Complexity

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How to fire a president with very little response

When a mechanic walks up to an aircraft with a toolbox, nothing on the aircraft changes. However, when there's an announcement of impending retrenchments, everything changes in the organisation. This is an example of the nature of complex adaptive systems thatDave will often quote when speaking of complexity. I've been struck over the last 60 hours since the ANC decided to recall President Thabo Mbeki, how a mechanic has walked up to the airplane known as South Africa, and very little has changed. I would have anticipated [...]

With foresight, who needs hindsight?

I came across a billboard with this statement last week.  It's part of a marketing campaign for one of the short term insurers. When I read it, my first thought was that this is probably one of the silliest statements I've seen in a while, but after thinking about it, I realised that someone who doesn't look at life through a complexity lense may think that it's rather clever. So why do I have a problem with it?  Well, first [...]

By |July 14th, 2008|Categories: Systems|Tags: , , |0 Comments

Once breakfast is over

What do you get when you pull together a former meteorologist, anenigmatic maven and a former narrative therapist? Answer:The Narrative Lab and pretty informative breakfast conversation oncomplexity in the business landscape. In an amazingly short amount of time we managed to showcase our keynote on complexity (The New Simplicity), listen to a customised podcast from Prof. Dave Snowden on the Cynefin framework, hear how our methods are applied in practice and to talk briefly about the SenseMaker software we use when working with mass narrative capture. Thanks to all our friends, partners, potential [...]

Dark matter in Organisations

A little gem from Dave on Day 1 of the Cognitive Edge Accreditation course we're hosting in Pretoria: The Dark Matter Theory asserts that there is much matter in space that we cannot see, but we know it exists because it exerts gravitational effects on visible matter. When it comes to organisations, and the complex way in which they operate, the dark matter theory can be applied i.e. there are things/forces that happen in organisations that we cannot see, but we know they occur because they [...]

The narrative debate

I came across the following in one of Dave Snowden's articles that I haven't read for a while .. (it's quite long, so please bear with me!) "When people first become aware of the importance of narrative in organisational sense making, the often go through a stage when they think the best thing would be to tell stories in order to control the organisation or some issue.  This belief is a swamp across which consultants must guide clients safely, because [...]

9 Principles of Safe-Fail Probes

In a fail-safe environment, the key objective is to prevent things going wrong.  It is a system that has been structured such that it cannot fail (or that the probability of such failure is extremely low) to accomplish its assigned mission. High levels of planning and predictability accompany any such initiatives.  Indeed, some contexts demand this kind of rigour - take for example the recent serious of "could-have-been-worse" incidents in the South African civil aviation ­ arena.  Every eventuality must be covered, and when [...]

By |November 13th, 2007|Categories: Complexity|Tags: |0 Comments

Enabling leaders to make effective decisions

Dave Snowden, founder of Cognitive Edgeco-authored (with Mary Boone) the front pagearticle of the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review.  For those of us who've been involved in Dave's complexity and narrative work over the years, this is a key milestone - indicative of how our way of thinking is starting to make in-roads into mainstream thinking.   To quote Tom Stewart (HBR Editor), "Most leaders are told that it is important to be (or appear to be) decisive. Fair enough — but how is one [...]

Crime and Abortion :: Correlation or Causality?

n a recent radio commentary (John Robbie, on 702 on the 20th of September 2007) it was noted that research is coming out of the United States and also the UK that suggests that the legalization of abortion could have something to do with the decrease in certain types of crime. One of the most popular treatises on this topic is by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, calledFreakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. At first [...]

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