Systemic Agility Community

The Cynefin framework is well established in the Agile community but it is only a small part of the wider Cynefin body of methods and tools. The latest Estuarine framework looks at mapping the current situation in organisations and then focuses on multiple small interventions to change the energy gradient of the system. Rather than trying to force a desired endpoint we look instead at, to express it colloquially, making the energy cost of sin higher than that of virtue. That also involves challenging the whole idea that ‘mindset’ has any value in change.

Prof Dave Snowden
Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the University of Wales. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.
He is a visiting Professor at the University of Hull and has previously held similar Universities of Bangor, Hong Kong PolyU, Warwick, Pretoria and Stellenbosch. He held the position of senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period in Nanyang.
His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge management. He is a editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in the field of knowledge management and is an Editor in Chief of E:CO. In 2006 he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and in 2007 was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.
He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity; during that period he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a world wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector and was one of the founding members of the DSDM consortium, one of the three feeds into the Agile Manifesto.
The Cynefin co exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants. He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management.
The Cynefin Centre for Applied Complexity was established to look at whole of citizen engagement in government and is running active programmes in Wales and elsewhere in areas such as social inclusion, self-organising communities and nudge economics together with a broad range of programmes in health.

Note: The event will be recorded but we will hide people without camera on so there is a way to participate as an observer or silently with questions/comments in the chat. Feel free to bring your questions and your sharing spirit to this conversation.

I remember when I knew it all. Organisations would hire me to help them 'go agile,' and after pushing water uphill with a stick for many years, I realised that isn't what they wanted at all. They wanted help solving problems. We love our models and tools. We love making fun of stupid leaders because they don't know what a complex adaptive system is. But maybe we're part of the problem. In this session, we'll examine why who we are as people, and the stance we take, are just as important as the models and tools we cling to.

In this session we will be welcoming Jason Little. Jason is the founder of Lean Change, author of Change Agility, Lean Change Management and Agile Transformation: A Guide to Organizational Change. In addition to revolutionising the world of change, he's also CTO of Spero Careers Canada, a company dedicated to solving the autism employment crisis.

Feel free to bring your questions and your sharing spirit to this conversation.
Note: This will be recorded but we will hide people without camera on so there is a way to participate as an observer or silently with questions/comments in the chat.