Note: Voice to text transcriptions are about 90% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:01
Today on Phronesis, I have David Snowden and Mary Boone. And these two individuals wrote an article in 2007. That is one that I continually revisit. I read it probably a couple of times a year. And I recommend it probably three or four times a month, to different colleagues and friends around the globe. So it's an honor to have the two of them here on Phronesis today, and we had angered the tech gods in a previous life. And so this is actually their very, very kind. This is actually our second recording. So I am indebted to the two of you, I love both of you a pint or your drink of choice when we cross paths live next. But Dave is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge. He has a background in technology spent time at IBM has taught at multiple universities. And I love this in his bio, it talks about anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems. That's such an incredibly cool combination. And Cognitive Edge has a section of their website called the rabbit hole of knowledge, which I thought was one of the coolest things I'd heard labeled recently for a part of a website. That was awesome. And Mary Boone is the president of Boone and Associates. She is an expert in organizational communications, learning development, collaborative technologies, which I'm sure it's coming in very handy. In the last 12 months, Her work has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, CNBC Financial Times, and she teaches in the MBA program at Northeastern University. So, David, Mary, thank you so much for being here. What gaps Do you need to fill in what have I missed Mary, maybe we start with you.
Mary Boone 2:07
I will make one slight change. And I think it's relevant right now to what you mentioned in my bio, which is I teach for Northeastern University's online MBA programs. So, so that I think that's important. And I've been doing that for 11 years. So, you know, when this all hit, it was kind of status quo. For those of us who teach online, I'm sure other people out there can identify with that. You know, Dave and I, we met when I was writing a book called Leadership and the Computer...actually I interviewed Dave, for Managing Interactively. And, you know, I think that these ideas have had a lot of traction for a while and have gained steam actually, kind of interestingly enough, the person who was the person editing HBr, when we did this just said to us the other day, Tom Stewart, that that this was a slow-rolling article, he said it was different from many articles in HBR, because it seemed to gather steam, you know, it didn't come out with this big bang, but it over time, it's gathered steam and its had significant staying power. And I think that's because people are really struggling with these concepts, of complexity. And, and, of course, as we can see, in recent events, at least in the states here, chaos. So, you know, I do believe that these ideas are still extremely relevant. And I'm happy to hear you're reading the article and recommending it, Scott, you know, we really appreciate it, Dave, and I've been really gratified over the years by how people continue to reach out to us based on what we put out there and HBr quite a while ago now.
Scott Allen 3:53
Well, it's wonderful. And Dave, David, what, what gaps do I need to fill in in your bio, anything, and then we'll jump framework, a few
Dave Snowden 4:00
I split the commercial and not-for-profit elements of Cognitive Edge several years, but, and I now run the Cynefin Center, which is a not-for-profit section. So that's a change. I think the other thing that picks up on what Mary said, I think next week or the week after, we're not sure which the European Commission will publish a new field book or field guide on how to managing complexity and chaos. And I'm the lead author on that. Okay, she's rather ironic given the stupidity of the English we blame the English for everything in Wales for taking us out of Europe. But that's actually because the slow-burn thing is key. I mean, we've been taking a natural science-based approach to social systems now for about 10 or 15 years and argued against approaches based on case studies. The basis that you never got enough data and under conditions of uncertainty that was dangerous and COVID has kind of like triggered that. So all of a sudden, if you're you specialize in complexity and chaos rather you're quite attractive in current times.
Scott Allen 5:09
Well, let's talk a little bit about the model I the Cynefin Framework. There are five contexts we have simple, complicated, complex, chaotic. And then we have disorder, which does not sound fun. And there's an interesting boundary, we'll have a visual, we'll have a link to the article. There's a, there's an interesting story about the boundary between simple and chaotic as well that I would love to explore a little bit. But Dave, would you give us a high-level explanation of the framework?
Dave Snowden 5:39
Yeah, I think nobody did that in two stages. So in nature, there are three types of system ordered systems, complex systems in chaotic systems. And if you want a metaphor for this, it's rather like solid, liquid, and gas. And then you go through a phase shift between them. So if I hit water up to 100 degrees, it doesn't immediately become steam, I have to put in more heat before it makes a change. And that's called latent heat. So the simplest version of Cynefin, naturally, so three domains, highly ordered, highly constrained systems, high levels of predictability, chaotic systems, which are always temporary, because they have no constraint. And that doesn't ask for long. And then complex adaptive systems, which are deeply entangled. And I think that's the key metaphor for complexity. Everything is entangled with everything else. And it's like, you know, Juarrero famously said, it's like Bramble bushes in a thicket, or you put you pull a Bramble Bush, you got no idea what's going to happen because of the level of entanglement. And the other key point on that is, if you know about the triple point in physics, there's a point of stability between pressure and temperature, where it's equi-possible for things to go into any of the three states. And that's the central domain of Cynefin, which is now called confused or operatic. Yeah. And what Cynefin does then so it has that central domain. All right, it then splits order into two, clear and complicated, we've changed it from simple. That was Mary's idea. So clear is like in the US, you drive on the right in the UK, we drive on the left, it's obvious what you should do, go do it. Yep. It's complicated is more about experts. So that fundamentally Cynrefin is clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and confused. And then we add liminality and a few other things. But that's the basics.
Scott Allen 7:33
Great, great. And Mary even is even in your description right here. Obviously, some things have shifted a little bit in the more than, you know, 10 years since its publishing. But as you reflect on the work, does it hold for you? I mean, obviously, you said this is a slow burn, this obviously has some energy and some legs in the system. Does it still hold for you, Mary, even as you look back on it?
Mary Boone 8:01
Oh, absolutely. I use it, not only in my professional life but my personal life, you know, in terms of thinking about how to approach a situation and think through a decision I have to make, think through. And it still helps the leaders that I work with, to really understand how to manage complexity and how, because primarily, you know, let's face it, most of the problems we're facing now are complex, or at least complex in nature. And, I think the reason it really holds well, is because it's such a simple framework. And I know people talk a lot about how, how academic we can get or how complicated it can seem, but it's really not the simplicity of it, the elegance of it has made it really not only lasts for a long time and gain steam, but something that is just highly pragmatic to use. You know, it's something that leaders can use when they're facing these situations where they don't really know how to manage and, and, and I think it marks it. There's such a, it's so clear to me now, why people struggle so much with approaches to leadership because most of them were developed for an ordered environment. Most of them were developed for the kind of talent sell ideas get that buy, and they weren't, they weren't really developed for handling the complexity and the chaos. And so this helps people understand why what worked in the past doesn't work. It doesn't work as well now because there's even more complexity.
Scott Allen 9:46
We'll go ahead David,
Dave Snowden 9:48
which are important ones is and I've done this, this is one of several sensemaking frameworks and created they are all designed to pass what I call the back of the table napkin test. Sure, if you can't draw something On the back of the table napkin from memory, it has no utility and strategy. Yeah, it's better. The other thing is it goes back to the title of your podcast, which is from Aristotle. Phronesis. Right? Yeah. Okay. Aristotle says you need two things Sophia, and Phronesis - you need theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom. And the way Cynefin has evolved is we use nat...It was designed on the basis of natural science and then refined in practice. And it's gone through multiple iterations since, as the science has developed as a practice have developed. So it's not a framework created from a one-time study and put in an article and then promulgated, which is what most Harvard stuff is, is actually been an evolution of its own right.
Scott Allen 10:45
When it's being used, correct. In practice...
Dave Snowden 10:50
Yeah, we say you can't get to command level in any of the US Armed Forces without you without learning Cynefin for example. Yeah. Right. And a lot of the case studies are in intelligence and military because those spaces face complexity all the time. And they understand, you know, that you're dealing with, you know, what class which you know, cliche called the fog of war. And that complexity is about,
Scott Allen 11:16
I love. I love the simplicity. But I also love and I could think of it in kind of levels, also, where a lot of the leadership education that I see, we're teaching people to think through simple or maybe complicated type problems, we aren't, we aren't preparing them to be thinking at these different levels, thinking in these different ways. And preparing them to - because each of these requires, you know, the leader has a different job, depending on the type of problem that they're facing. And so I don't know that we do a good job of that. And I think that bringing that into this conversation of how we develop leaders, and if we're training leaders to think to your point, yes, I forget the quote, I'm not going to get the exact words, I'll put it in the show notes. But you know, it's by a military General, and it said, you know, "no strategy survives contact with the enemy."
Dave Snowden 12:16
I think there's something else which is important here as well, I think this is coming back into the natural science of this. For the last 20 or 30 years, people have tried to define the ideal leader, they focused on the individual and the qualities of the leader. And they've had this weird dichotomy between rigid process and inspired leadership. And that's actually a false dichotomy. You know, anything about the natural science, you know, that connections matter more than things. So the work we're doing on leadership development is all about changing connectivity. For leaders, and we don't talk about qualities or competencies, we put them in situations where their connections constantly change and shift. And we get them to do a narrative-based reflection on that which they share with their peers. And that's again, that that matches the way the brain makes a decision, it matches the way that human societies evolved to handle things. The problem with the sort of competence-based approaches and the idea there are checklists is comes from the dominance of the engineering metaphor, which came in the 80s. With systems thinking and systems dynamics, and please don't confuse complexity with systems thinking. It's completely different. And those of engineering metaphors, which came in the start, and it's where things you know, pseudosciences, like Myers Briggs come through because they make people like widgets in a manufacturing process. And the reality is the most individual is, is a catalyst or a nexus point, in a complex series of interactions and good leaders learn to manage that.
Scott Allen 13:53
Say a little more about that. What are you managing the connections?
Dave Snowden 13:59
So let me give you an example. I need to be careful. I'm glad to name names in some cases. So we've done this now with leading fashion houses with the military, you take people who are in the leadership development group. And what they do is they keep her narrative base journal. The narrative is really important for human beings. It's sort of a halfway house between high codification and high end and basically tacit. So sometimes they keep a learning journal and every couple of days they're given a task to go interview somebody, you know, you go and find somebody, one of our shops, ask them this question. And that becomes a sort of shared narrative base. And you manage the process. So you constantly change their interactions over time. What we're doing on mental health at the moment, which is related to that it's with defining 30 or 40 roles that exist, not just within the health sector, but also in the public sector around it. And then entanglement those roles in groups of three, to share learning and experience as they go through and record each of those trios is part of another tree or is part of another tree. So what we're doing is to deliberately untangle a system in such a way that it doesn't happen accidentally, it happens by design. And that peer-to-peer exchange increases people's ability to find things that they can copy or imitate, or mutate and reduces the pressure on mental stress. So that's my point about leaders or catalysts or nexus, you know, the way you change people is not to turn them on or sort. Of course, the way you change people is to change their interactions. So I'll give you one example from peace and conflict because I'm was on the phone till midnight on peace and conflict resolution in the States, which we're hoping. Yeah, so we've been a lot of work on the years over peace in conflict resolution. Yeah. And there's kind of like what I call the Boston Brahmin approach because that's where I experienced the most opposition, which basically says if you just get everybody into a workshop, and as bright intelligent, you know, upper-middle class, white liberals have a conversation with them, they'll see the error of their ways. And they'll behave differently, right? And that kind of never works. And we have the same thing in Northern Ireland when I was involved in the 70s. So you had everybody being brought into a hall, you know, and kind of like Protestants and Catholics alike, and we all love each other, don't we? After a week, everybody would say they loved each other. Within three days, we're throwing petrol bombs again. Wonderfully satirized in a television series on Channel Four called Derry Girls, which is brilliant. All right, episode one and series two does this. I was working then in a different center. And we took two Catholics and one Protestant or two Protestants to one Catholic, the asymmetry is key, and threw them in teams into Latin America together, and we didn't talk about the troubles. And that creative sir, and basically, they work the stuff out for themselves that I think part of the problem you got with leadership training educators, is they think things have to be spelled out. Another person example from the age of 11, in the school I went to, and I still remember the first day in school, I know where to look allowed to wear long trousers because we weren't allowed to wear long trousers till we were 11 in the UK, okay, in the UK, winter, you know, walking three miles to school in shorts, it hardens your soul.
Scott Allen 17:55
That makes... source of Pink Floyd's The Wall!
Dave Snowden 18:02
So I walked to the front of the class I knew was coming. And somebody gave me a record card. And this is when we were debating the abolition of capital punishment in the UK, unfortunately, joined the realm of civilized countries who don't do that, right. So I got given a card, and it said, you support capital punishment, and the teacher grinned at me because my mother was leading the campaign against it in the counties. And I had to speak for seven minutes without preparation, in favor of something I profoundly disagreed with. And we did that every week from the age of 11 to 18. That made us generalists. And it made us critical, that process changed the way we thought we weren't taught to be critical. But the process of doing things in a different way changed it. And that's the key thing on modern leadership development. You change interactions, you change process, so that people develop something which is sustainable for them, you stop all these nonsensical competence frameworks, and God help us ideas like mental models. It's incredible.
Mary Boone 19:07
You know, one of the things that that that brings up for me is another thing that happened in management theory is that we went through this whole period where they said, "We don't need any leaders," right? We don't need leaders, everything can be totally wrong. Everybody can be totally self-managing, right? And of course, that's nonsense as well. Because what is the role of the leader and the actions of the leader, not the role that the actions of the leader need to change and, and bring to bringing in this notion of peer to peer, and you know, this plays out in so many different ways. It's interesting, I do a lot of work with people and helping them to design major leadership conferences and designing the way the interactions will work. And I have a really hard time convincing people often that that peer to peer interaction and the design of it the consciousness as Dave was talking about before with the entanglement, the conscious decision about how you set that up for that peer to peer interaction is so crucial. And it always gets short shrift because everybody's so concerned with messaging, right?
Scott Allen 20:19
we put as many people on the schedule as possible. So they'll come Right, right. And that, right, I have a joke among my friends that I create my own conference. And so I kind of sit in the lobby, and then all of my friends come, and I have wonderful conversations all day long.
Mary Boone 20:42
What were you gonna say? Dave, you were gonna
Dave Snowden 20:44
say it's also the ethics of it. I think it's perfectly ethical, if you're in HR or in organizational change, to change people's interactions. I don't think it's remotely ethical to try and change what they are. And it's actually quite interesting that that applies to things like mission statements, which we don't talk about mission statements anymore within work. So now we talk about purpose statements, which is just the same name for the same phenomenon. And the one thing you can guarantee if you want to be purposeless, yeah, is a creative, formal purpose statement. Because everybody will learn to gain it, we actually use parables. Because all the world's religions teach through parables and parables kind of like give you a good indication of what you shouldn't use but leave open possibilities about what you should do. So they adapt and change over time. And this is what we've been doing on commander's intent, right? You're much better using ambiguous narrative forms, and actually, something structured because then the system can adapt, and change. So the crazy thing is the last 20 or 30 years, we've had all these constructs being built on the assumption that the human brain is a limited capacity information processing device, you know, to quote a psychology textbook that they try to impose on my daughter. Yeah, the reality is that carbon isn't silicon. Human beings make decisions in radically different ways in unstructured ways where we're biological, our narrative environments, this is, you know, beyond you know, consciousness is distributed function for humans. And therefore, this ecological metaphor is much sounder than an engineering metaphor, if you're going to deal with humans.
Scott Allen 22:28
Well, as we wind down our time together because we've been going for about 26-27 minutes. What, what are the two of you thinking about right now? What's keeping your mind preoccupied and in exploration mode? Mary, you want to say,
Mary Boone 22:50
My mind in the exploration mode is, is really looking right now at what's actually going on around me, especially with you know, Coronavirus in the forefront of everybody's thoughts. And also, clearly, you're in the states, the political situation. I'm involved in a conversation right now about how to rethink government. The with a group of UX designers and other designers. It's a whole organization filled with different types of designers. And we're in a conversation about that right now, because, and, of course, many of the ideas that we've talked about today, and then also tools, I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention the tool Sensemaker, which is going to enable a lot of things. And I think Dave can speak to that a little bit. So I'm thinking about how, Sensemaker can play a role in this whole notion of rethinking government, and, and also rethinking organizations. And because that tool, is the ability gives you the ability to work with those narratives, to listen at scale, to be able to, to affect change in ways that because you have a new type of intelligence that you can gather...Dave talk a little about it and elaborate a little bit,
Dave Snowden 24:14
I tweeted, I put something on social media yesterday, which has gone absolutely viral. And said the biggest mistake of the last three decades has been to define where we want to be and try and close the gap. Yeah, because you can't do that. And what it does is it blinds you to possibilities in the present. So in complexity, we start journeys with a sense of direction. And the thing that's and therefore it's far more important to understand where you are than where you want to go. And management for the last 20 or 30 years is forgotten about the present and just keeps assuming it can have a greenfield site and design an ideal future state. So what sensemaking does, which is a distributed ethnographic tool. I'll give you two examples. We if we're mapping culture, the organization will basically ask people for the story, they would tell their best friend if that best friend was offered a job in their company, which is a hypothesis-free question. And then they interpret that story on six triangles, and each axis of each triangle has a positive quality, so there's no way they can understand what to do. And that interests me because I've wired people up for this, there are advantages to having a visiting chair in psychology, you can wire up the first year undergraduates...it actually triggers the brain into operation is what this is what's I don't like this phrase, it's the thinking slow, not thinking fast. And that gives us quantum data from which we can draw landscape maps where we can show culture as effectively as a series of densities. And if you don't like where you are, you can click on that and say, I need fewer stories like that. And then you can find what's called the adjacent possible. Yeah, something close to it and say, I'd like more of those. Now, if you say to your employees, how do we come to become more customer-centric, they'll fight back. If you gather stories from your customers and say, We need more of these sort of stories and fewer of those everybody can buy-in. So that's kind of like one aspect. The other thing, which is the peace in conflict approach is where we use young people from churches, from sports clubs, from schools, to act as ethnography as to their communities to find the day-to-day stories of people's lives. And then we actually look at cluster patterns in those stories across competing political or ethnic groups. And then we enable conversations about those new patterns. We don't talk about the problem, because we'll make it worse. Yeah. And I mean, that's what I was up till midnight, talking about last night, right? Because the minute you talk about blue against red in the States, you basically trigger responses, you've got to, you've got to enable a different conversation. And you've got to finally have something which has local empathetic value for the actual actors. So that's a decomposer. And this is the principle you scale a complex system by decomposition and recombination. Not by imitation. Yeah. And you know, the whole of organic life form DNA is for chemicals in different combinations. So the work we do is can like break it down, break it down to the lowest point of coherence, and then recombine it, yet to discover new possibilities, but don't start with where you want to be. Yeah, start with where you are.
Mary Boone 27:27
And, and I would follow on to that to say, and especially since you have a lot of academic listeners, researchers have to watch a bit have to avoid the same kind of problems that leaders do, in terms of influencing the outcome of things and, and using new tools to approach research is so important. Because if I'm, if I'm doing a lot of interviews, and I know what my hypothesis is, it's really hard not to, you know, to be complete, those interviews be competitive.
Dave Snowden 28:00
And then you want the academic name for this. This is called abductive research. It's not inductive. Most people's failure of an abductive is is actually how you handle uncertainty. And the whole approach we developed is to say, and this is my physics background, right? From a physicist's point of view, no social scientist ever has enough data to form any valid conclusion whatsoever. And I would still stand by that. On the other hand, we know there are things about systems we know there are things about human cognition, they that we, these are things which have been subject to repeated experiments and peer group review. So what we do is build methods which are consistent with natural science. And that allows you to develop novelty in the face of extreme uncertainty, but to reduce the risk in the process. If you use inductive logic or cases, you're bound by what worked in the past, which very rarely works in the present.
Scott Allen 28:56
Yep. I love how the two of you think it's incredible. I mean, it really is. And it's, it's fun to listen. It's fun to kind of hear your perspective and how you're thinking, because it's refreshing, it's different. And I'm excited to see how this continues to evolve. I want to come to some of the programming. I want to understand more. How can people be in touch with the two of you, how can people learn about your good work? Where would you suggest they go to learn more?
Dave Snowden 29:37
We're putting up a new website next week for the Canadian center. So if you search on cynefincenter.com, you'll find it that will also contain the new European Commission field book on crisis management. And the big programs we're doing on health and future of religion in society, which is actually also really interested in terms of how you create Meaning, and climate will miss all of those programs will be there. And the other thing is just to look for me on social media. I'm very active, and I blog most days. And that's where I do most of my thinking. I like blogging.
Scott Allen
Great, great. Thank you, sir.
Scott Allen 30:14
Mary?
Mary Boone 30:15
@maryboone on Twitter. And also you can get me at mary@maryboone.com. My website's not as nearly as good a shape, as Dave says. But you can just email me directly, Mary at Mary good.com. And I'd be happy to respond. Great,
Scott Allen 30:33
Great. Well, thank you so much for the two of you making this work again. I really, really appreciate your time. And thank you for the good work that you do. It's incredible. And I'm excited to share this with our listeners. Because, again, I think this natural science perspective, is a beautiful lens to look at this through. It just is. And Dave, I don't know, if you like this quote. You'll have an opinion on it, you'll have an opinion on it. And that's one of my favorite quotes "is every system is perfectly designed for the results that it achieves. Do you agree with that, quote?"
Dave Snowden 31:16
No.
Scott Allen 31:19
What do you think?
Dave Snowden 31:20
A whole bunch of systems evolve, okay? A whole bunch of systems are designed for one thing, but the only thing you can guarantee in a complex system is whatever you do will have unintended consequences. The most effective systems we have in the world will generally device for something other than what they're now useful.
Scott Allen 31:40
Well, that would be a whole nother episode for us to explore that answer, but I love it. I love it. Thanks to the two of you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful 2021
Dave Snowden 31:50
Pleasure.
Mary Boone 31:52
Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai