---
id: people/dave-snowden
about:
  label: Dave Snowden
  depiction: people/dave-snowden.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'UX Brighton, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.'
  description: >-
    Welsh researcher in knowledge management and complexity who created the
    Cynefin framework for telling ordered, complex and chaotic situations apart.
  tags:
    - Cynefin
    - complexity
    - sense-making
person:
  affiliation: The Cynefin Company
  role: complexity researcher
  homepage: 'https://thecynefin.co/team/dave-snowden/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Dave Snowden - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Snowden'
    - title: Dave Snowden - The Cynefin Co
      url: 'https://thecynefin.co/team/dave-snowden/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Dave Snowden, born in 1954, is a Welsh management consultant and researcher in knowledge management and complexity science.[^1] He studied philosophy at Lancaster and took an MBA at Middlesex Polytechnic.[^1] At IBM he researched storytelling in organisations as a way of expressing tacit knowledge, became European director of its Institute for Knowledge Management in 2000, and founded the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity in 2002.[^1] He left IBM in 2004 and in 2005 founded Cognitive Edge, now trading as The Cynefin Company, where he is chief scientific officer; he also directs the Cynefin Centre.[^1,2]

He created the Cynefin framework and originated the design of SenseMaker, which his company calls a distributed ethnography tool.[^2] His approach to organisations draws on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory.[^2] His 2007 Harvard Business Review article with Mary Boone on Cynefin won an Academy of Management award.[^1,2] He is lead author of a field guide on managing complexity in crises, written with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.[^2]

He is the creator of [Cynefin](/terms/cynefin/).