Building Scalable Organizations that can Deal with Uncertainty — with Dave Snowden

Podcast Notes

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 which 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 organisations, 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 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”.

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: https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

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

Recorded on 26 October 2020.

Key Insights

1. One of the key components of building complexity-friendly and adaptive organizations is “scaffolding”: internal and external. While external scaffolding can be thought of as a rigid structure — an exoskeleton — that doesn’t allow for scaling, internal scaffolding is one that allows for growth and diversity to emerge on top of its initial structure, like a human skeleton. This is more apt for entrepreneurial organizations that need to adapt swiftly to changing circumstances.

2. Leadership and hierarchy that is tailored around exchangeable roles rather than individuals imply collective leadership through crews instead of individual leaders. And when it comes to bringing the whole organization along and foster coherence, as Dave puts it: “a lot of our work around leadership is finding naturally occurring heuristics, clustering them, articulating them, linking with teaching stories, making sure they’re verifiable, and using those as a linkage constraint within the system to get alignment”.

3. In the current “ nexus moment”, things could turn either better or get significantly worse. People, therefore, need to be educated around virtue ethics: we need to build distributed education around both being virtuous and being able to deal with uncertainty, since the future is going to be messy. Ontological frameworks like Cynefin — which celebrates 21 years in 2020 — have proven to be powerful as a means to teach and guide our relationship with uncertainty.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organizing by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.