What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
Dave Snowden
Dave Snowden (Twitter, LinkedIn) is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co.
The Cynefin Co is "the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world". The Cynefin Framework is a decision support framework, a way of determining what method to adopt in this particular situation.
Dave is a thorough-to-brusque practitioner and thinker using Complex Adaptive Systems (a dynamic network of interactions where the behaviour of the ensemble is not predictable from the components, and which is able to adapt to changing circumstances).
Two key points I take from our conversation:
-Don't focus on changing people (for which there is little evidence of success). Instead, focus on changing the connections people have with other people opens up more possibility for the whole assembly.
-From a complexity view, the world is constantly changing and the information you have is partial. Better to be responsive to what's happening around you, rather than having aplan which will be immediately out of date.
Links
Probably the most recent full explanation of the Cynefin Framework and how to us it is here. "Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis. A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework" published by the EU.
SenseMaker® is a distributed ethnographic approach to understanding a situation. By allowing respondents to give meaning to their own experience, it avoids the epistemic injustice of third-party of algorithmic interpretations.
"SenseMaker® allows the powerful combination of vast amounts of data, with the rich context of narrative, based on the anecdotes of real people going about their real lives. Very importantly, SenseMaker® places the voices and interpretations of people at the centre, instead of privileging those in power."
Timings
0:50 - Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?
6:03 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?
11:52 - Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?
20:58 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?
22:46 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
25:52 - Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?
26:58 - Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
Twitter: Powerful_Times
Website hub: here.
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Thank you for listening! -- David
Welcome to What can we do in these powerful times? I'm your host, David bent, and I've been working in the field of sustainability and climate change for some 20 years, it feels like the need for change is growing faster than the impact we're delivering. So I'm wondering what I can do next that's useful. Speaking with others, they have that same question, which is why I'm doing this interview series. In 40 minute bites, I asked them brilliant people what they're doing now and why, or to inspire and enable the audience through stories grounded in experience. And today's guest is Dave Snowden, who is the Chief Scientific Officer of Canadian company and the director of the Canadian Centre. Morning, Dave, good to be with you. Right. So first question, what are you doing now? And how did you get here?
Dave Snowden:Anyone I've been doing for 2025 years now, since I moved back into a research role when IBM took over the company that I worked for, which is to apply natural science to social systems. Not so much as a sort of traditional 19th century scientific inquiry, but more as a constraint. So we know there are things about human decision making about systems which are known scientifically. So we work within those constraints, in terms of developing methods and tools. And that's what we've done there for a few decades. And it's kind of like working out. So carrying on doing
David Bent-Hazelwood:let's go back then, back in the days of IBM, and some people listening might know the story of the start of Cynefin as a was a framework and then company, but could you walk us through how all of that came through?
Dave Snowden:Yeah, so what happened is about 26 years ago, I'm not sure the exact date. But I was effectively strategy for a company called data sciences, which was Anglo Dutch with some German. We were about to float the company on the stock market, and then all sorts of good things were gonna happen. It's a management buyout, and I was one of the managers involved. And then over the course of a weekend, we went from being an independent company to being a part of IBM, which was a bit of a shock and trauma. I've never seen a it happened so fast in my life. And I was in a sense, lucky in that I was kind of like seen as a creative. So I've done the turnaround on the company with a combination of legacy management, object orientation, agile type, early agile work. And so I got given one of those lovely roles, which is just go and do interesting things or pay a salary. And actually more amusing this actually got incentivized and upsetting very senior people in IBM, for the first year or so. Because IBM bought us to become a service company. So we were the start of IBM Global Services. And that's where it came from. So I got into that role. We were working then on knowledge, because that was the current thing and my backgrounds decision support. Anyway, that's why I built my early reputation software. And what happened is, I got this phone call from Washington with we you're working on narrative and complexity theory, come and talk to us and ended up in a sort of rather weird combination of the CIA, former national security advisors, and God knows what else. And then effectively, it was part of the DARPA programme for both before and after 911. Looking at weak signal detection, and that was what really drove the methods very fast, particularly after 911. Because I was in Arlington, the day before the day it actually happened. And that Mike picked up the news the next day, and things got serious. So it was that sort of origin. And then the final key point on this is the Singapore government through the to house, the best civil service, my life picked up on what we were doing. And effectively, there was a negotiation and I left IBM and Singapore paid us to build their risk assessment and horizon scanning system, and that funded the software development, etc for the company. So that's the rough history.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Wonderful answer. Now, you said that you are working on some as science as a constraint, we know that there are some things which we constrain our ability to make decisions and then social sciences within those constraints. Can you unpack that for us a bit more? What do you what kind of work are you doing? With whom?
Dave Snowden:With Okay, so, I mean, my background is physics and philosophy. And I'm from a physicist point of view, no social scientists are ever has enough data to form any valid conclusion anyway, so that's kind of one part of this. They give a couple of illustrations. My favourite one if you give radiologists a batch of X rays, you ask them to look for anomalies. And on the final X ray with a picture of a gorilla, which is 48 times the size of a cancer module 83% of radiologists will not see it even though their eyes physically scan it is called inattentional blindness. It's not something you can train people not to do find myself and others say there's no such thing as a cognitive bias. All of these things are actually heuristics, they've evolved because they have utility. And so once you realise that, and this gets me into projects, you can't actually try and train people to be better decision makers, because they will not see what they will not expect to see. So one things we do, for example, is we use the whole of the workforce as a sense of mechanism. So you have an issue or a problem, you distribute the problem to the workforce. They all interpret that situation, and we develop pipe structure metadata for that. And then we present the landscape of opinions for the executive, literally 510 15 minutes half an hour after we posted out. So we can see dominant views minority views, we can generate ideas for change. And critically, we can find the 17% of seeing something everybody else is ignoring. So that's an example of moving from theory into practice. Right.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Next question, what is the future you're trying to create, and why?
Dave Snowden:We were building in increasing levels of uncertainty in society. So I have an intense dislike of case based approaches to management science and management theory. Because nobody ever gallons in of cases, you know, they they have massive bias in terms of only selecting positive cases, not negative cases, I have an intense dislike of consultancy recipes and fads for the last 30 years, I just really despise it. So what we're trying to do is to create something which is ScienceBase, because science doesn't change as the world changes. So post COVID, you can't really use pre COVID cases to decide what you should do. So that's part of it. And we got programmes, for example, on climate change, because once we get into convexity science, which is one of our big things. And also the cognitive side of this, we actually know that characteristics of a complex system are many agents, rich short term interactions, and no knowledge of the whole. That's how you get emergent, which is why thinking holistically is able to happen, and be it by an idea. So once you understand that, you know that until you can change the micro interactions of people, you won't change the overall attitude or disposition or space to the point where government will be prepared to make long term decisions on the planet. So it's all very well to have meetings and agree what we should do and manage people. But if you don't change people's day to day lives, in a short term election cycle, and that isn't going to change in the foreseeable future, you won't change anything else. So one of our programmes, for example, which is an open programme, we'll be capturing data on this at a festival next week, is looking at examples of micro sacrifices at a local level where people have realised the need to change the way they live, because they can see something in their local environment, which is affected by it. And if we can magnify those, once you get to a sort of six 7%, critical mass there, then the thing starts to accelerate. And you create a change in which governments can then make longer term decisions. So that would be one example.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Right? And does that point to a sort of larger or method that you're putting into practice there of which relates also to the thing you're saying about what you're doing now on the getting the workforce to talk about what they to give a pulse of information back to the management, which is helping, helping a situation to see itself I almost said system to see itself? I'm not sure that's quite the right phrase. But there's, there's a sort of holding a mirror up to what's going on in a way that then people can respond to that and create those positive feedback loops.
Dave Snowden:I'm really not wild about that way of describing it. This is probably in the academic envy. But that way of describing it comes from a sort of post enlightenment, focus on individual individual possession, because being a psychodynamics, and I really dislike that field. And it's the focus on trying to change people rather than trying to change the way that people connect, which is bad science. So I think it's more what we're doing is distributed. You know, one of the other things we're doing at the moment, for example, is to get groups of three or four roles, sorry, three or five roles, with delegated authority to make decisions, but it's the combination of roles. It's not the individual. So you're not holding a mirror up and you're not making people aware of the whole system. You're changing the short term interaction so that different patterns will emerge which can be sustained and changed.
David Bent-Hazelwood:So it's more like rewiring the connections people have so that they can push back
Dave Snowden:on you. rewiring is one of the most awful phrases people talk about on human beings. We're not machines. We're actually complex organic creatures. Yeah, our body makes more decisions in our brain in our social interactions makes more decisions in our bodies. So it's not a rewiring to reconnect. It's connecting, but it's connected in a biological sense. It's not connected in an engineering sense. Sure.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And those connections are. I enjoy being having pushback, because it helps me to make sure I'm getting closer and closer to maybe understanding what you're saying, Remember, philosophers
Dave Snowden:in particular about language anywhere? Dangerous.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Indeed, what I was asked was trying to get to was this by changing the connections people have with other people, that then opens up more possibility?
Dave Snowden:Yeah, so I've done a lot of work on peace and reconciliation over the years. And if you take people in very soon, it has to be five or less, we evolved to make decisions that extended families and clans. And the maximum number of decision makers in an extended family is about five. So we actually evolved to compromise in groups of five or less, but we don't compromise when we get into bigger groups. So we've done work since the 70s. To be honest, when I was involved in peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, I've taken very small groups of people from radically different backgrounds and putting them into an alien environment, where they discover they have more in common than they thought. And then letting them have a conversation about the differences when they're ready to have it. So complexity is all about changing the context. So people have autonomy in their own change, rather than some white liberal facilitator, getting them together in a room and telling them how they should think.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah, one liberal facilitator with a beard and glasses, which would be
Dave Snowden:great. Yeah, well, we both got those. And I've managed to lose the hair. So my wisdom quotient goes out, because
David Bent-Hazelwood:I'm working on average, we're going quite slowly. And then just thinking about the next few years, what priorities Do you have? What are the things that are most exciting given what you're doing into the future?
Dave Snowden:I'm 70, next year. So one priority is to actually walk the Camino. I think several things first of all, people like me, if we retire, we die within a year. So no intention of retiring, tend to change the pattern. I think I'm gonna I'm gonna be a grandparent next month. And I used to worry about my grandchildren. Then I started to worry about my children. And I started to worry about meal climate change. So I think that is a major driver, along with the political changes that should go on the growth of populism. In fact, I never thought in my 70s, sorry, in the 70s, that in my 70s, we'd be facing another war in Europe, we are. And I think, doing things which actually, nobody has a solution to this, but a lot of us are working in that area, starting to do things which change that space, is one thing. I think the other thing is getting rid of this over focus on the individual, which is a North European North American phenomenon. And the assumption that all change comes because individuals decide to change, which is where you get the whole nonsense about mindsets and mental models, and all of that pseudo scientific crap. Alright. So it's basically starting to recognise that we need to take a an empathy based interaction approach to change. Yeah, and we need to change the way that people think including people we don't like to think but we don't do that by admonishing them or lecturing them. We're doing it by the change that we interact. And one of things we're talking about, for example, with indigenous groups in Australia, where we do a lot of work, is the whole peace and reconciliation process with the planet, we need to start to think about that not as a living entity in anthropomorphize sense. But we need to reconcile ourselves with our physical environment, because we've kind of like lost.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah. So I've heard you speak up elsewhere about a project you're doing with it schoolchildren in Latin America. Yeah. So I mean, that that was really fascinating. Can you talk us through what you're doing there? Yeah, that's
Dave Snowden:our big idea. And we're looking for funding for it. So it will widen at the moment. So we've done it in Wales, we've done it in Sweden, we've done it in Colombia, we've done it in Australia, and a few other places is where we get kids sort of 16 to 18 year old because you don't have ethical issues there through the school. But also, they're still really old. So what we do is we made them ethnographers, to their own community. So we don't send the outsiders we use the voice of youth etc. And then we look at patterns in those narratives. And then we put transgenerational pairs together so young people with people in their retirement period, to come up with ideas for improvements, and if it's a good idea, we put them in a chair with somebody from government who can make it work. Now, we started to play with this because I Got really fed up with outsiders coming into communities they didn't understand. And this is in the literature, this is called epistemic justice, and you need to adjust that. So that's an approach we tested. And about eight years ago, when we first went to major funding. I remember saying like, if we ever have a major pandemic leads like this, because we'll need to be able to measure attitudes at the school district level. And that's now getting traction. So that's something and we're talking with the backfill area about this, they're on board with this. And so at some stage, hopefully over the next year or so we'll start to run the big pilots on that is my ambition is to have every kid at the age of 17, in every school in the world is not perfect condition. And that also handles the fake news problem better. Because instead of trying to be telling me what the app one outcome is valid or not, you focus instead on controlling the input. So you know, the input,
David Bent-Hazelwood:the input to what sorry. So
Dave Snowden:effectively, what we're creating is a huge international open source database of people stories and experiences and things they've done to improve things. Now, if we know where that data came from, we know it's authentic, you don't know whether data from the internet is authentic or not. More and more algorithms to prove what is or isn't right. And we're just twisting that and say, Well, why don't we instead focus on where we source the data rather than what data is valid.
David Bent-Hazelwood:So the long division here is that if we could have every 17 year old in the world as an ethnographer, who is feeding data, their own experience, their stories of their own experience,
Dave Snowden:even the experience of people in their communities, they act as journalists, or as journal keepers,
David Bent-Hazelwood:their experiences the expensive those in their community into a giant database and trying to find the right word for it, then that will give us great insight into what is actually happening at the moment. And in the recent past. And, and it will
Dave Snowden:give us an evidence base, which is important because surveys and focus groups don't give evidence in that sense or in the volume matters. It also allows what we call peer to peer knowledge flow. So the ability for ideas to transmit horizontally without having to be mediated through an agency. And with that, with this trios concept, we're now starting to build to the point where small amounts of money can be allocated real time outside the normal grant mechanism, because the big aid agencies and we're working with three of them on this at the moment, their problem is they can allocate 50 million, but they can't allocate 500. Yeah, but allocating lots of five hundreds will have a bigger impact. So we've been working on auditable transparent control mechanism, which builds off the kids with older people in communities, which would allow more effective distribution of money in real time. And by the way, with, that, we overcome a lot of the problems with things like Citizen assemblies, because we got real time access to people's opinions rather than over structured over facilitated, difficult to set up events. Yeah,
David Bent-Hazelwood:ones which have ballooned now they give a snapshot in time and with a small group of people.
Dave Snowden:And also they're only really good at one off issues, which are binary, and we're not dealing with binary issues. And
David Bent-Hazelwood:yeah, so it's in thinking about this project and its initiative press, but a word that has many different possible uses. One is, for those people themselves who who are giving the data in, they can then learn from it, they can learn from others who are like them, they can put into practice, what is working elsewhere, and try it out for where they are. And then larger institutions can have more trustable and more real time data, which to make true.
Dave Snowden:The other key thing this is actually a breakthrough in medical research. We do a lot in that areas. People can withhold the story they capture, but they share the way they interpreted. And then they can choose who gets to read the story. But you still got statistical patterns overall, which is what we need for an evidence base. And we're now doing some really interesting stuff for is if you see something which concern you, but you don't want to report it, because you'd be crying wolf. And that includes things like misogyny and racism and fraud and things in the environment. You can actually report it, it's encrypted so nobody ever can see it again. And then we look for patterns in multiple such reports. And when it reaches statistical significance, we can alert authorities the fact they've got a problem. That's actually really important because it gives you much earlier intervention before something becomes visible. Yeah.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Absolutely. And I can't remember the names of all the various NHS scandals there have been over the last
Dave Snowden:one going on. The moment they will
David Bent-Hazelwood:almost always been, where things are sort of known, but also sort of not.
Dave Snowden:You see now child abuse, and you see it in abusive elderly patients in residential care homes, we do work with the Dutch government on that big event coming up in Rotterdam to go through that project and tell people what we achieve. And I think it is this science based approach. We're going from complexity, cognitive neuroscience, but we're linking it with anthropology, and some aspects of sort of biological psychology. And what that allows you to do is to create systems which you can like now we're going to work with minor variations. So you get around the pilot project problem, because actually, you know, you're doing something consistent with the science. So it's like, if you know what happens in physics, physicists work out the theory. And engineers get to play with the practice. But once you've got the theory and know the practices achievable, and that's kind of like our approach.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah. And so someone was inspired to follow those prices, which I would summarise will try to summarise here is applying science, applying complexity and applying anthropology to have more useful data, which can then be used in a more distributed in, it's how it's got hold of, and then how it can be used to make real differences in the world. If somebody was inspired to follow that priority. What should they do next?
Unknown:A read a lot. Secondly, we actually run an open network. So we're a small action research company, we have a huge network of independent consultants and people and agencies we work with. And we're really open about that our methods are open sourcing canadian.io. We're building programmes using the software for people to pick out family we entirely self funded. So we're not we're not yet subject to grants, which gives us a lot more independence. But get involved. Yes, is the answer.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And what would you recommend somebody read if they're, if they're starting in this?
Dave Snowden:If you want to understand after the background, like I was the principal author on the European Union field guide on how to managing complexity and crisis, you can download that free, you can get a hard copy. If you still got the sense to be within Europe, you can get it without having to pay postage, if you're in Britain, you're going to be boasted, yeah. That's actually quite a good summary overall. And then sort of getting engaged. And I wrote most of my stuff in my blog first. And that's all available. So look on keywords there. And you'll find them references to other books and other authorities that we draw on.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Cool. And I'll put a link to that field guide in the show notes. If your younger self was starting their career now what advice would you give them?
Unknown:Do what interests you don't have a plan, I mean, do some sensible things like get a degree and get an education and I worked overseas for three years after I left University, which was transformatory indigenous rights and things like that. So just don't make sure. Because if you're female, early 20s, if you're male, late 20s, your concept of what society is the start to lock down based on the prejudices of society you're in. So you really want that very diverse experience while you can still accommodate it, so do that. Yeah, yeah. And then find things that interests you don't don't follow a sort of rigid groups with a plan and a schema, it's respond to opportunities as they arise.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And in a way that that's part of your view, as informed by complexity, which is almost impossible to plan for long term, the world is constantly changing. The amount of information you have about the world is so small anyway, being led or being responsive to what's happening around you, and forming the combination of what's there.
Dave Snowden:I think that's the key. All right. But yeah, I mean, what was interesting, I often tell the story when I first went to senior school 11 was allowed to wear long trousers, we had to wear short trousers until then, which in the British winters, the late 60s was really like marriage, with a three mile walk to work. I still remember Friday afternoon, I walked to the front of the class and the teacher gave me a card and honoured it said you support capital punishment. And my mother was leading the Labour Party in north Wales on the current Campaign to Abolish capital punishment. So I think the teacher has been right on that yet. And I speak for seven minutes without preparation for something I profoundly disagree with. And we did that every week from 11 to 18. And those of us who repeatedly got trained in rhetoric that that made us generalists. Yeah. This is a key point to keep making to educationalists. If you want general is creative process which makes people generalists Don't trains be generous. Yeah, it also made us critical. Because if you argue for things you don't believe in without notice, you actually get really sensitive to good arguments and bad arguments. So I think we need it. It's process, its behaviour. People say we want this behaviour. So they try and train the behaviour. Well, it's scientifically impossible. You need to change the way people interact. So the behaviour emerges. So if you want things like generalists, if you want critical thinking, you need those processes when people are young enough to build different pathways in order to do it. Right.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Then, who would you nominate to answer these questions because you admire what they're doing and what their approaches
Dave Snowden:are gonna go for any one particular person. I mean, we work with several people in complexity. I mean, Walter Freeman, when he was alive was huge. But let's see Gerardo, Gary Klein, I could go on a huge list, we actually tend to pull them together in retreats, three times a year. So there's no one person there's a whole body of people I think, are well intentioned, and the whole body of people be honest now. We're just seeing complexity as a fad. And that worries a lot of us. Yeah.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And how could to there's a question, how could somebody tell the difference between somebody talking about complexity as a fad and somebody who's taking it sort of see, okay,
Dave Snowden:so check their age, right? So if they're in their 40s, or 50s, complexity has been around for 2025 30 years, if they've only started to talk about it, and the last couple of years and be suspicious? If they're, you know, 20s? Well, they've just come across it, that's okay. But if they claim deep expertise, be suspicious. And ask them difficult questions, see what they've read, read? Have they got peer reviewed material? Or is all immaterial, self published? Semi publishes all raw material, don't trust them for the petroleum?
David Bent-Hazelwood:And then is there anything else important that you want to say?
Dave Snowden:No, really, I think. I think the key human quality, which actually made us what we are as a species is curiosity. And my worry at the moment with things like chat, GBH, and all those sort of things is we're allowing, we're starting to allow our lives to be curated by machines of loving grace. And for God's sake, avoid that. The danger with AI, which is not AI as machine learning, is not that it will exceed us in intelligence, but at the moment, where can it make it halfway, so please, don't? Yeah,
David Bent-Hazelwood:wonderful. Well, on that note, the the call to keep curious. And I suppose there's also a call in there to avoid a curated life as have raw experience that you can learn from directly rather than one that is mediated by somebody else. On that will say thank you. So you've been listening to what we do in these powerful times. event and we thank you to you, Dave. And thank you to all our listeners.
