Dave Snowden on Sensemaking, Decision Making, and Complexity
On 15th August 2022, IPAA Queensland in partnership with Complexability, the Cynefin Centre and QUTeX hosted Dave Snowden and Beth Smith to share their thoughts on ‘Citizen Engagement through Complexity in Public Purpose Work’.
Part of our Challenger Seminar Series, this conversation discussed the importance, the strengths, the insights, and the weaknesses of citizen engagement during complex times.
Citizen engagement can take many forms such as direct outreach to citizens and information campaigns, public meetings and consultation, deliberative processes such as citizens’ assemblies and citizens’ juries, and other methodologies.
With over 100 registered attendees, the academic, theoretical, and practical insights shared by Dave Snowden and Beth Smith provided a platform for attendees to consider their own citizen engagement methods when developing public policy.
The discussion during this Challenger was wide and rich and the IPAA team will be releasing a series of focused blogs over the coming weeks sharing the insights with our public purpose community; this article being the first.
What insights were shared? Check out our first article featuring key insights from Dave Snowden below.
What is Sensemaking?
I define sensemaking as how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it.
There is this high level of contingency and practicality about it.
Naturalising means to root what you do in the natural sciences, not in the social sciences.
We use natural sciences – it’s what’s called an enabling constraint. You can’t use 19th century models of scientific inquiry on human systems. You can’t, they’re far too complex, but there are things we know about systems in human cognition, which are scientific facts, which we can use as constraints.
We need to design within those constraints.
How did decision making evolve?
Think about the first tribes of Africa. If something large and yellow with very sharp teeth runs towards you at high speed. Do you want to artistically scan all available data? Look at the catalog regarding the flora and fauna of the African belt and identify the running animal as a lion, look at best practice case studies on how to avoid lions? No.
By that time, the only docent of any use to you would be the book of Jonah from the Old Testament, which is the only example I’ve seen of a survivor manual, having escaped from the digestive tract of a large carnivore, right?
We evolved to make decisions very, very quickly based on a partial data scans, privileged in our most recent experiences up to right now.
How does the brain function when it comes to decision making?
That is important because the mind matters.
Dualism is so common in Western thinking. Consciousness is a distributed function of the brain, the body, and its social history. Your body makes about 80% of your decisions for you. It’s called autonomic processing.
The brain fires after you make the decision, not because you haven’t got free will, but it’s double checking whether the reaction was right this time or not remember chemicals in the nervous system extend throughout the body.
And we know there’s more so just to throw some stuff out, we know that phenoms help human beings determine trust.
If you’re not in a physical environment, you’re not getting the signals. You expect to make decisions, which is one of the problems with virtual environments. The point I’m trying to make on this is that’s a reality trying to train people, not to do it is impossible.
We don’t talk about cognitive biases anymore. We talk about cognitive heuristics because they all evolve because they have evolutionary advantage. Trying to tell that you can train people, not to exhibit them is a fundamental error. You must build systems which move around it.
The principle of naturalizing sense making we know this is the case, right? To let build systems with work of how human beings have evolved, rather than trying to pretend we got an ideal framework.
For example, we all know they, these days try and avoid the mindset word, right? You know, you all get this right. You know, we, people didn’t have the right mindset. We had a wonderful government initiative, but they didn’t have the right mindset.
Mindset puts all the blame on the individual and it assesses the individual’s mind is making all the decisions. We don’t have mental models to which we filter things. We have this much more random entangled assemblies.
Defining complexity:
Complexity theory is not the same thing as system thinking. Let’s be very clear on that. They have different origins and different backgrounds. Complexity theory comes from biology and chemistry.
Right now, complexity gives us a science for this experience. Complexity is sometimes known as a science of entangled systems.
So, in a complex system, everything is entangled with everything else. Everything is entangled with everything else
You pull one thing and something else comes. What comes may appear as separate, but you can’t separate it.
The only thing we know with absolute certainty about a complex adaptive system is whatever you do will have unintended consequences.
That means as a government, you are responsible for those consequences. Once you know, it’s complex, it changes the ethics. It means large initiatives are very dangerous because of these unintended consequences. You’re moving into multiple small initiatives. You have the law of unintended consequences; small things produce a massive effect.
How does complexity scale?
You try to scale a complex adaptive system by decomposition and recombination, not by imitation. You don’t take something which worked in one location, and copy it, because the context there is something you can’t fully know.
What you do is break down what worked there to what’s called the lowest coherent unit. This is not reductionism. We’re not implying causality.
Then you recombine those things in a different combination with new things to create a solution. That means you do undertake this effort in parallel, not in secrets.
The key thing in complexity is anybody with an added hypothesis gets a chance to experiment with a hypothesis, but the experiments of running parallel because they will change the space.
A solution will emerge. You don’t do a pilot project. Pilot projects are always disastrous because they always succeed, it’s called the Hawthorne Effect.
Concluding thoughts on complexity:
Complexity thinking has more in common with scientific management than it does with systems thinking, because if you look at scientific management and you bother to read what Taylor said, he was making a more humane workforce, you look back on it and say it wasn’t, but look at what was around him at the time.
He cared about workforce, and he kept an apprentice model for management.
What happened with systems thinking when it came in, in the eighties and nineties with process reengineering, six stigma, et cetera, was an attempt to remove human judgment entirely from the equation by engineering process.
And that is really dangerous.
A restoration of human judgment through distributed decision making rather than delegated decision making is at the heart of what we do.
Want to know more? View the full event recording and our full library of past events on the IPAA member portal here!
About IPAA Queensland:
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IPAA Queensland advances the professionalism, capability and integrity of public administration and public purpose work and promotes pride in service.
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About IPAA’s Challenger Series:
Our Challenger Series aims to facilitate discussion on topics and issues that are challenging in their very nature, to spark conversations that can lead to real impact and to be a catalyst for transformation in public purpose work in Queensland. These interactive forums are based on respectful collaboration and are intended to provide a platform for to promote ideas and discussion about emerging issues, innovation, and future public service reform.
The inaugural Challenger Seminar Series in 2019 subject “30 Years since Fitzgerald: Ethics and public purpose in the future economy” featured former CCC Chairperson Alan MacSporran QC, Ian Stewart AO (Commissioner, Queensland Police Service), Cris Parker (Head of Ethics Alliance from the Ethics Centre), and David Fagan (former editor of the Courier Mail).
About the Cynefin Centre Australia:
The Cynefin Centre Australia applies the pioneering work in complexity of Dave Snowden in the Asia Pacific context.
The Cynefin Centre Australia primarily focuses on working within the not-for-profit, government and academic sectors, with action research and development projects applying complexity science principles, methods and approaches to social good. We focus on research becoming practice, learning from doing, making sense of complexity accessible and understandable.
For this, co-creation and collaboration with all involved in any project are fundamental principles.
There are Cynefin Centre flagship research programs into healthcare; education; climate change; power, discrimination and conflict; citizen engagement and democratic innovation. In CC Australia, we are explicitly focused on the integration and application of indigenous knowledge to complex issues, building complexity literacy for grass roots community activation, and the development and implementation of consultation and engagement processes using complexity based methods and processes that ensure equity in access and participation, sovereignty of data and decision making, and transparency of evaluation and results.
About Dave Snowden:
Dave is the creator of the Cynefin Framework, and originated the design of SenseMaker®, the world’s first distributed ethnography tool. He is the lead author of Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision makers, a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, and the Cynefin Centre.
He divides his time between two roles: founder Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the founder and Director of the Cynefin Centre. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. By using natural science as a constraint on the understanding of social systems this avoids many of the issues associated with inductive or case-based approaches to research. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.
Dave holds positions as extra-ordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch as well as visiting Professor at the University of Hull. He has held similar positions at Bangor University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Canberra University, the University of Warwick and The University of Surrey. 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 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 an 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.