Subscribe + Review Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of The Growing Small Towns Show! If the information in our conversations and interviews has helped you in your small town, head out to Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver relevant, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more small-town trailblazers just like you!

Welcome to another episode of The Thinking Leader podcast, brought to you by Red Team Thinking. In this episode, your host Bryce Hoffman talks to Dave Snowden about how a four-stage approach can help leaders better manage complexity and why smaller, adaptive systems initiate change to improve your position. Dave Snowden is a world-renowned expert in the field of knowledge management who is most famous for creating the Cynefin framework. He is the founder and chief scientific officer for Cognitive Edge, a consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking, and is also the author of several publications, including Managing Complexity and Chaos in Times of Crisis, recently published in conjunction with the European Union. Top 10 Takeaways: [2:38] The role of the leader in times of crisis. [6:19] Constraints are the only thing you can manage in a complex system. [9:20] Trioptican and the benefits of creating a human sensor network to act faster. [12:00] The Cynefin Framework – what it is and where it comes from. [16:15] Distinctions between Complexity and Systems Thinking leadership styles. [20:55] The problem with big consulting companies. [27:27] Can processes change culture? [30:15] A complexity-based approach to design thinking. [31:17] Bryce and Dave talk about how companies can respond to negative publicity. [38:19] How do you get leaders to move beyond short-term thinking? Mentioned in this episode: Brought to you by Red Team Thinking Managing Complexity and Chaos in Times of Crisis, by Dave Snowden The Cynefin Centre Cognitive Edge

Welcome to another episode of The Thinking Leader podcast, brought to you by Red Team Thinking. In this episode, your host Bryce Hoffman talks to Dave Snowden about how a four-stage approach can help leaders better manage complexity and why smaller, adaptive systems initiate change to improve your position. Dave Snowden is a world-renowned expert in the field of knowledge management who is most famous for creating the Cynefin framework. He is the founder and chief scientific officer for Cognitive Edge, a consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking, and is also the author of several publications, including Managing Complexity and Chaos in Times of Crisis, recently published in conjunction with the European Union. Top 10 Takeaways: [2:38] The role of the leader in times of crisis. [6:19] Constraints are the only thing you can manage in a complex system. [9:20] Trioptican and the benefits of creating a human sensor network to act faster. [12:00] The Cynefin Framework – what it is and where it comes from. [16:15] Distinctions between Complexity and Systems Thinking leadership styles. [20:55] The problem with big consulting companies. [27:27] Can processes change culture? [30:15] A complexity-based approach to design thinking. [31:17] Bryce and Dave talk about how companies can respond to negative publicity. [38:19] How do you get leaders to move beyond short-term thinking? Mentioned in this episode: Brought to you by Red Team Thinking Managing Complexity and Chaos in Times of Crisis, by Dave Snowden The Cynefin Centre Cognitive Edge

There are frameworks designed by systems thinkers that can help us understand where we are and navigate an ever-changing context. I discuss two that I have found helpful: The first is David Holgrem's system diagram for the change between pre-industrial and current systems, where the producers and those with power over resources became increasingly distant from each other. The second is Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework for navigating simple, complicated, complex or chaotic situations. These help me to know where I am, and as Snowden says, to go from confused to aware that I am confused, and steps to move between states. Listen notes

In this episode, John R. Miles interviews Welch management consultant and researcher David "Dave" Snowden on applying complexity science to ignite your passion. They discuss complex adaptive systems theory and other scientific disciplines and their link to individual success. New Interviews with the World's GREATEST high achievers will be posted every Tuesday with a Momentum Friday inspirational message! Dave Snowden discusses his company being acquired by IBM and his seven years with the tech behemoth. He talks about one of the big benefits of IBM was that you could do some really serious work because you have that brand behind you. It allowed him to work with the CIA and many other global organizations and he discusses those experiences.  Dave discusses how he and his team are working with the U.S. government to determine the origins of COVID-19 using high obstruction metadata. John and Dave discuss leadership development and the cult of the individual leader. Specifically why this type of leadership is detrimental to the military and organizations. Snowden discusses the impact of bringing on his daughter into his company and her background in anthropology to create a new realm of science called anthro-complexity – complexity as experienced in human systems. We discuss leadership development and the cult of the individual leader. Specifically why this type of leadership is detrimental to the military and organizations. The importance of competence-induced failure and its impact on individual success and using Cynefin to unlock your passion. And, so much more. Enjoy!!! What You Will Learn About Applying Complexity Science to Ignite Your Passion The story of his company being acquired by IBM His work with the CIA and Admiral John Poindexter His unique data approach to analyzing the origins of COVID-19 Applying complexity theory to leadership development His new publication on managing complexity in times of crisis The role of the leader in managing crisis Rapid application development and the Agile Manifesto The implication of ethics in the 4th Industrial Revolution Clayton Christenson and applying competence induced failure Wisdom of Crowds Approach Applying Cynefin to our personal lives Why the next generation needs to be engaged with the planet Quotes From Dave Snowden "The role of the leader is coordination, not decision making. And people keep getting that wrong. A good leader never makes a decision, they coordinate people."   "These days nobody should be allowed into any engineering software role without training in ethics because the implications of what we're doing in technology are really scary. And I think the trouble with Facebook, I think less Apple with the Apple vs Facebook confrontation is really interesting. Facebook, has never been immoral, they're amoral. And that's actually far scarier because they're not concerned about the implications of what they're doing."   "Knowledge management is interesting, that moment is coming back into play. It is like knowledge management goes through this cycle of being fashionable."   "So this cult of the individual leader, I think is actually deeply worrying because what you get is either a rigid process or this inspirational leader. And that's actually really bad science because most of the time leadership can be distributed." "Facebook has never been immoral, they're amoral. And that's actually far scarier because they're not concerned about the implications of what they're doing."    --- Follow Dave Snowden here:   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowded   Website: https://www.cognitive-edge.com/   Managing complexity in times of crisis Field Guide: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC123629   --Follow Passion Struck on Instagram -https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast   -- Combat veteran, multi-industry CEO, and Author John R. Miles is on a mission to make passion go viral by helping growth seekers to overcome their fear, self-doubt, and adversity. He loves taking his own life experiences, lessons from his time as a CEO and Fortune 50 C-Level Executive, and the truths he has learned to help make other's lives better. His new podcast Passion Struck provides inspirational interviews and powerful guidance for people to take their lives to the next level. Watch as these high achievers weigh in on life's biggest questions and challenges as we journey on the path to becoming passion-struck.   -- Follow John R. Miles Here:   Website - https://passionstruck.com/​   ​​Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles ​​   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johnrmiles.c0m​ ​   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr​   ​​Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ ​   John's Website: https://johnrmiles.com/​   - John's New eBook - The Passion Struck Framework https://passionstruck.com/coaching/​  

We are drawn to patterns and recipes to help us solve problems in our work, but in reality, what works for one case does not always work for another. Many times when leaders apply their recipes to new environments, unexpected consequences emerge. Humans habitually leverage patterns almost exclusively, blinding us by our own intellectual biases. Developing a mindset that welcomes complexity science into our minds will unlock our ability to apply leadership skills to many types of situations. We believe there is something here to uncover. Dave Snowden, Founder of Cognitive Edge and inventor of the Cynefin Framework, joins us to discuss complexity and human nature. In this episode, we still explore the high-level nuances of complexity thinking and some of the language around Cynefin and Complexity. By the end of this episode, we hope you find enough value to explore Cynefin and Complexity Science independently. Related articles A leader's framework for decision making. Resources Cognitive Edge Cynefin on Google Scholar The Sense Maker Application Connect with Dave Snowden Dave Snowden on Twitter Dave Snowden on LinkedIn