Summary:
Continuous Dynamic Change
Much of the language of Scrum and Agile Gatherings draws on manufacturing concepts and ideas. This presentation will look at taking a more ecological approach to delivering value at all levels of the organisation. Within the wider context of Agile it will look at ways in which we can improve our understanding of both implicit as well as explicit user needs. It will introduce complex adaptive systems theory using the Cynefin framework and look at how to scale Agile bottom up not top down. More specifically it will look at how to engage the strategy function of organisations beyond IT management to take a more proactive approach to innovation, including methods for whole of workforce engagement in decision support. It will focus on using the principles of Agile to create a resilient organisation, architected for continuous change.
Biography
Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. 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 holds visiting Chairs at the Universities of Pretoria and Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as a visiting fellowship at the University of Warwick. He has also held senior fellowships at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore. 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 aware 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 joining IBM he worked as a software designer and programmer building Decision Support Systems for major international clients such as Guinness. As a result of that work he developed the business to the point where he became General Manager of a new software business covering Decision Support, Forecasting and Inventory Management.. In those roles he was a pioneer in bringing academic insight into the pragmatic world of business. He was one of 50 managers selected to be part of the management buyout of Data Sciences from the Thorn EMI group and rose to a central role in strategy before the take over by IBM. In that role he pioneered a new approach to service marketing and was one of the founders of the DSDM consortium which went on to create international standards for rapid application system development and joint application design. He created businesses in the areas of Data Warehousing and Legacy System management through the GENUS program won a series of marketing awards in the UK and was crediting with driving most of Data Science’s revenue growth prior to the IBM takeover.
His company Cognitive Edge 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.