David Snowden: Profiles in Knowledge
This is the 26th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Dave is a self-described “proud curmudgeon and pragmatic cynic” and the founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company (formerly Cognitive Edge)
I have been quoting Dave in my blog since I started it in 2006. I first met him at KMWorld 2006, and have seen him there most years ever since. If you haven’t heard him in person, you should watch his videos and listen to his podcasts.
Background
1. LinkedIn
Currently working on the application of natural sciences to social systems thought the development of a range of methods and the SenseMaker software suite. Started work in an NGO post University and then moved onto HR & Training in the late 70s when he started working with computers. That together with a diploma from The Certified Accountants got him a job as Development Accountant in the same firm where he headed up the Treasury function and was responsible for computerization. An MBA in financial management saw him move into consultancy and software designing decision support systems in what became Data Sciences where he became a General Manager (creating MURCO) and the Corporate Business Development Manager where he created the Genus Program (and integration of JAD/RAD, Object Orientation and Legacy Management) which was one of the main components in the turnaround of that company. IBM acquired the company 1997 and after that his more public career started.
Specialties
Experience
Education
2. Wikipedia
Worked for Data Sciences Ltd from 1984 until January 1997. The company was acquired by IBM in 1996. The following year, set up IBM Global Services' Knowledge and Differentiation Program.
While at IBM, researched the importance of storytelling within organizations, particularly in relation to expressing tacit knowledge. In 2000, became European director of the company's Institute for Knowledge Management, and in 2002, founded the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity. During this period, led a team that developed the Cynefin framework, a decision-making tool.
Left IBM in 2004 and a year later founded Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd, a management-consulting firm based in Singapore. Associate professor extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, and honorary professor in the school of psychology at Bangor University.
Founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organizational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organizations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a passionate speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.
He holds visiting Chairs at the Universities 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.
He previously worked for IBM, where he was a Director of the Institute for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector.
Profiles
2. Knowledge Management Review
3. A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making with Mary E. Boone
5. Complex acts of knowing: paradox and descriptive self-awareness
6. KMWorld: Everything is fragmented
AOK Discussions
KM Generations
The first generation of knowledge management is the period prior to 1995. Here "knowledge" as a word is not problematic, it is used without conscious thought and the focus is on information flow to support decision makers. Executive Information Systems, Data Warehousing and Process re-engineering dominate this period.
In 1995 Nonaka and Takeuchi publish the Knowledge Creating Company and for the first time on common business language the words tacit and explicit are introduced, although Polanyi had explored the subject in more depth in the 1940's. This publication with its SECI model defining four transition states of tacit-to-tacit, tacit-to-explicit, explicit-to-explicit and explicit-to-tacit proved decisive and was broadly taken up by consultants and software vendors, both groups seeking to drive revenue through the rapid growth of collaborative technologies.
The pioneering work of practitioners such as Buckman, Edvinsson, Lank, Saint-Onge and Ward amongst others, provided legitimacy and the second generation with its emphasis on conversation of tacit to explicit was born. For second generation thinkers and practitioners, most notably in central Europe, Probst and his collaborators, the function of knowledge management is to convert private assets into public assets, though the extraction of that knowledge into codified form. I have argued elsewhere (Snowden 2000a) that this approach unnecessarily focuses on the container rather than the thing contained, and this view has been strengthened by the increasing recognition by practitioners that there is much tacit knowledge that either cannot, or should not, be made explicit.
As we move into the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in which we focus not on the management of knowledge as a "thing" which can be identified and catalogued, but on the management of the ecology of knowledge. Here the emphasis is not on the organisation as a machine with the manager occupying the role of Engineer, but on the organisation as a complex ecology in which the manager is a gardener, able to direct and influence, but not fully control the evolution of his or her environment. We are also seeing a refreshing move away from programmes which seem to manage knowledge for its own sake, to those that tightly couple knowledge management with both strategic and, critically, operational priorities.
"I always know more than I can say, even after I have said it, and I can always say more than I can write down."
This is one of the basic operating principles of knowledge management, regrettably not fully understood in the second generation. The process of moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably involves some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss of context. Once we recognise this we can start to rethink the nature of knowledge management. Most second-generation approaches are to all intents and purposes content management; they focus on documents containing structured and reflective knowledge that is disconnected from the knowledge holder, diffuses easily and is formal structured.
What we can say and what we know are respectively covered by Narrative and Context Management. Context management in contrast focuses on connecting and linking people through, for example, expertise location, social network simulation, apprentice models of knowledge transfer and the retention strategies for key staff. Managing context involves the recognition that knowledge cannot be disembodied from human agency either as giver or receiver, content is the exact opposite. Context Management takes control of what we know, but cannot fully say or write down. Content Management organises that which can be written.
Narrative Management lies somewhere between the two and is the focus of this chapter, it manages what we can say in conversation and in declamation, it is also cheaper and less onerous as task to capture than written knowledge and its use is closer to the natural patterns of knowledge acquisition in organisations because:
The separation of context, narrative and content management in third generation approaches in turn makes each more effective. By understanding the imitations and capabilities of each medium -- head, mouth and hands -- we make each more effective and the combination of the whole is accordingly greater than the sum of the parts.
2. June 2004: Comparing and Contrasting Corporate and Personal KM
3. March 2005: Complexity: The Next Big Thing After KM
Imagine organising a birthday party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of learning objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would those objectives be aligned with the mission statement for education in the society to which you belong?
Would you create a project plan for the party with clear milestones associated with empirical measures of achievement? Would you start the party with a motivational video so that the children did not waste time in play not aligned with the learning objectives? Would you use PowerPoint to demonstrate to the children that their pocket money is linked to achievement of the empirical measures at each milestone? Would you conduct an after-action review at the end of the party, update your best practice database and revise standard operation procedures for party management?
No, instead like most parents you would create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviour, you would use attractors (party games, a football, a videotape) to encourage the formation of beneficial largely self organising identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early, to prevent the party becoming chaotic, or necessitating the draconian imposition of authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been a success, but you could not define (in other than the most general terms) what that success would look like in advance.
The purpose of this article is to introduce a new simplicity into acts of decision-making and intervention design in organizations. That may seem ironic given the title, with its use of the terms "ontology" and "sense-making" which may be unfamiliar to readers; but new ideas often need new or at least unfamiliar language and I make no apology for that, although some readers may wish to skip the remainder of this introduction which may only be relevant to academics wishing to situate my language. New language aside, the basic principles that underlie this paper are very easy to understand and are illustrated by the inset example of the children's party. Multi-ontology sense making is about understanding when to use both methods of management outlined in the story, both the structured and ordered approach based on planned outcomes and the un-ordered, emergent approach focused on starting conditions expressed as barriers, attractors and identities.
Ontology is derived from the Greek word for being and it is the branch of metaphysics which concerns itself with the nature of things. In this article I am using it to identity different types of systems, and will later discuss two contrasting types of ontology (order and unorder) each of which requires a different approach to both diagnosis and intervention. In practice we need to consider three physical and five human ontologies. The three physical ontologies are order, complexity and chaos; in human systems order divides into visible and hidden forms and we add a fifth state of disorder. These are more fully described elsewhere (Kurtz & Snowden 2003). For this article I will combine complex and chaotic into a single category of unorder and ignore disorder.
Sense-making is most commonly associated with the Weick (1995) and Dervin (1998) and is starting to gain more attention in management circles. I am closer to Dervin than Weick, and in the context of this paper I am talking about sense making as the way that humans choose between multiple possible explanations of sensory and other input as they seek to conform the phenomenological with the real in order to act in such a way as to determine or respond to the world around them. Multi-ontology sense making is thus a means to achieve a requisite level of diversity in both the ways we interpret the world and the way we act in it. Requisite diversity means ensuring the acceptance of a sufficient level of divergence to enable the sensing of weak signals (terrorist threat or market opportunity) and avoidance of the all too common pattern entrainment of past success, while maintaining a sufficient focus to enable decisive and appropriate action. Above all it is about ensuring cognitive effectiveness in information processing and thus gaining cognitive edge, or advantage.
The ideas and concepts may be novel and even threatening to a generation of managers, civil servants and academics who have been trained in what I will later define as single-ontology sense making. The dominant ideology of management inherits from Taylor (1911) a view of the organization based on the necessity and the probity of order. In this world things are deemed to be known or knowable through proper investigation and relationships between cause and effect once discovered repeat. It is the world of the mechanical metaphors of Taylor and most management theorists who came afterwards; it is the Newtonian universe of predictable relationships between cause and effect which can be calculated; the world of the five year plan and the explicit performance target; of hypothesis and empirical proof through observation and explanation of events in retrospect. This paper challenges that particular weltanschauung not by denial, but through bounding and limiting its applicability.
Cynefin as a framework has its origin in knowledge management, in part as a reaction against Nonaka’s SECI model and was initially stimulated by Boisot’s I-Space. The SECI model focused on tacit to explicit knowledge conversion running through four transitionary states. Observation and participation is a form of socialisation [S] allows for externalisation [E] of knowledge (from tacit to explicit) and its consequent codification [C] would then allow internalisation [I], namely the conversion of explicit knowledge to tacit. The constant flow over those spaces was designated as the knowledge creation spiral and was used to explain the process of idea conversation into products mainly in the manufacturing sector. It later became known as BA.
At the time I had just started working for IBM and was observing the way in which informal networks and communities were critical the effective functioning of the formal or explicit system. I was also being asked to codify material into the IBM intranet so that other colleagues could use the material without my engagement. Now this created significant issues. Firstly (adapting a phrase from Polanyi) I always know more than I can say, and I will always say more than I can write down; in consequence codification involves significant loss. Secondly there were some people I trusted with my knowledge at varying levels of abstraction, there were others who had proved untrustworthy. If I codified by knowledge and they used it I knew that I would not be credited if it worked and blamed if it didn’t. So I would share material in private group, knowing that people would come and talk with me before using something and would be prepared to undergo an apprenticeship. Third, there were many things that I knew, but only when I needed to know them. Context triggered application, and more critical radical repurposing. In a specific context, especially under pressure I knew things then then I would not have been aware of in some prior act of codification.
As for much of Cynefin, as I delved into cognitive science I discovered reasons for these issues, anthropology taught be more as did my original degree in Philosophy. I started to use natural science (I also studied Physics at University) to inform social practice rather than relaying on observation and interpretation of practice. That allowed me to limit issues of confirmation bias and in attentional blindness.
With that scientific enquiry I got to know Max Boisot who introduced me to complexity theory, and many other things before his tragic death a few years ago. Complexity is sometimes known as the science of uncertainty, of systems where there is no repeating relationship between cause and effect. Complex adaptive systems comprise many, changing agents with so many interactions that at best you can make statements about a systems dispositional state, about its inclinations but you can’t define outcome and there is no repeatability. What worked last time may not work this time; small inputs produce magnified changes overall and the system has properties that are not the sum of its parts. I’ve also called complexity the science of common sense and illustrated its nature by talking about how you would manage a childrens’ party. Complexity provided then, and still provides a scientific explanation for things that anyone with any real experience already knows. That for me was a critical insight and was the trigger mechanism by which Cynefin evolved from a basic two by two matrix looking at culture and codification to its current five domain form.
At the heart of Cynefin is an argument against universal approaches, in favour of using a contextually appropriate solution. It frankly amazes me that this is considered novel or revolutionary in nature. There is a British phrase that is appropriate here: horses for courses. Before placing a bet you check out the track record of horse on different ground. Some do better on heavy, some on dry and so on. Different things work or don’ t work in different contexts. Over the years I have been increasingly frustrated by advocates of valuable new things who feel that their enthusiasm should be shared by everyone else, be universal in application and involve the ritual burning of all that has happened in the past; a bonfire of vanities. Over the decades I’ve seen it with successive management fads, some of which have high utility some little, but all appropriate in context. Business Process Re-engineering provided value, but it claimed universality and failed, Six Sigma was a let’s do it harder and see if it works this time attempt to overcome that which of course made things worse. We had the Learning Organisation, Blue and Red Oceans, Balanced Score Cards and now Agile. All devoid of underlying theory other than in retrospect, mostly providing value, but only within context despite the claim of Universal application. Each fad then attracts its own followers, masters of retrospective coherence who ride the waves of fashion.
Cynefin is about saying that, in the main, most things had value within context and started to fail when they moved outside of that context. Often advocates simply failed to understand that and were more concerned to condemn heretics that to create something of lasting value. They avoided the very simply truth that condemning what went before does not of itself legitimise what you propose as an alternative. This approach also allows for change and movement between applications as a field emerges and the entry of new ways of thinking under conditions of uncertainty.
Articles by Others
Dave as Quoted by Me
The problem with wikis has always been the collapse of two essentially different operations: Save and Publish. You edit and save a page. What happens? You publish to the world. No approval. No chance to ensure it marries up with process changes made elsewhere, compare to compliance or governance regulations, to get it buy-in from stakeholders or to get legal approval. As a rule Wikis omit Content Management and Workflow capabilities and, because they don’t deal with Approved Records, they also lack Records Management and Records Retention facilities.
How does an organization know what it knows? That question drives a lot of interest in knowledge management. It drives a lot of spending on consultants and technology. It drives a lot of effort trying to extract the “knowledge trapped inside people’s heads” with explicated and documented content in searchable repositories.
Disconnecting knowledge from its source, in terms of people and places, will remove from that knowledge the very context which infuses it with life. Because indigenous knowledge is continuously generated and renewed in the living practices of people, archiving in isolation from practice removes its ongoing relevance.
An anecdote is a naturally occurring story, as found in the “wild” of conversational discourse, usually about a single incident or situation. An Anecdote Circle is a way of capturing these. It is a lightly facilitated, group based Method. People are selected that have some form of common or shared experience. As an example, they will be prompted to “Share either a good or bad experience when…” in relation to this common or shared experience. Anecdotes can then be applied across a wide variety of organizational endeavors, from culture to strategy. They may also later be tagged or signified and placed in a Narrative database. The general operating principle of the anecdote circle is this. Because “you only know what you know when you need to know it”, it is difficult to get at aspects of knowledge, values and beliefs that are held in common but rarely talked about.
When people tell each other stories about their experiences, the social negotiations that take place create conditions which recreate to some extent the feeling of being “in the field under fire”, or, in the state of “needing to know”. Thus, hidden knowledge surfaces and becomes available in ways it could not otherwise do so. Anecdotes are usually short and about a single incident or situation. Contrast this with a purposeful story, which is long and complex as well as deliberately constructed and told (usually many times). Some people tell purposeful stories often; others don’t. What you are after in the anecdote circle is not purposeful stories, which are indicative of what people believe is expected of them, but anecdotes, which are more unguarded and truthful. For sense-making and knowledge sharing anecdotes are priceless. They can answer many questions that direct questioning cannot. Telling stories allows people to disclose sensitive information without attribution or blame, because the inherent distance between reality and narration provides safety for truth-telling.
"Funding is linked to delivery of projects and projects come into two main categories: safe-fail low cost experiments and fail-safe conventional ones. More fully described these are linked to a specific issue/opportunity/problem where the new concept can be show to have a positive impact on a business process or other objective, and where the impact of that initiative can be measured (either by positive impact or by the cost, opportunity or otherwise of not carrying out the work. ROI, EVA (Economic Value Added) and other accounting measures can work here and you will need to understand them and their application."
One of the main enemies of all of this is time and capability or understanding. I am writing this after coming off a three hour conference call trying to dumb down a complex message to the point where the CEO of a major international corporation might understand it enough to pay attention. Now that has been a depressing experience as it requires sound bites, pain points and a recognition that anything which requires thought is unlikely to succeed. Now I want this deal to work and I have good coaches but it is a depressing process.
So a final plea to senior decision makers, and a pretty direct attack on common practice. If you allow yourself to get caught up in meetings, decision making and the like to the point where you no longer have time to think and reflect then you have damaged yourself and downstream the organisation that you lead. It also shows you are not leading well as you have too little time. Paying attention is not the same thing as being busy. Some of the best executives I know have brains that can sense there is something they need to spend time on. Some of the worst make a virtue of ignorance.
Indeed the celebration of ignorance, the anti-intellectualism that dominates too much management thinking represents the immanence of death during dynamic shifts or paradigm changes. It's not enough to simply act, you also have to think. It's not enough to think you also have to act. They go together and the more senior you are the more you need to be comfortable with both; neither can be fully delegated. So if someone comes along and offers you a solution that doesn't require you to think then kill the messenger.
-- Complex adaptive systems theory is used to create a sense-making model that identifies a natural flow model of knowledge creation, disruption, and utilization.
-- Knowledge is seen paradoxically as both a thing and a flow requiring diverse management approaches.
Sense-making is the way in which we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. Dave Snowden describes technologies that process large volumes of data with a view to weak signal detection and pattern recognition. Another kind is naturalistic sense-making, derived from an understanding of the cognitive processes that underpin human decision making.
Recommended by LinkedIn
14. Black Swan
Fooled by Randomness was a timely book, well written and useful, but then we got Black Swan which again has good examples but over generalizes its theory.
Decision-making and problem solving are similar, so let me focus on spreading innovations. In KM efforts I’ve seen, a leading indicator of success is some sort of “pushed” newsletter, e-mail to a distribution list, or blog that informs an interested audience of important news and ideas. In my opinion, citizen journalism will be one of the lasting legacies of KM, whether KM itself lives or dies.
Accelerating the spread of innovation is obviously a good thing, but I would subsume it in creating the conditions. If you don’t have an adoption policy (which may include distribution) then you are not creating the conditions in the first place. In respect of using KM tools, well I think that is a means to an end, not an end in itself. KM tools may be the right answer, but a fair number of them prevent effective knowledge flow. The danger is if you start to add in means, you end up with a long list and you prejudge the solution.
I agree that blogs, newsletters, etc. can be (but are not necessarily always) useful in KM. However again they are a means to and end.
Many years ago I formulated three rules or heuristics of Knowledge Management:
The first of these reference the fact that you cannot make someone surrender their knowledge in the way that you can make them conform with a process. It was originally coined in reference to individuals, but I have come to realize that it also applies to organizations… So a new formulation, or possibly extension of the first rule would be:
If you ask someone, or a body for specific knowledge in the context of a real need it will never be refused. If you ask them to give you your knowledge on the basis that you may need it in the future, then you will never receive it.”
Five statements:
There is an underlying assumption here: that narrative material, anecdotes, pictures, fragments of stories is more valuable than structured documents and closer to the way we naturally share and create knowledge and learning.
Four suggested ways forward:
We need to be learning lessons continuously, not documenting lessons learnt.
Recommended Reading
19. Cognitive Edge
Cognitive Edge is replacing The Cynefin Centre, which includes the work of Dave Snowden. Here is information about Cognitive Edge.
Headquartered in Singapore, Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd was created in 2006 to take on the work originally initiated in IBM as the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity. Cognitive Edge has three main focus areas:
1. SIKM Leaders Community, July 2019: Let’s start to manage knowledge, not information
2. SlideShare
3. Understanding complex organizations: The Cynefin Model by Keith De La Rue
4. Podcasts
5. KMWorld
Closing Keynote: From KM to Sense Making: From Efficiency to Effectiveness - The journey to sense making from knowledge management, represents a desire to return to the basic driver of early KM, before installing a portal was the magic key, focusing on making better decisions and creating the conditions for innovation. Drawing on theory and practice in sense making and KM, as well as highlighting patterns from stories captured from KMWorld attendees, this talk focuses on five aspects of the way we perceive the world:
Snowden provides examples of how KM practitioners can capture the high ground of strategy in an organization and shift from the electronic storage of knowledge to its deployment and creation to enrich human decision making.
Session C102: Tools for Putting Organizational Stories in Context - More than storytelling, dealing with narrative in organizational settings is becoming critical to decision making and innovation. Organizations are complex, each with its own culture, and focusing on narrative systems can help. This session describes tools and techniques used in building narrative databases which can fuel the engines of decision making and innovation. Using real-world examples, it illustrates the impact and value within complex organizations—those populated with people!
Evening Networking Event: KM Stories @ the Pub - Join Dave Snowden, Director, Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity, IBM Global Services, and Steve Denning, author of The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations, conference speakers, other storytellers, and attendees for an informal, interactive networking program that brings together experts and novices for an evening of fun and learning. Participate and take away ideas to use in your organization to assist in managing change and knowledge transfer, techniques to practice to have a positive impact on your organizational culture, and more.
Workshop 1: Corporate Storytelling - The ability of a story to transmit a powerful meaning with intensity has enormous significance for performance in communication, knowledge facilitation, cultural change, and cross-cultural understanding. Organizations such as 3M, Xerox, IBM, NASA, The World Bank, Intel and Microsoft are actively using story techniques to handle complex management issues. Storytelling already exists as an integral part of defining what the organization is in terms of culture and purpose. This workshop provides an opportunity to understand the rich opportunities for the use of storytelling in your organization.
1. KMWorld
2. Vimeo
-- Conversation
3. YouTube
Books
Governance systems; PNG Petroleum; Traditional Owner relations; South Pacific Futures, Web 3
6yGreat and epic write up! Much appreciated.
with sharing and discusion to elavate the knowledge
6yAgree the leader of KM in "cognitive edge".
Fabulous write up
Strategy & Innovation, Strategic Communications
6yOne of my fave curmudgeons!
Investor | Consultant | AI/ML | Web3 | Blockchain | Customer Service Management | Product & Program Management | Data & Knowledge Management
6y...and a complex storyteller... 🙂