Complexity, knowledge management
Dave Snowden
b. 1954
Cynefin adds the discipline of naming which kind of terrain you are on — clear, complicated, complex, chaotic — before choosing a method.
Read alongside: Sense · Shape
- Start with
- A Leader's Framework for Decision Making (2007, with Mary Boone)
- Where they resist the book
- Snowden rejects most leadership development as category error. He would question whether a practice can be taught at all.
Works worth the time
A Leader's Framework for Decision Making · 2007
With Mary Boone. The short statement of Cynefin: match the response to the kind of situation, not to preference.
Read further
- The Cynefin Company: Dave Snowden ↗
The Cynefin Company
- Wikipedia: the Cynefin framework ↗
Wikipedia
Where Snowden appears
Organisations make sense retrospectively, and then act as though they knew.
Weick's sensemaking shows meaning being assembled after the fact from cues and plausible stories. Schön's reflection-in-action is the counter-practice: examining the framing while still inside the situation. Snowden's Cynefin adds the discipline of naming which kind of terrain you are on before choosing a method.