Dave Snowden - Sensemaking, complexity, and frameworks for living

For years now I've wanted to speak with Dave Snowden because he has helped me understand complexity and how to navigate a complex world better than perhaps any other thinker. At the same time, it's intimidating to interview someone who draws so widely from all schools of thought and can be so coherent on a topic as immense and complicated as sensemaking.

Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking. For years at IBM he was the Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management, garnering worldwide attention for his frontier work.

He's the developer of the Cynefin (kuh-NEV-in) Framework--a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making across any context. Cynefin has been adopted by governments and companies worldwide, including by the US to improve homeland security, the European Union in creating their field guide to navigate crises, and in the British National Health Service to examine the complexity of care. It would be an understatement to say it is a seminal work for decision-making.

Dave's body of work includes contributions to industry, government, and charitable organizations. In fact, his intellectual prowess might only be matched by the ethos of generosity and equality through which he carries it out.

It is Dave's ability to weave seamlessly across fields of anthropology, ecology, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, engineering, and complex adaptive systems theory, pulling together a coherent, inspiring, and actionable fabric of thought that has always drawn me to his work.

So this episode is about complexity and sensemaking. But it is also about the tools and frameworks that allow us to think more clearly about our world and our actions in it. It is about witnessing a life that has gone through these journeys to create the frameworks and to give each of us an example that will help us bring the lessons into our own contexts.

In this episode, I get to ask one of the people who has led thought about complexity and how we navigate life among it: How do we make decisions in the presence of complexity? What are the pathways to becoming 'comfortable' with uncertainty? In what ways are our individual, institutional, and societal approaches to making sense of the world inadequate and even damaging? What is a better approach to sensemaking?

This episode is expanding. It will be with me for a long time and I hope it stays with you, too.