EP184 Dave Snowden on Managing Complexity in Times of Crisis

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Jim talks with Dave Snowden about the document he co-authored, "Managing Complexity (And Chaos) In Times of Crisis." They discuss the Cynefin framework, its development into a complexity-informed framework, distinguishing complex from complicated, emergence, enabling constraints vs governing constraints, openness in complex systems, short-term teleology vs top-down causality, lines of flight, six sigma, Taylorism, distributed decision-making, the meaning of crisis, preparing for unknowable unknowns, plagues & heat deaths, false learnings of Covid, the order of origin of language & semiotics, building informal networks, exaptation, the right level of granularity, setting Draconian constraints, preserving optionality, anticipatory thinking, comprehensive journaling, LLMs & the recent open letter, the need for ethical awareness, scales of group decision-making, documenters & doers, the aporetic, Covid as a boon to complexity work, cadence vs velocity, ritual in American football, designing strategic interventions with stories, vector theory of change, constructor theory, making the cost of virtue less than the cost of sin, dispositional management, an upcoming book, and much more.

[@williamjmccartan8879]

Journaling is a great tool for those that follow the person who previously held the position you are being asked to carry out. It works up and down the organizational structure. Thank you both David and Jim. Peace

[@tinyknott]

One objection to the idea at 21:40: that you can't know the future: Yes, but if an event is big enough, it changes the system from a complex to a simple one because all other effects can be discarded as rounding errors rather than contributors. The population collapse that's coming will be one such event. (well, it'll spawn a ton of subsequent behavior that will be hard to predict, so it won't be easy to make good predictions even then, but the system will become a lot less complex)

[@AndresGarcia-wu6oi]

Just because you remove half the population would not take you into a simple order system.
Try and think away from cause and effect mentality. Basically complexity in the physical world can start with 3 inanimate bodies. What you need to also consider is the new othe properties that appear in the system that you could never foresee. Hope this helps

[@ErnestoEduardoDobarganes]

Dave is brilliant.Thanks for sharing, I have to catch up to latest episodes.

[@merlepatterson]

I've learned that there's two types of "Snowden's"