Session 1
10.15 – 11.15 Plenary Session 1 – Keynote Session
“Thinking and Acting New”
Dave Snowden – Cognitive Edge
David Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work 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 complexity. Well known for his work on the role of narrative and sense making, he is an entertaining speaker and a formidable realist, and one of the few thought leaders who can bring together the academic and practitioner perspectives into a single, comprehensible purview.
His HBR cover article with Mary Boone A leader's framework for decision making, was selected as the 2007 Best Practitioner Paper by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management.
Snowden holds a variety of academic positions. He is a visiting professor at the Universities of Canberra, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Pretoria and is a visiting fellow at Warwick University, Nanyang University, the Universita' Cattolica in Italy and the Singapore Management College. He was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence in 2006 and was appointed to the NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research in 2007. He is also on the editorial boards of several Knowledge Management journals and is an Editor in Chief for Emergence, Complexity and Organisation.
He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity. 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. He has extensive international experience.
Outline:
The world of social computing is fragmented and largely unstructured. Publishing information into the void creates networks of influence for people within the organisation regardless of their formal status. The world of information is becoming fragmented and unstructured. It exhibits many of the qualities of the oral tradition for which our ancestors evolved but for which our IT infrastructure and security processes are ill suited.
Findings in the cognitive sciences are challenging traditional models of decision making and the assumptions behind many approaches to search. This presentation will establish a sense-making model to understand the how this new world works and suggest ways in which it will evolve. It will argue for an approach based on theory informed practice and for a symbiotic interaction between human and machine intelligence.
