person · draft
Dave Snowden
Welsh researcher in knowledge management and complexity who created the Cynefin framework for telling ordered, complex and chaotic situations apart.
UX Brighton, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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.
- affiliation
- The Cynefin Company
- role
- complexity researcher
- homepage
- https://thecynefin.co/team/dave-snowden/
makes
Dave Snowden's framework of five domains (clear, complicated, complex, chaotic and confused), each with its own mode of action and its own limits on prediction.
Tags: Cynefin, complexity, sense-making