Navigating Complexity in Education - A Conversation with Dave Snowden

Dave Snowden is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of
Cognitive Edge. His work is in the area of naturalising
sense-making, seeking to base social science research and
practice in the natural sciences. He is generally considered to
be a pioneer in the application of complex adaptive systems
theory to a range of social issues, and in the development of
narrative as a research method. His work extends across
government and industry in a variety of fields including
knowledge management, strategic planning, conflict resolution,
counter terrorism, decision support and organisational
development. 


Snowden, then of IBM Global Services, began work on a Cynefin
framework in 1999 to help manage intellectual capital within the
company. He continued developing it as European director of IBM's
Institute of Knowledge Management, and later as founder and
director of the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity,
established in 2002. Cynthia Kurtz and Snowden described the
framework in detail the following year in a paper, The new
dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated
world, published in IBM Systems Journal.


Snowden holds a variety of academic positions. He is a visiting
professor at the University of Canberra, Hong Kong Polytechnic
University and University of Pretoria and is a visiting fellow at
Warwick University, Nanyang University, the Universita' Cattolica
in Italy and the Singapore Management College. He was Director of
the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence in 2006 and was
appointed to the NSF (US) review panel on complexity science
research in 2007. He is also on the editorial boards of several
knowledge management journals and is an Editor in Chief for
Emergence: Complexity and Organisation. His HBR cover article
with Mary Boone A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making was
selected as the 2007 Best Practitioner-Oriented Paper in
Organizational Behavior by the Organizational Behavior Division
of the Academy of Management.


Earlier this year, Dave Snowden (and Friends) published the book
Cynefin: Weaving sense-making into the fabric of our world (2021:
Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd).


Dave lives in the UK where he pursues his passions of Welsh
Rugby, Wagnerian Opera and walking.


Social Links


LinkedIn: @dave-snowden


Twitter: @snowded