Complexity and Cognitive Science with Dave Snowden

This week’s guest is Professor Dave Snowden.

Dave is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co. and Director of the Cynefin Centre for Applied Complexity. His international work covers government and industry, looking at complex strategic, organisational, and decision-making issues. He has pioneered a science-based approach, drawing on anthropology, the cognitive sciences, and complex adaptive systems theory. 

Agile on the Mind is about exploring how agility and cognitive science can help us build intelligent teams, and there are few people better placed than Dave Snowden to unpick these topics with. Dave’s approaches have been incredibly influential on me personally and it was a real thrill to have him on the podcast.

My aim in having Dave on the podcast was to create space to dig into his interests, perspectives, and - often strong - opinions. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Here is a rough list of the topics we covered together:

* What is Cognitive Science and what does it have to do with complexity?

* Affordances, assemblages and attractors

* Why Daoism is attractive to complexity theorists

* How humans are good at handling complexity (The Frozen 2 Strategy)

* 4E cognitive science

* Extended Mind, hallucinations and Andy Clark’s work (we called it ‘The Prediction Machine’ but it’s actually called The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality )

* Keeping a direction of travel in an organisation - alignment is more important than goals

* Does changing yourself actually change your village and the world?

* Why your teams are actually groups of roles, not individuals.

* Harnessing Panopticon effects

* Gaussian vs Pareto distributions - why nurses have to break the rules to keep patients safe

* Estaurine mapping and creating chefs not recipe followers

* What agile gets wrong about empiricism

* Inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning, and why abductive reasoning is fundamental to human cognition

* There are no cognitive biases, just heuristics

* The powers of rituals and habits

* Rituals and religion

One small thing - I had a bit of a rough time editing this episode. I didn’t manage the sound properly, and as a result you may hear some clicks and skips in this episode which I struggled to edit out. I’ll try to do better with my audio next time. Sorry about that.

If you feel strongly about this issue, I invite you to upgrade your subscription to paid so I can afford to get some professionals into my production process.

Otherwise, I’d love to hear your feedback on Agile On The Mind, and ideas for future episodes and guests, so please be in touch or fill in this form to share your views.

I’ll be on the conference circuit this summer, so please grab yourself a ticket (with one of my discount promo codes to see me talking about this stuff in the flesh.

* Agile2024 European Experience July 24-26th

* Lean Agile Scotland 25-27th September (10DanielS) 

* Agile Cambridge 2nd October (10Daniel)

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