S2 Ep. 5 Dave Snowden – Building Scalable Organizations that can Deal with Uncertainty

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast

Today we’re talking to Professor Dave Snowden, the founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge and Director of the Cynefin Centre Wales. His internationally acclaimed work covers government and industry, and looks at the complex issues of strategy, organisational development and decision making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organizations 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.

Dave holds visiting Chairs at the University of Pretoria and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, as well as a visiting fellowship at the University of Warwick. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore.

In this conversation, we start by exploring a frequently used idea and quote from Dave in our emerging work on organizational design, namely that “the next generation of organizational design is about contextually unique solutions to emerge and adapt based on a coherent whole”.

We then go more specifically into what having context-specific solutions means and talk about the need to build systems that do not assume that you create a rational objective human being, but which work more in tune with ideas of diversity within constraints, like in nature.

Dave talks about the importance, especially for entrepreneurial organizations, to build internal scaffolding – a sort of endoskeleton that empowers the organization to grow and adapt more easily in a complex and rapidly changing world, compared to external scaffolding which gives a more rigid structure that could be more apt in times of temporary crisis management, for instance.

He also describes how, in the current nexus moment, experimenting with novel forms of widely distributed citizen engagement in problem-solving will be needed to face the challenges ahead, in terms of economic depression and massive unemployment. And we need to learn to become more “virtuous” in the process. This process will be highly collaborative and collective. According to Dave Snowden, as we move ahead in this challenging start of the century, “the capacity to manage with uncertainty is going to be something we need to build communities around”.

Remember that you can find the show notes and transcripts from all our episodes on our Medium publication:

https://medium.com/@Boundaryless_/88ef04b7fadb?source=friends_link&sk=d3d9dd800cfb45e535e57fb4cd0cb4d2

To find out more about Dave’s work:

> Website: https://www.cognitive-edge.com/

> YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CognitiveEdge

> Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowded

Other references and mentions:

> Dave Snowden, Zhen Goh, Sue Borchardt, Riva Greenberg, Boudewijn Bertsch, Sonja Blignaut, Cynefin: Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World, 2020: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynefin-Weaving-Sense-Making-Fabric-World-ebook/dp/B08LZKDCYM

> The Cynefin framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework

> Embeddedness: Exploring the Roots of the Eastern idea of Organizing — with Alicia Hennig: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/embeddedness-exploring-the-roots-of-the-eastern-idea-of-organizing-with-alicia-hennig-62cbb75fce0f

> Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice, 2018: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Sacrifice-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300233353

> Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Hope-Without-Optimism-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300248679/

> SAFe®: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 26 October 2020.