Dave Snowden Fan Boy?

I mentioned Dave Snowden in conversation in the bar last night and someone responded:

“You’re a big fan of his, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

And I realise it’s quite important to say that, because I keep referring to our “ongoing dialogue” in various posts here at Psybertron or on LinkedIn, which might make it look like I’m obsessed by some disagreement with him, but nothing could be further from the truth. Less damned by faint praise than praised by faint damnation, I sincerely hope. So let me put that right.

I’ve been mentioning / following Dave and the progress of his Cynefin “Sense-Making” approach & consulting business since 2002/3.

In later years of my own systems architecting career, when so many management teams have thought they needed to get to grips with “agile transformation” or whatever latest idea / fashion / fad in practice, the question of getting in an independent / external consultant to help has often come up. My record would show my only recommendations in that time have been Dave Snowden (and sometimes Johnnie Moore) – not that anyone has ever taken my advice on that 🙂 Sadly, management consulting choices have become ever more orthodox and formulaic – becoming #PartOfTheProblem in my terms – “no-one ever got fired” for hiring something recognisably big, blue and square (which is ironic given the origins of Dave’s Cynefin business and his variation on the ubiquitous 2×2 grid).

We have no conflict of interest. He’s “doing” nothing wrong IMHO and indeed our agendas are quite independent. Whilst also being a prolific and thoughtful writer Dave’s focus is a business – Cynefin is bigger than a one man show – a business that delivers and gets stuff done. I have massive overlapping areas of interest in terms of real-world content and processes, but my focus is firmly in the direction of more abstract / philosophical frameworks for understanding of that same scope.

Explicitly, as per our latest LinkedIn exchange yesterday and today, I’m curious and Dave, being busy with his valuable consulting time, has no obligation to humour my curiosity. We’re both imperfect humans with good appreciation of our individual strengths and weaknesses (and objectives). I’m simply curious why, given very little to disagree about in approach to our complex systems space, Dave hangs on so tightly to the word “science”?

It takes two to obsess 🙂

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Elsewhere on Psybertron:

Dave and Dichotomies vs my #GoodFences.

Psybertron’s “Systems Thinking” agenda more widely than Dave & Cynefin.

The “More Than Science” dialogues more widely than Dave & Cynefin.

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Post Notes:

One obvious reason Dave is hanging on to the word “Science” is that it is in his Cynefin job title “Chief Scientific Officer” as opposed to say “Chief Knowledge Officer” Anyway …

… Strangely after sharing this post I saw a version of Dave’s Cynefin Framework that rang bells:

There are many versions, where exactly what is emphasised in each quadrant has evolved in use, although (a) the Simple > Complicated > Complex > Chaotic labels are pretty stable, and (b) some versions also emphasise that these are not flat quadrants of the ubiquitous BCG 2×2 Grid by making the disconnect between Chaotic and Simple more obvious, in a different / overlapping plane, and the “aporetic” grey zone in the middle.

But what I like about this 2007 version are those little tetrahedra symbols which, to me, illustrate the essence of the different contexts in terms of the nature of the relationships between the current subject in focus (the yellow node) and the other parts of the problem (the black nodes). Which is ironic because Dave considers them confusing or misleading and has dropped using them in recent years. Anyway, the encoding is in the solid or dotted clarity of the relations:

Simple is – simple enough that functional relations to the subject are well enough understood causally, that the relations between the other things don’t matter enough to worry about how well they’re defined.

Complicated is – where all the relations matter, but they’re well enough defined and understood, that the primary issue is just that taking them all into account is complicated (but nevertheless tractable).

Complex is – there are plenty of causally well-understood and defined functional relations but that many of the relations relevant to the subject are also emergent and not directly causal or reductively deterministic.

Chaotic is – where few if any relations are well enough understood to be treated as directly causal and almost all relations are emergent at multiple levels.

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Post Post Notes: Could be so many….

Dave’s “dialogue” continues with many, on LinkedIn and with Cynefin writings and events. We discover he does have Christian religious affiliations, and he frames one series of regular events as “retreats” – in the wilds of Wales …

Shared on X/Twitter (8 June 2025):

QUOTE

𝐂𝐲𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐑𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 – 2025. We are organising a retreat, the theme is ‘What does it mean to be human?’ We were inspired by our Snowdonia retreat earlier in the year, where this question arose repeatedly. In this new age of machine learning, “thinking”, and algorithms, what do we know about uniquely human forms of creativity?

Please register your interest in exploring how we coexist with each other and AI 👉 https://share.hsforms.com/1Rs1gf_JiRruDQYTY1ysNPw4x0jh

The retreats are special to us at #Cynefin, offering a more in-depth setting to meet with network members and discuss research ideas and offerings from around the world. We hope to welcome you there.

UNQUOTE

What does it mean to be human? Agreed, this is a core “meaningful” question – for Cybernetics / Systems Thinking about real world complexity and our place in that ecosystem, individually and collectively. Any ontology of the world, needs an epistemology of meaning in the world. All good, but yet again just increases my curiosity that he clings so tightly to “science” and decries attempts by me and others to suggest there’s “more than science” that matters here?

I do have a comprehensive metaphysics which supports an epistemological ontology, as well as moral philosophy, but we’ll save that for another day. If people insist on ignoring even the possibility of epistemologies – stuff worth knowing – beyond science, I’d be wasting my breath 🙂 Do not pass go.

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