This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host Stina Heikkila.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript that has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello, everyone. So great to have you back on the podcast. Today I’m here with my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hi everyone.

Simone Cicero:
And with legend, I would say, of complexity thinking and sensemaking, Dave Snowden.

Dave Snowden:
Hi, pleased to be here.

Simone Cicero:
Dave, thanks very much. We are really looking forward to this conversation. I’m sure it’s going to be groundbreaking for our research and thinking. So, so first of all, as I anticipated, I would like to really start this conversation asking you to explore, I would say for our listeners, these ideas that we are quoting often lately, that you shared in a recent conversation with some other great folks on your YouTube series on organizational design (that by the way, I really encourage everybody to check). You know, this quote that basically says: “the next generation of organizing is about contextually unique solutions to emerge and adapt based on a coherent whole”. And I’m really looking forward to have you explode this, especially with regards to this idea of both, you know, the unique solutions and the coherence that make the full picture.

Dave Snowden:
Okay, so if I do a sort of high-level summary of my position on this, then we can explore it more deeply. The approach I’m coming from is complex adaptive systems theory. And one of the key aspects of complexity is the approach to actually working with what are called “context specific solutions” rather than “context free solutions”. But, if you look at the last 30 or 40 years of Management Science, what you’ve actually had is a context free approach. So, whether it’s business process engineering, Six Sigma, purpose, Blue Ocean Strategy, learning organizations — what all of these tools and techniques do is they kind of like carry out a sort of basic, retrospectively coherent study of a limited number of case studies. And from that they create an industrial scale recipe, and therefore propose an idealized model of future organizations. And organizations get into this cycle of adopting those realizing it doesn’t work, then moving on to the next fad, which comes along. Agile is currently one of those, we went from mission and values to purpose. You know, we went from Six Sigma through various stages to agile and so on and so forth. Now, the reality is, if you look at this from an organic, not an engineering metaphor- and I think that’s key — the engineering has underpinned management thinking for the past 30 or 40 years. From an organic point of view, there are certain things that we know which are in common. So, for example, you won’t get things defying the law of thermodynamics or the law of gravity. But, within those sort of constraints, you get a huge amount of biological diversity, which is unique to specific ecosystems. And that’s kind of like the approach we’re now looking at it organizational design. So, there are things that we know which are absolute. We know, for example, that human beings are triggered by partially blended memories of previous experience in response to limited data simulation. So, that’s how they make decisions. So, we need to build systems, which assume that’s the case rather than systems which assume that you can create a rational objective human being, which you can’t. We know the nature, the way that systems grow and develop. And we know that a key principle is how things connect, not what they are. So, we need to build organizational structures, which, for example, focus on connectivity, not things. Now, having established those basic rules that actually allows an organization to develop in a coherent and structured way, which is unique to its context. And to give one illustration of that, is actually more important to build and trigger informal networks than formal systems. But, if you look at any management technique over the last 30 or 40 years, it has always tried to make the tacit explicit, it has always tried to make the informal formal. It has always tried to create an engineering diagram rather than a more complex ecosystem. Yeah, with wildflower gardens and formal gardens and ponds and drainage capability and so on and so forth. So, very high-level that that’s where I would come from on this.

Simone Cicero:
Super clear, and just a couple of reflections that poured into my thinking while I was listening to you, especially one: how do you relate to this idea of organizing with, I would say, approaching organizing more from an architectural perspective that designs the constraints? I would say allow organizational efforts to fill the blanks and to grow organically into some sort of architectural constraints that you can put, versus traditional modes of organizing that are more about, you know, designing functions or divisions that to some extent resonate to the idea of products and services that organizations want to provide? So does this capture a little at least of this new approach to generating coherence in a different way?

Dave Snowden:
Yeah, and I think there are two key elements to this, one is a concept — we’re not sure this is the right title yet, by the way — but, for the last two or three years, we’ve been working on a complex systems approach to design thinking. And one of the key components is what’s called scaffolding. Now, I’m not sure it’s the right label, to be honest, because most people when they think of scaffolding, think of one specific type, which is an exoskeleton, either sort of steel tubing, which goes up before you create a building. They don’t think of an endoskeleton, which is like the human skeleton, so around which a huge amount of diversity can evolve. And they certainly don’t think about things like micro cardio lattices, and nutrient lattices which are used in health care to provide structure around which healthy bodily function can build. But, we’ll use the term scaffolding for the moment. So one of the work we’ve been doing is on a typology of scaffolding, and that has some core distinctions, some of which are dichotomy, some which are dialectics. So, for example, internal or external and or exoskeleton resilient or robust. And then this rethinking of object orientation from 90s and the realization that organizational units are objects, as well as software. And this, by the way, is key, because technology these days has a profound effect that really, it has a co-evolutionary effect on human systems. It’s not a sort of one follows the other. The two are constantly co-evolving with each other. And that’s kind of like: how do you define the linkages? How do you find the connectivity between systems? So, the modern concept of organizational design and software system design, everything else, is first of all: use the level of uncertainty to determine the type of scaffolding you want. And also to use the degree to which you want to scale. So, for example, external scaffolding doesn’t scale, internal scaffolding does. So, you make those sort of two decisions. And then you focus on what are your objects, so that might be organizational units, and what I call the rule of 5,15 and 150. Different sizes of units have different behavioral characteristics. And then starting to define the linkages or connections between those units, and the linkages or connections between those units and with the underlying scaffolding or structure. And that allows effectively an organization or an application to emerge as a result of the interaction of those objects around the scaffolding. So, it’s not that you don’t provide structure, but you provide the right mental structure. So, for example, if you have a non-scaling crisis management team, you might create a rigid external structure, an external structure, because it’s temporary one, you might define rigidly roles. And you might limit interaction because ironically, order is a solution to a crisis. On the other hand, if you’re looking to build a entrepreneurial company, which can expand into different markets and change, you’d almost certainly go for an internal skeleton and internal structure. And you would actually allow for a significant amount of loose coupling as well as tight coupling, so that more deviance, or diversity or mutation evolved in the system. So, what you’re doing is you’re making decisions more as a designer of a landscape garden in a wild area of the country than you are as an engineer. And that metaphor is important.

Simone Cicero:
And Dave, this resonates also, I guess, with some of your some of the points that you raised recently in terms of leadership, you know, with this idea of leadership and moving away from the individual, and moving into the crew. It’s easy for us to connect this with this idea of micro-enterprising also, as you as you mentioned, if you design an entrepreneurial organization, you do this internal scaffolding that can grow and adapt. So, how this resonates with, for example, the type of leadership that you need to be enabling and you need to nurture into an organization so that these organizations can grow according to this new type of scaffolding.

Dave Snowden:
Yeah. I think I think this is actually a problem for Northern Europe and North America. Because you’ve had this sort of dichotomy develop between rigid process control and for everything which that will cope with the cult of the great leader who just makes these brilliantly intuitive decisions when they need to be made. And that cult of leadership is deeply problematic. It partly underpins the growth of populism in the last few years. So, if you actually look at military units. Military units, although they have a hierarchy and they have authority, they also have crews, which are predefined interactions between roles. So, for example, a weapon sergeant outpoints a brigadier in the context of their weapon system. So, the role can be roles can have higher authority than their status in the hierarchy. And the key thing about a crew and these are characteristic of firefighters, of aircraft pilots and so on, is that the roles interact, not the people. As a result, which is a form of collective intelligence, that’s a crew. But, also, lots of the original work I did in IBM 20 years ago was on informal networks and stimulation of informal networks, where what matters is you know the level of connectivity and you can create the coalescent points around which the informal networks will flock, when they need it. And that’s another type of leadership. So, I think we need to switch from individual leaders to various forms of collective leadership that make the point that hierarchies of roles are okay, hierarchies of individuals probably aren’t.

Simone Cicero:
All right. And Stina, I know that you have a question on this, right?

Stina Heikkila:
Yes! And so I was thinking, you know, when we talk about leadership: what type of leadership is needed? I’m also thinking, how will people adapt to this within an organization? What kind of, how do you bring people along and make them understand what is going on, without necessarily having to take the leadership role, if you see what I mean?

Dave Snowden:
One of the ways is not set a leadership role, but to distribute it. For example, right, I have six people that work for me who for various historical reasons, and there is the “coven”, right about to expand. Now, I am technically the leader, but I mean, they meet every week, they talk about things they bring me in when they need to bring me in. And that’s actually very rare. They often tell me why I’ve got something wrong. And they largely self-manage and self-organize. And I’m not worried about explicit purpose. Now, I was saying to one of them yesterday, kind of like, you know, please don’t start reporting holiday and time off, because we’re not that sort of an organization. You know, we’re much more fluid. But, there is an intervention mechanism if it’s necessary. Right. So, I think some of the issues here, I think people get too held up about motivation. Generally, if you’re having to talk about that, it’s because you’ve got something wrong in the first place. So, military units, you know, the motivation is kind of like based in recruitment, and in training and focus. You don’t find startup companies talking about motivation, because they are motivated. It’s when you get into bureaucracy and structure that the problem emerges. Yeah. Now one of the ways you can do this is by heuristics and teaching stories. So, I would never collect a group of platitudes together, put it on a mission statement, or make people carry it around in a card in their pocket. But, I might create a series of heuristics about the way we work and create teaching stories based on people’s own experience around them. And that type of approach has considerable fluidity in it. And I think that introducing new language here that one of the key principles in complexity is called coherence. So, is there sufficient coherence for us to move forward? So for example, evolutionary biologists have radical agreements, you know, people like Richard Dawkins has very little support from any geneticist I know, but he’s within the coherent structure of scientific inquiry. And others think he’s fundamentally wrong but we don’t challenge his commitment to science.
On the other hand, young earth creationists are incoherent to the truth, they have no coherent theory. So, you can dismiss — there’s no point in having a conversation with them. I think we need to start to think about coherent structures and sufficient flexibility within that. And of course, the more uncertain you are, the more you’re going to need to allow more latitude. That’s the loose coupling point around this and therefore, the more explicit you’ve been the more problems you got. The other thing to say on this is if my favorite example of heuristics is used by the US Marines, and it’s if the battlefield plan breaks down, stay in touch, keep moving capture the high ground. Now, that isn’t some sort of, you know, a non-platitudinous statement about if in doubt, be nice to customers. Because actually did you try and capture the high ground? Did you stay moving? Did you keep in touch are empirically measurable, but they handle wide levels of ambiguity. So, a lot of our work around leadership, to be honest, 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.

Stina Heikkila:
And if we zoom out a little bit to the societal scale, when you think about this coherence and bringing this heuristic element that you were talking about, I know that you’ve mentioned previously, for example, with work on climate change that you kind of need to go to the micro-scale to enable people to grasp and to sort of not be paralyzed about the situation. I don’t know if that’s the right interpretation but I would love to hear some more on that.

Dave Snowden:
And I think this is the issue of what we’re talking about in complexity is you’re dealing with systems which don’t have linear causality. But they do have dispositional state so you can measure how the system is disposed to act. So, part of the point you got with climate change is that because everybody’s focused in things like Kyoto and the Paris Agreement is just too big. And because the statements from scientists are catastrophic, it’s like, you know, if you don’t do something in eight years, you know, I was on a conversation with somebody the other night, he was in his early 60s who thinks he will starve to death as a result of climate change, he thinks that’s how he’s going to die. Now, at that point, people just turn off, it’s just too big a problem. What you need is a sort of micro changes, like, you know, people switching off lights in rooms they’re not in and doing something in the local community, which creates a more balanced ecosystem or going for, you know, encouraging local farmers to supply direct. And as those little things start to accumulate, you get a change in the dispositional state. And there’s a trigger point on this is one of the things we worked on how to measure in counterterrorism, ironically, where the population as a whole will accept the sort of sacrifices we need to deal with global warming. Now, just telling them they need to make those sacrifices now means they won’t, and people like Donald Trump will gain dominance. So, this isn’t a… we can’t afford it. It’s actually: you can’t afford not to, and you should have started a lot earlier. And the same is true an organizational design, which is fundamentally, the way the system is, the nature of the system gives what are called affordances, which are when the organization is capable of change, and when it’s not capable of change, and trying to change it outside the context of those affordances is a mistake.

Simone Cicero:
Dave, I will try to, let’s see if I can if I can manage to make a clear question about this. But, essentially, when you speak about coherence, I’m curious to see how do you see the connection with purpose and identity and most specifically, I would say, would like to relate to this also with the possibility of seeing, you know, more conflictual positioning, you know. Because I would say that if you ended up reconnecting with the context, for example, with the community or with the region with the nation, as we have seen there are emerging, for example, nationalist, you know, sentiment in the world. And I will say paradoxically, we see them also possibly relating with protecting the localities and, and conserving smaller, more contextual wholes, like nations, as I said, or central regions. So, what is your feeling about, you know, the need for coherence and potentially, at the same time, the need for a more decentralized but collaborative mechanism to ensure collaboration? Are there frictions between the two?

Dave Snowden:
Yeah, I think that this is one of the key things and I’ll declare an interest here, right. I’m the member of Plaid Cymru, which is the Independence Party in Wales. But, I’m very pro-European. So, my identity as well shows European second because I think you need something at the level of the European Union to handle things like finance and defense. And one of the major tragedies of things like Brexit and the moves to the same thing in Italy at the moment are that we need Europe as a counterbalance to the US to Russia to China. It’s multiculturalist diversities genuinely, or at least as near we got the moment to democratic. But, within Europe, if you look at it, yes, small culturally cohesive units are more successful. So, if you look at the response to COVID, with the exception of Merkel — and Merkel’s exceptional anyway — because she’s the child of West, West Germans who went to East Germany, she’s got a science degree, she’s on “Eastie”. So, she’s really is an exemption. But, generally, you’re talking about prime ministers in smaller countries who have actually made the reaction faster, because it’s easier to get their population behind them to create that sort of cohesion. Now, as I say, that’s a really important principle. So we know there’s 5, 15 and 150 limits in organizational size, I increasingly think that actually about 5 million is a limit for a national unit to have enough cultural coherence and cohesion, for people to agree how they would work together. So, associations are smaller countries within larger groups seems to me to give that sort of identity problem.

And part of the problem in democracy is it it’s and you get me onto key areas of work at the moment, it grew up mainly in the UK, to be honest after the in the 19th century, where people would actually know who they were electing as their representative. Countries are now so big that nobody knows who they’re electing. So, they voted party states. So, going back to intimacy within that structure is key. And there’s also a principle here called “coherent heterogeneity”. Trying to homogenize people so, everybody has common values, common purpose, common principles, if it was possible, which it isn’t, it would actually be very dangerous. Because what you need is people need to be different. They need, they need differences. We like to drive different cars, we have different habits, we watch different television programs. But, you need that heterogeneity, those differences to be coherent in the face of major challenges, like climate change. And so that’s kind of like the principle and one of my real worries at the moment is a lot of the work I see in climate change, a lot of the work I see on citizen assemblies, citizen juries, a lot of the work I see in organizations, is based on the assumption of homogenization being the solution where actually it’s part of the problem at the moment because it engenders rebellion and revolt.

Simone Cicero:
Right, and and I think it’s pretty telling also that your work, to some extent, is moving more into the political process and democracy. So, maybe a question that I can, you know, extract from this conversation is, if you project I will say, in the in the near future, or let’s say 10 years or something like that, your idea of organizing, and I’m specially interested in you, I would say exploring the connection between public and private and citizen led. So, how is this idea of the corporate that has been and you know, the corporate on one hand and the center government on the other, that has been dominating 20th century, how do you see that evolving into a new space maybe, where these three spades, you know: the public, the private and the citizen led reconnect, rearrange around our community’s needs and, you know, products and services? And also would be interesting to see what is, according to your understanding, the role of technology in this process that you have very importantly reconnected with organizing to some extent as the same thing. You know, because there is discontinuity between what we have what we are and our technologies. So, how do you see these things unfolding in the next decade?

Dave Snowden:
So, I think one of the things we’re seeing is the boundaries between the state and large companies are going down. And that’s both good and bad. So, you’ve got, you know, large companies like Amazon or Apple are bigger and more powerful than most nation states, and particularly the way they use technology if you look at Facebook or Twitter. They have more political influence, than they should do proportionally. So, I think we’re seeing that sort of fuzzy boundary thing going on at the moment. And what we’re not doing is creating the right sort of legislative constraints around that. Now, I think there’s a wider problem here. Part of this is actually about the issue of money. All right, the fact that we mediate everything through money rather than through, for example, indigenous concepts of gifting, which is one of the things a lot of us are exploring at the moment. So, I think, I think what we’ll start to see is and you can see it already with COVID is the start in the growth of a sort of localized gift economy complementing the national economy. I think regrettably, governments and international organizations aren’t in a position to handle the big corporates. So, that’s the downside. The upside is I’m seeing evidence that people in the big corporates are actually starting to worry about this. And starting to worry about the ethical implications of what they’re doing. So, I have some hope around that. But, I think we’re in for a rollercoaster ride.
I mean, we’re looking at massive depression, probably starting January, February next year: it’s already bad. Because COVID is going to go on until at least 2022. And people are going to start to realize that early next year, and that has massive implications. Now, at the moment, governments aren’t gearing up the economy for mass unemployment. And we’re going to face that. So, to be quite honest, anybody who makes a prediction about the future is going to get it wrong. What I do know is that we can’t have everything mediated by money, we need to find ways by which we generate natural constraints on large corporates because they will respond to consumer pressure. And we need to start to create these novel experiments. And we’re doing work on this with a whole variety of organizations on effectively novel forms of widely distributed citizen engagement in problem solving. And we couldn’t do that before the technology. So, that’s a positive aspect of it. But, my overall response is, look, guys, this stuff is really messy. And the issue is how do we cluster people in goodwill. And I’ll go back to Aristotle here, which one should always do and certainly in preference to Jung. Aristotle said, we need to educate people to be virtuous, because then they’ll make the right decisions under conditions of uncertainty. And that’s called virtue ethics. And I think that’s one of the big things we need to bring back into schools. And we need to deal with distributed education around that, which is both opportunity and threat. So, sorry, I’m not answering the question so directly, right. Partly because I think we’re in a nexus moment where things could switch for the better. I mean, we’re looking to, for example, link attitudes with COVID, with Black Lives Matter with climate change. Because there are times in the history of humanity where you can make a change and times where you can’t, and those are the things could go well, or they could go really badly. I mean, you might in 10 years time end with the pumps failing in, in Netherlands. And you know, we have Breda by the Sea, if you know your geography. At the same time, we might have popular tyrannies in America and the UK with civil unrest, you might have the Gilead scenario in the US for which blue states become blue or red states become redder. These are all quite realistic possibilities. And we need to use technology to make people aware of these and critically aware that they can do something about it.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I wanted to come back a little bit to also to your framework that how you know, the what people most people would associate your name with, the Cynefin, I know there’s some recent work on that, and you have a book coming out, and so on. So, how has the evolution been given that backdrop that we just painted? And how can we look at that tool in this shift? How can it help us?

Dave Snowden:
Yeah, what Cynefin is about right, and that’s actually really important, is the concept of bounded applicability. So, different things work within different spaces in different dynamics. Yeah. And, and that’s the power of it, right? So and that was born out of my own frustration about, you know, having to abandon things which should work but not work universally, every two or three years when I was a general manager. So, what Cynefin does is allows you to see those differences. And it allows you to connect things which appear to be contradictory, but actually work in different contexts. So, that’s one of its criticalities. You know, with the Cynefin21 celebrations, it’s been quite moving in some ways. I mean, there’s actually a hospital where they have it pinned to the wall of the operating theatre, so they can avoid killing people by realizing if it’s complex. So, if Cynefin is going to make a contribution, it is going to making a contribution to an understanding of diversity of response, and working in different ways. And the nice that, I mean, it’s evolved over many years. So, basically, because it’s evolved in it’s an interaction of science and capability, and so on and so forth. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s been resilient and why it’s been used, but it can be used very simply very quickly without our involvement. But, as you dive deeper, it gets more and more sophisticated. So, it’s a method of saying, diversity is valuable, but only within constraints. How do you choose which method or tool you use based on the nature of the system and nature of interactions, and how do you move forward.

Simone Cicero:
David, just building on this quickly reflection on… You know, it seems like as you said, you know, we are in a nexus moment. It’s kind of a tipping point or, you know, and so I guess that also from the organizational leadership perspective, you kind of need to approach the problem of creating organizations, developing them and products and systems and services, with an epistemic that is fairly different from the epistemic of the 20th century. And also, it’s much more like, we need an epistemic posture that is much more, I would say, friendly to know, to not knowing to some extent. And also you mentioned this idea of virtues, and you put quoting, if I’m not wrong, Aristotle and my question is, what are I would say the, I would say, the scope of epistemic capabilities and somebody calls them psycho technologies? How do you approach this as a human, as a leader, the context of the new context of organizing where you don’t really have many, much clarity, and you really, at the same time, even looking at the crisis that seems very daunting, how do you still do you think, what is the what is the right approach for from organizational perspective to deal with that and at the same time to be productive and, I would say, ready to engage with these in a productive way from the organizational development perspective?

Dave Snowden:
Yeah, I think actually, that part of the issue here is in the way you started is you need to be ontological, not epistemological. So, I think it links in with the previous question. So, Cynefin is an ontological framework, it says there are three fundamental types of systems. And the approach you adopt within those is radically different. Yeah. So, that sort of ontological awareness actually makes epistemic change a lot easier. And I know you’re using epistemic there in a slightly different way, as well. So, I’m playing the same game. So, awareness of different types of system, which are ontologically encountered compatible with different types of epistemic approach are then key. I think the other key thing in this age is what’s called epistemic justice, which is allowing people’s voice to come through. Some of this it goes back into leaders perspective, in that you have to recognize that the way people will say things to you is based on what they think you want to hear. So, again, some of our work is allowing those unarticulated voices to be shown. So, for example, outliers mapping would present something to the wholeof your workforce, they’d all interpret it, and then you’d look for patterns in the interpretation to find the groups of people who are seeing things differently from other people. And that’s both important in terms of leadership, because that’s about weak signal detection. But, it’s also important in letting people’s own voices to be heard. And I think that’s one of the other big switches, it comes back to what we talked about citizen engagement and increasing intimacy in the system so people are connected in different ways.

Simone Cicero:
Right. Definitely, I mean, so maybe the question, Dave, would be from an organizational perspective, if given these, you know, this need for new tools and new approaches, and acknowledging the Nexus that you mentioned before. My question will be now in the 21st century, to some extent, we are acknowledging that today, priorities of the organization is more to switch, I would say, towards the capability to do sensemaking at scale, because to some extent, you need to redraw the salience landscape, I would say for the for the organization, so you didn’t need to accelerate your sensemaking capabilities. And I’m curious to see, where do you see the friction or the equilibrium between these two missions. So, the organization as an engine of sense making as a way to sensemake together collaboratively? And on the other hand, the actual need of the organization to take care of, you know, for example, as we said, protecting the identities and ensuring that maybe some essential processes, like, you know, the production of energy or food or welfare actually take place in the community in the landscape. How is this equilibrium to your understanding, playing out in terms of maybe also interaction with between local implementations of organizing and more abstract, you know, global organizational layers? So, that that could be maybe an interesting space to explore.

Dave Snowden:
I think it’s also at the moment, it’s going to be about survival of organizations. And I think that comes back to this government and industry intermeshing. So, you’ve got the ones who will survive anyway and the ones who may not survive, particularly in the SME sectors. So, I think there needs to be intermeshing because I think the danger is people are actually going to focus on survival, rather than focus on change and expansion. If we do get the switch to sense making, and that involves effectively hold of employee engagement, you need more diversity in your sensemaking process, you can’t do it from a small group of elite in the center. And that needs to be interfaced in with the community. So, for example, some of the stuff we’re looking at, is also looking at some intermeshing communities with you find communities, for example, in South Wales, or South Africa, where you have a total dependency of one community and one industry. So, if the industry goes, the community goes, and but they still never talk to each other. So, that’s sort of the complexity concept here is entanglement. You need to entangle people in things rather than allowing them to be separate entities. And that’s going to be really necessary to government to industry level of the next year.

Simone Cicero:
Can you expand a bit on this idea of and entanglement, Dave, because we have been talking a lot about this lately, and we also had, for example, we had recently, Alicia Hanneke in this podcast where she presented, for example, different posture from, from a mindset perspective of Asian thinking, you know, that is much more embedded into, you know, the locally the local context. This you know, versus the Western perspective, there has been really much about the disentangling organizing from the from the context. So, I’m really interested to explore more into this idea of entanglement, if you if you don’t mind.

Dave Snowden:
It’s quite interesting. I mean, there’s a standard thing it comes from Geography of Thought, which is worth people reading and I use it a lot where you basically say to people, which is the odd one out, cow, chicken or grass? Now what’s interesting is in Northern European, North American normally (it’s not universal) is to exclude grass, because the first the other two are animals. Whereas the southern Europe, Celtic fringe of Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, norm is to exclude chicken, because the cow has got a relationship with grass. Now in political philosophy, that’s a difference between social atomism and communitarianism. So, as a difference, is it your community defined by the collection of individual identities? Or are the individuals defined by the community identity? And I fall into the latter category on that. So, part of the and you see this in indigenous groups, which I’ve studied over the years, basically, if you feel yourself is entangled to the community and to the environment in which you live something which is increasingly important, and the decisions are radically different than if you see yourself as an independent actor within a system, which has been the normal assumption of Western thinking. So, I think that’s one key difference is we need people to get to an embodied experience and enacted experience of the interdependencies that they actually have with their environment and with the people around them. And I think, you know, multiple small initiatives to make that switch are probably the most important one. And there’s some interest in the ironies here, because one of the things that we need to start thinking about here is that that interdependency is going to fundamentally change some of the mechanisms we have for exchange. And again, I’ll come back to that point about the emergence of local gifting communities and so on. So, I think this is all going to get very messy, but entanglement is messy. And part of it is getting people to understand that messiness, and incoherence are going to be part of their lives for the near future. Now, if you live in the West, you’ve had a nice, yeah, in the last few decades have been very comfortable. They haven’t been comfortable for the rest of the world, and they’re going to stop being comfortable for us. So, the capacity can manage with uncertainty is going to be something that we need to build communities around.

Simone Cicero:
And how do you build — or if possible for this — because your work is also very much related to this idea of narratives. And I think I find this very, you know, this is the core point, I think we are discussing here. And also it’s really about, as you said, engaging within coherence. And how do you build the kind of positive narrative in this shift?

Dave Snowden:
One is you identify naturally occurring narratives and you emphasize the ones which are going in the right direction, you don’t try and build a positive narrative. Part of it is actually, to be honest, most people like negative stories, not positive stories, because they have evolutionary advantage. You know, avoidance of failure is a more successful strategy. So, I work for example on citizen engagement is to allow people to generate their own narrative, but then critically, this is the epistemic justice angle. Or the cognitive sovereignty angle, if you want another phrase, is the power of interpretation rests with the people who tell the story. Now that also has the advantage, it allows me to scale the approach so I can see patterns in the approach. And then we get into this new vector theory of change, where you start to say, how can I create more stories like these and fewer stories like those, rather than how do I achieve X, Y, Zed characteristic? And people can respond to that. And therefore what will happen is new what are called tropes rather than narratives. So, a trope is a multiple common pattern, that small anecdotal data, which kind of like captures people like a whirlpool. So, the tropes switch away from populism to interdependency and so on.

Simone Cicero:
Right. And Dave, as we entering more or less the closure of this conversation, I would like to ask you to maybe peek into what according to what you feel now are the most important directions where our listeners, which are, you know, designers, organizational developers, should be looking now, in this moment, to really be ready to show up with this with the needed integrity, to engage with what is on our table at the moment, I don’t want to say what is coming up because we have a pandemic, for example, on our table now. So, it’s really here already, you know, so what are the direction you feel like we should be directing our curiosity, our passion, our interest as organizational developers, designers, and considering that we are also focusing with people that are interested in this idea of scalable organizing? Also, really thinking about leveraging ecosystems and mobilizing, I would say, for the better?

Dave Snowden:
I think, I mean, there’s two books by a former colleague of mine from the 70s, Terry Eagleton, which I think people should read one is called Radical Sacrifice, because we got to start to get people ready to the concept of sacrifice. And the problem with neoliberalism is we kind of like sort of invalidated that. Actually, people in religious communities tend to understand it, because it’s a key theological concepts along with things like grace. The other book by him, which is really worth reading is called Hope Without Optimism. So, given the sort problems we face, optimism is very difficult. But, that doesn’t mean that you deny hope. So, I think we need to start to think, and this is not the half full, half empty nonsense, this is basically hope is about a commitment to transformation and change even if you’re not optimistic about it, or you don’t, you don’t get into despair. Yeah. And that’s quite easy in the current climate. So, that’s like a very high level and was religious concept right in the ground level, if you want to scale something, and it’s complex, you don’t scale it by repeating what other people have done, that comes back to our starting point. Or by doing more of the thing which just happens to work last time. You scale a complex system by decomposition and recombination. And there’s a strong biological metaphor for that, if you think about it, the whole complexity of organic life form, yeah, basically comes from the recombination of four basic chemical compounds in DNA. So, you need to start to think like that. So, if I’m working in an organization, whether I’m a politician working in the country, or whether I’m a small business owner, or whether I’m working in a large company, I’ve got some seniority is I need to work out what’s the optimal granularity of my organizational units and my technologies, and then I have to start the process of hopeful integration or no, or connectivity between those units so that novel forms which are more resilient can emerge. So, this is the decomposition and then recombination type principle of complexity based scaling. And that means a change in software design, because actually, we need software to be coherent objects which interact rather than applications which are pre given. And in organizational design, we need to think about what are our core identities? And what are their interactions? Not what sort of organization do we want? So that’s the big switch in thinking.

Stina Heikkila:
So, maybe as a flip side question to this, what do you think could be things to avoid in the current moment?

Dave Snowden:
Well, the very thing I’ve done so in software development, for example, we knew that agile had gone bad when things like safe came along, you know that things are bad. I mean, for example, in British society at the moment, people are using the COVID emergency effectively to give huge contracts to people are incompetent as part of their the elite group. And we can see the same thing in the States. So, we need people of goodwill to call out that sort of corruption because it’s more likely to succeed and the good thing so if you don’t call it that early, you’ve got a problem. In organizational space, we need to avoid the sort of consultants recipe that sort of, “oh, here’s a solution: I’ll make you agile, everything will be Scrum”. And that comes back to the contextual design. So, it’s kind of like avoid recipes, avoid universal solutions, avoid panaceas, avoid the sort of, well, we’ll say we’re going to do this and then nobody will expect us to deliver results for 18 months. So, I might get away with it type approach, which is also complement as management. Yeah. And avoid disenchanting key staff, because then they won’t contribute to your solution.

Simone Cicero:
Dave, well, it’s been very thought provoking conversation, I think, maybe more than with other episodes, I will need to we will need to wrap our heads around the things that you brought up, especially these latest reflection on you know, how do you design organizations and software for example, elements that can interact and be to some extent, lead to the solution evolution and merge and be ready, you know, epistemically, to approach or to work in this new, this new context is really, really an interesting point. So, I would like to just ask you, as a final point, if you want to point out some of our listeners to explore more of what is in the new book, and I’m sure that, you know, they should be on the desk on any of our listeners, but I would love if you can explore a bit more what is this in the book coming up and why it’s important.

Dave Snowden:
Okay, so I didn’t know about the book until Saturday. So, what my colleagues did was to put together I mean, I was I wrote a 13,000 word article for it, but I thought I was writing something for the website and it turns out to be book chapter. So, that book is a mixture of me talking and anecdotal history the Cynefin framework and their their whole body of stuff from multiple backgrounds talking about the impact Cynefin has had on them. So, that’s going to be worth it and will be available on Amazon this week. The book which I am writing with Mary Boone, which is kind of like what is Cynefin and how do you use it? That’s probably still about a year away. But, there’s a host of material on the website, there’s a host of material on YouTube if you search on it, and we are actually we just put a new website up for cognitive edge, we are actually about start to curate some of that stuff so that people can know what to pay attention to and what not to.

Simone Cicero:
Great to know that there’s another book coming up in a year or so. So Dave, it was great to have you. I hope you enjoyed.

Dave Snowden:
I did. It was my pleasure.

Simone Cicero:
Thanks very much. Thanks to Stina for also being part of the conversation and to our listeners, catch up soon.