Dave Snowden > Quotes

“When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“there are few if any context-free solutions, but many valid context-specific ones.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.” – Blaise Pascal”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“How do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it? With that definition comes the concept of sufficiency, how do we know that we know enough to determine the type of action we can take? After all, that is the primary function of Cynefin; at its heart, it is a decision support framework.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“Conflict and paradox are critical to the advancement of understanding. Aside from verbal paradox, Cynefin methods often deliberately introduce conflict and ambiguity into group interactions to gain this higher level of understanding. Introducing a state of Aporia, or deliberate puzzlement, allows us to present seemingly contradictory and competing understandings as valid and useful pieces of the bigger picture.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“The method created the space for socialized sense-making and the process of inquiry, discovery, and design that ultimately shifts the power and agency to the citizen.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“A set of principles for operating in a complex environment includes: work with fine-grained objects, leverage distributed cognition, and ensure dis-intermediation.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

“The problems start at the beginning. For one, the options outlined are only based on the experience and knowledge of the consultant. Even consultants who tout their expertise, once they undertake delivering the series of workshops, for instance, to engage the company’s employees, the workshops are based on their existing thinking. They do not include the outliers or ideas that may lead to a revolution of the business. There may well be talk of embracing good or best practice, but that does not mean that they are current practices and there is a saying, ‘best practices are someone’s past practices.’ Also the work is typically based on a small set of examples. Therefore, the applicability, in this context, is not tested; it is basically an inductive model. The approach is fundamentally based on an idealized end-state model that assumes that we can second guess the market, that we have largely perfect knowledge, and that we can affect the market with the consultant’s limited strategy. As Paul Ormerod and Bridgett Rosewell’s paper indicates, this is inconsistent with reality. We need a new model that reflects the reality that we exist in today and allows us to discover, as Dave Snowden suggests, “The evolutionary potential of the present.”
― Dave Snowden, Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World