Rethinking Design Thinking With Dave Snowden

​Dave started work in an NGO post-University and then moved on to HR & Training in the late 70s when he started working with computers. That together with a diploma from The Certified Accountants got him a job as Development Accountant in the same firm where he headed up the Treasury function and was responsible for computerisation. An MBA in financial management saw him move into consultancy and software designing decision support systems in what became Data Sciences where he became a General Manager (creating MURCO) and the Corporate Business Development Manager where he created the Genus Programme (an integration of JAD/RAD, Object Orientation and Legacy Management) which was one of the main components in the turn around of that company. IBM acquired the company 1997 and, after that, his more public career started.
At IBM, he was a director of The Institute for Knowledge Management and the Cynefin Center, and in 2004 became the founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company.

​The Cynefin Co has worked for almost two decades in partnership with academics, artists and complexity scientists and has been taking a fresh look at the whole process of design. Bringing the evolutionary concept of exaltation (radical repurposing of traits) and work on weak signal detection for unarticulated need mapping representing some of the outputs of this process. The use of distributed ethnography is changing the way we design health services as well as society in general and this has been pioneered by Dave Snowden and his team.

​In this talk, he shares some of his rich experience rethinking sense-making and system design.

This talk was recorded on December 9th, 2022.