Complexity, Cynefin and the Evolution of the OODA Loop with Dave Snowden | Ep 2

Dave Snowden 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.

Mark, Ponch, and Dave have a wide ranging talk about Dave’s work and its connection to the work and theories of John Boyd.

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature on Apple and Spotify to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

//Dave Snowden and links to his work//
Dave Snowden Biography
Dave Snowden Sensemaker
Cynefin Workshops

//Books and briefs mentioned in this episode//
"The New Killer App: The OODA Loop and Cynefin Framework"  –  by Brian Rivera
How the Leopard Changed Its Spots  –  by Brian Goodwin
Cynefin: Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World  –  by Dave Snowden
Grammatical Man, Information, Entropy, Language, and Life  –  by Jeremy Campbell
Cybernetics  –  by F. H. George

//Theories mentioned in this episode//
The Cynefin Framework

//The Papers of John R. Boyd//
John R. Boyd Collection, COLL/2949, Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division, Quantico, VA.

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https://www.getflowtrained.com/

Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created using AI. It has not been edited verbatim.)

00;00;04;01 - 00;00;14;16

Intro

00;00;17;06 - 00;00;25;08

Mark McGrath

Welcome to No Way Out the podcast where we explore the theories of John Boyd and how they can help you and your team improve your capacity for free and independent action.

00;00;25;29 - 00;00;39;06

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

I'm Brian "Ponch" Rivera and I'm fired up to be joining Mark McGrath on this journey where each week we engage in thought provoking conversation with a diverse group of people who can help all of us make sense, decide, and act in this VUCA world.

00;00;39;29 - 00;00;51;03

Mark McGrath

That's right, Ponch. Our conversations will dive deep into the theories of John Boyd in order to help listeners reorient and see that VUCA is a massive advantage. So strap in. The conversation begins now.

00;00;52;25 - 00;00;55;05

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Hey, Mark, you fired up to launch episode two?

00;00;55;25 - 00;01;21;26

Mark McGrath

Yes. I'm really looking forward to sharing this conversation. I think that many people that are listening to us today are very familiar with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had a quote that's become very famous both in the military and in business about no knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. And we're honored to have a conversation today with the man who influenced Secretary Rumsfeld to say those things.

00;01;21;26 - 00;01;24;27

Mark McGrath

So why don't you tell us about our guest today, Ponch?

00;01;25;21 - 00;01;53;17

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah, thanks, Moose. Our guest today is Dave Snowden. He is the creator of the Cynefin framework. He is the author of a leaders framework for decision making. One of the great things about Dave Snowden is he has a amazing connection to John Boyd's history, including philosophy, physics, knowledge management, information theory, and of course, the way Dave Snowden thinks about complexity when applied to humans as anthrocomplexity.

00;01;53;22 - 00;02;18;09

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Now, this anthrocomplexity aligns well with John Boyd's thoughts on people, ideas, and things in that order. And we had a conversation with Dave Snowden about this, not necessarily about his Cynefin framework, but about the connections, overlap, and alignment between his framework, the Cynefin framework, and John Boyd's work leading up to the OODA loop sketch. I've got a question for you, Mark.

00;02;18;22 - 00;02;25;10

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

What did you think about your first introduction to the fire hose known as Dave Snowden?

00;02;25;20 - 00;02;45;26

Mark McGrath

Well, as you've said before, you got to do about 1000 hours of research to have a five minute conversation with Dave. And for me, it was awesome to speak with him. Being very familiar with his work over the years, I think that our listeners are going to find that when it comes to dealing with the complexity that we face on a day in and day out basis, OODA and the theories of John Boyd, compounded with Cynefin and SenseMaker and the theories of Dave Snowden, are going to empower individuals and teams to improve their capacity for independent action. There are two notes before we go to the conversation that we should mention. I'm really excited that Dave is going to talk about John Boyd's favorite book.

00;03;11;02 - 00;03;36;23

Mark McGrath

I'm also really excited that we're going to mention the definitive work on John Boyd's theories that was written by Francis Singer and one note about the podcast. It's a small technical glitch on our end. We got 99% of what we wanted to talk about with Dave, although it ends abruptly. And Dave will be back with us several times as we do a fair bit of work with him.

00;03;36;23 - 00;03;42;09

Mark McGrath

And without any further ado, let's get to the conversation that Ponch and I had with Dave Snowden.

00;03;42;23 - 00;03;45;12

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

How are you doing, Dave? I'm okay. Yeah, in.

00;03;45;12 - 00;03;51;29

Dave Snowden

The middle of it, very. Just come down from a day's walking in the freezing cold. So I'm on the beer. But it's evening.

00;03;51;29 - 00;04;14;29

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

You all right? Drinking and podcasting. We love it. This ought to be fun. So, hey, Dave, you and I connected several years ago back in, I think, 2016, right about the time of the 2016 election, actually. And you really helped me out quite a bit in understanding complexity theory. Clearly your Cynefin framework, but that doesn't mean I'm an expert in anything.

00;04;14;29 - 00;04;41;02

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

I'm always going to be a student. And a couple of weeks ago I was joking around about having a conversation with you that a five minute conversation usually leads to about 40 hours of reading material. Right. So, you know, it's always a joy to be around you and learn things from you. Back in 2019, we collaborated on the OODA-Cynefin exploratory up in Quantico, Virginia.

00;04;41;02 - 00;05;08;22

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

We had a great turnout and we looked at the archives there and we looked at several of the books and really looked at how the Cynefin framework and potentially how the OODA loop and the work that John Boyd did connects to your thinking. So I just want to start there and go back to 1980, 1990, and have you talk about where complexity theory was then when John Boyd was still alive and where we are today.

00;05;08;23 - 00;05;10;13

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

So what do you have for us, Dave?

00;05;10;22 - 00;05;38;18

Dave Snowden

And I'm not sure John was really aware, except that the periphery of where complexity theory was. I mean, if you go back to that period of time, it still tends to get lumped a little bit with systems thinking, which most people wouldn't do any more. You've got Santa Fe Institute. It's established and they're starting to do some pioneering work, people like that, but it hasn't intruded.

00;05;39;17 - 00;06;02;16

Dave Snowden

I think the thing which is being picked up and we see this sort of late nineties, early part of this century is the whole agent-based model, Stu Kaufman tried to set up a business on that with one of the big consultancy firms, which with Chris, I think, which didn't actually work out. And I think complexity was still hung up in those days on simulation is prediction.

00;06;03;14 - 00;06;26;16

Dave Snowden

So it was everybody got excited. We had Boyd's algorithm, you know, fly to the center, match speed, avoid collision, you're at huge power. Come in agent-based simulations based on simple rules. And that was all sort of getting people excited. Yeah, I think Stu was the first one to really make it into much more of a science in terms of what we did in core biology.

00;06;27;06 - 00;06;46;05

Dave Snowden

And when he got onto fitness landscapes and I think that started to change everything, but it was all messy. I think one of the big what if for me is if Boyd had still been thinking 20 or 30 years later, what would have happened to the OODA loop? And I think it would have been substantial. But I'd say generally, I mean, I've argued the same thing.

00;06;46;05 - 00;06;58;16

Dave Snowden

I think it started to be known about complexity theory. He never created the VSM model, right? I mean, you can see people intuiting complexity, but not having the science to understand what it is they've intuited.

00;07;00;15 - 00;07;18;03

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

And then when Boyd brings up the idea of people, idea, and things in that order, can you walk us through I believe you call anthrocomplexity. What's the difference between what systems thinkers were thinking back in the eighties and nineties and even today, and what anthrocomplexity is?

00;07;18;03 - 00;07;47;11

Dave Snowden

Well, is it distinction between systems thinking and complexity science? If you look at it, I mean, there is some common overlaps, but fundamentally systems thinking really goes back into information science. It really opens off Shannon and to some extent Ashby and to my mind it's a product of its age. It deals with, you know, feedback loops at scale, but it doesn't really fundamentally challenge the concept of causality.

00;07;47;11 - 00;08;15;29

Dave Snowden

Yeah, or no ability of the system as a whole. Complexity starts to challenge that. So fundamental principle about complexity, there's no linear material causality and that kills off systems dynamics overnight because systems dynamics is entirely based on causal feedback loops at scale. Yeah, it also deals with fine grained objects and that sort of kills off most of cybernetics, which assumes that a universal patterns and complexity says there aren't.

00;08;16;02 - 00;08;37;05

Dave Snowden

Yeah, okay. So complexity starts this sort of fundamental challenge to systems thinking. I think you then start to get a divide between and this is the divide I've created. Alright so I'm, it's my problem on this if anything that I'm not the only one, I think I was the first one, the guts to say it which is different, which is that people aren't ants.

00;08;38;22 - 00;09;06;21

Dave Snowden

So you know, you can produce simulation models for good behavior, for termite nest building, for behavior because you've got objects without intelligence or intentionality responding to genetically triggered stimuli. And that means simulating the work, the trouble. The thing you get into human beings is we have intelligence, we have intentionality, we have multiple identities. We show empathy beyond kinship groups.

00;09;06;21 - 00;09;33;23

Dave Snowden

We actually have art. We think in abstractions. Our language is symbolic. That's really significant, by the way. Massively significant. This is the work which destroyed Chomsky series of language symbolic species in that language is abstract and symbolic. It's not representational. Yeah. So all of these things mean that the study of complexity in human systems is something radically different.

00;09;34;09 - 00;09;55;06

Dave Snowden

And the phrase I coined for that is anthrocomplexity. And so we use complexity science, but we also use anthropology, we use cognitive neuroscience. We used a lot of philosophy, material engagement theory, which is one of the most fascinating things to come out of archeology, which links in with epigenetics, which is the most revolutionary aspect of biology at the moment.

00;09;55;23 - 00;10;08;02

Dave Snowden

So all of these things start to pinch together into a transdisciplinary approach. And, you know, technically I call it naturalizing sensemaking because I don't want to be conjoined just with complexity science.

00;10;08;14 - 00;10;32;02

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Okay, I've got several questions that popped out of there and we don't have to answer them in order to throw them out there. But the connection between entropy and Shannon's information theory, I believe it is, and the second law of thermodynamics is something we can explore here. Something else the connection between it's a Brian Goodwin book and which is Boyd's favorite book, which is how the Leopard Changed its spots.

00;10;32;02 - 00;10;38;00

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

The Evolution of Complexity. I think you're familiar with that, but can you dive into your.

00;10;38;12 - 00;10;40;20

Dave Snowden

Design with it briefly when it was in life?

00;10;41;00 - 00;10;41;09

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Okay.

00;10;42;07 - 00;10;45;21

Dave Snowden

So that part of the IBM Complexity Group together.

00;10;46;10 - 00;10;51;10

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Brian Goodwin was right. Yeah. Okay.

00;10;51;10 - 00;10;54;26

Dave Snowden

He was a biologist, he was also linked with the Schumacher Institute down in Darwin.

00;10;55;09 - 00;10;56;18

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

So finding out.

00;10;56;18 - 00;11;00;04

Dave Snowden

I knew him through Yasmeen and others, he was.

00;11;00;04 - 00;11;00;19

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah, he's.

00;11;00;26 - 00;11;03;25

Dave Snowden

Part of a group with myself, Peter and others.

00;11;03;29 - 00;11;21;06

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Okay, but his book is Boyd's favorite book, and I'm not sure if you're still familiar with this book, but can you just kind of describe that connection between Cynefin and OODA, if you and Boyd would have a conversation about that book.

00;11;21;06 - 00;11;53;29

Dave Snowden

Um, I'm not sure I interpreted it in terms of Brian's language. I think from my point of view, the primary area that Cynefin relates to is actually orientation. Yeah. I mean we can also skim it as you know, the way I've now portrayed it. And I really wish we could run that Quantico session again because if you probably might remember four weeks later I got admitted to the Ratcliffe in emergency admission and had a massive brain bleed drained off.

00;11;54;05 - 00;12;27;04

Dave Snowden

Right. So I wasn't on best of form at the time. Right. But I think the way I would now see it is Cynefin is a way of orientating yourself and then the action varies depending on which you are. I think you can also introduce some of the Cynefin aspects at the observation stage. So the way I now do it, if you take the OODA is a line, either put Cynefin as a series of disks across that line and depending on where you enter Cynefin as observe, you are going to different spaces and orientate.

00;12;27;16 - 00;12;50;18

Dave Snowden

So I think Cynefin actually allows you to use the OODA loop more effectively. Yeah. Now the first time I came OODA there was a guy called James Luke was an AI guy working in data sciences. He went on to be a senior AI expert in IBM, but I provided him some of the initial sponsorship and he introduced the double loop version of OODA, which I still like.

00;12;51;06 - 00;13;08;05

Dave Snowden

You know, I think if you join OODA as a loop, you haven't understood it. But if you draw just two loops with one going around faster than the other, that's often the best way of introducing it. And I use that heavily in the early work on knowledge management piece. We set the map, use it, compared with a London taxi driver.

00;13;08;27 - 00;13;30;23

Dave Snowden

The map user is going through that process far slower than the taxi driver. And the issue is, which do you want? Because if you want to move through that loop quickly and I would say this also goes back to Boyd's original stuff, the fighter pilots. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you guys, your Fly Boy, Brian, I mean, you recruit and train people very differently if they go in at speed.

00;13;31;08 - 00;13;56;11

Dave Snowden

And if you got time to do a grand strategy and do an assessment. And so it's not that it's an either or, it's a both. And understanding which you need is critical. So that for me was the other use of OODA and I would then I could draw that double loop differently in each of the Cynefin domains. So that's me using OODA within Cynefin and then me using Cynefin across OODA.

00;13;57;13 - 00;14;15;27

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

The second law comes up quite a bit, applied to close systems. What's your view on the second law of and entropy applied to anthrocomplexity? And on that, can you go back to the comment about Shannon entropy.

00;14;15;29 - 00;14;37;29

Dave Snowden

A discussion with Alicia? It's likely because this is your latest book. The first time I saw it, she was going to say the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply, and I was getting ready to defend her and then she's withdrawn it from the final version. So it is controversial, but I would say actually the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to human complex adaptive systems because they're never closed.

00;14;39;03 - 00;14;58;20

Dave Snowden

Okay. And the trouble is, if you take Shannon's, like, in dementia and if the minute you move into Shannon's work is brilliant, by the way, is absolutely no question. He was probably deserved a Nobel Prize. He was one of the greatest geniuses of the century. But he's working within the confines of what we knew about information processing at that period.

00;14;58;28 - 00;15;24;24

Dave Snowden

Yeah, the minute we started to challenge that myself, with ? and with John Poindexter, we had this long session back in DC ages ago and I basically at one point it said, look, I don't think Ashby's law is a restriction, we're all using it as, as a restriction, which means the terrorists have asymmetric advantage over us.

00;15;25;03 - 00;15;44;26

Dave Snowden

So we were working on counter-terrorism. This is just after 9/11. I said we don't need to take Ashby's laws of restriction if we change our sensor networks. So if we change the way we sense data and we don't have to accept the restrictions, ? then actually a government can get asymmetric advantage over terrorism.

00;15;44;26 - 00;15;59;09

Dave Snowden

And that was a really significant shift. And I remember presenting that in Maryland once to a whole bunch of CIA guys. Yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of like, we need to take terrorism. We need to act as terrorists against the terrorists.

00;15;59;20 - 00;16;00;02

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Right

00;16;00;25 - 00;16;36;28

Dave Snowden

Which means governments learn to act asymmetrically. And the way governments act asymmetrically is they use their explicit visibility in their citizens sensor networks, which radically changes the cost of processing. And so you basically make the system open and then you haven't got an entropy restriction without an entropy restriction, Ashby's law doesn't apply. But you say Ashby's law doesn't apply to the system thinking community and they want to take you out, take you to a stake, put some flammable timber around you and set fire to it as soon as possible.

00;16;36;28 - 00;17;05;02

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

So you brought up some work with the Department of Defense in the military, many people look at the OODA loop as something that is applied only for war or warfare. And you and I know that's not necessarily true. We can use it elsewhere. But if you're going to use both Cynefin and the OODA loop to help inform organizations and how to use asymmetry to their advantage in this environment, is there anything you would advise them on or suggest to executives?

00;17;05;02 - 00;17;26;08

Dave Snowden

I think where we're going with that at the moment. I mean, the Fletchers curve, for example, went down better at Rhode Island than Cynefin in terms of strategy. And that gave me a clue, right. With a whole bunch of admirals there. That was a weird session because Trump fired the heads of the college while I was giving a lecture and that was pastoral.

00;17;26;08 - 00;17;52;13

Dave Snowden

I've never forgotten that right. So the latest framework, there are three major frameworks within the Cynefin ecology. One is Cynefin framework itself. The other is Fletchers curves. The third one, the new one, is value stream mapping. That I think is more significant. What value stream mapping does is it basically puts ground strategy and tactics into the same framework in the same timescale.

00;17;53;17 - 00;18;12;15

Dave Snowden

All right. Now, I think that's where Boyd was trying to go. If you look at some of his writings around strategy. But I don't think he has had the science to understand it. So he hasn't really picked up on Fractality as far as I can see. So once you start to pick up on fractality, you start to realize some of the ways you can do that.

00;18;12;28 - 00;18;31;00

Dave Snowden

So it's certainly I'm far more excited about value stream mapping than I was ever excited about Cynefin, actually. In terms the way it works is far better at creating frameworks now I kind of like know how to do them. For example, I've just come off a call with the U.N. and we're about to write it out as a U.N. technique.

00;18;32;03 - 00;18;54;04

Dave Snowden

We're doing a conference at Oxford now, or it is a new type of foresight, and it's all about what has the lowest energy gradient will win. And I think that's pretty fundamental to where Boyd was anyway. It was it was all about reducing the energy gradient. I mean, it's not just turning the airplanes faster. It was reducing the energy cost of decision making.

00;18;54;12 - 00;19;21;26

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

You brought up fractals. And one thing I'm not certain on I can bounce off Mark as well. But Mandelbrot Misbehavior of Markets is a very popular book or has become a very popular book about fractals and a few other things, Brownian motion, things like that. But had Boyd had access or can you talk more about fractals and subtle similarity and how important that is in today's environment?

00;19;21;26 - 00;19;53;12

Dave Snowden

You know, in the classic cases that are cauliflower leaf or the Norwegian coastline, I like the Norwegian coastline because it reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and ?. The point about fractality is that things are similar to all different levels of scale that that's the most important thing to understand. All right. So if we want to create a strategic approach, then the grand strategy, the political grand strategy, and the tactics for the strategic corporal all have to be self-similar.

00;19;54;27 - 00;20;04;04

Dave Snowden

Otherwise you can't get principles. And that's where we've gone with value stream mapping.

00;20;04;04 - 00;20;30;09

Mark McGrath

Okay, Dave, that answered a lot for me. I've taken a lot of fire from people from saying that OODA is fractal because I think it applies to individuals and then collections of individuals, be they teams, companies, organizations. So I really am happy to hear you say that. You mentioned the Strategic Corporal which was something that came out when I was in the Marine Corps, and it's never left me.

00;20;30;09 - 00;20;53;26

Mark McGrath

I wanted to know your thoughts on that specific, specific concept and its applicability to business, because coming out of the Marine Corps and being in the business world for so long, that sort of trust and decentralization of decision making, I've never seen it paralleled the way it was for us in the in the military. And I wonder if it's if it's possible in commercial frameworks or government frameworks.

00;20;53;26 - 00;20;54;26

Mark McGrath

And it.

00;20;54;27 - 00;21;12;01

Dave Snowden

Yes, it is. And I worked in that in DC on a series of projects and I still remember it was it was a four star general who said would you mind going out and have a conversation with my sergeants? And so you can come back and tell me what he's not allowed to tell me, which is what we then did. I got a lot of respect for that sort of stuff.

00;21;13;27 - 00;21;35;07

Dave Snowden

I think one of the reasons it works in military is because of the heavy role based. I mean, militaries crews in roles less than its individuals that's really important to understand. It's drummed into people from a very early ?. One of the reasons is, you know, I mean, the army, I'm not getting into marine prejudices here, The Army can't recruit the best and the brightest people.

00;21;35;07 - 00;21;54;25

Dave Snowden

It has to take what it gets and it has to make them exceptional, by the way it trains them. Yeah. So you, I'll never forget, suggested I named a new software package after General Patton at Quantico and then marched down to the Death Star and shown five Marine generals who said, choose one of those instead, which kind of really get the points.

00;21;55;13 - 00;22;16;20

Dave Snowden

So I think the way we're going on that is actually role based, distributed decision making. So we distributed in the what caused a called entangled trios. So you define three roles and the three roles in combination can make a decision, but no individual can make a decision and different people can occupy the role when they are introducing out of our base roles.

00;22;16;20 - 00;22;37;04

Dave Snowden

So you don't know who the person is. It might be from the panel, but what we're doing is distributing decision making into small, diverse networks, and there's some cognitive science in there as well in that the minute you go with three people, people form into tribes. So if we can keep three people from radically different backgrounds, they're forced to have a conversation.

00;22;37;14 - 00;22;58;01

Dave Snowden

It can just about go to five but once it goes above five, they'll go back to the norm of that group. Yeah. So that says taking the learning from strategic corporal work saying why does this work when the roles are key? Okay, we now know this stuff from cognitive. You can see the so but we now know this stuff from cognitive science and we've done this work in conflict resolution, right?

00;22;58;01 - 00;23;25;28

Dave Snowden

We'll put the two together, then we'll put it in the GAMBA system, which is software, so that if they make a decision, we can introduce lags into it where the decision can be reviewed. And if it's not canceled, it's allowed. Yeah. So what we're distributing is into combinations of roles. And I was arguing that on the strategic corporal, I said you're focusing on the corporal and you need to focus on the system around the corporal 

00;23;25;28 - 00;23;45;28

Dave Snowden

And by the way, there's another key factor here. One of the ways military works in actually nurses work as well, a medical profession works is you have people who learn the theory and then the practice, and you have people who start with the practice and then then the theory. So nurses start with practice and pick up theory. Doctors start with theory, then do practice.

00;23;46;15 - 00;24;17;03

Dave Snowden

And it's the same between noncommissioned officers and it's the combination of those two, which actually seems to weirdly work because it's different ways of acquiring knowledge and it's a process. It's not a explicit information transfer, it's a process of socialization and context. And I'm starting to think we need similar sort of approaches, to be honest, you know, and it might be the more micro-level, but it's got a consistent pattern of working really well in health and the army so that should tell us something.

00;24;18;07 - 00;24;41;24

Mark McGrath

Well, being married to a nurse for 22 years, I can align with that for sure. I know that my wife, neonatal intensive care nurse by trade that good doctors, as you say, were versed very well in theory. And somewhere they met in the middle because they knew that the nurses were the best practitioners and there was sort of an effective way that they could team from doctor to nurse.

00;24;42;00 - 00;25;07;08

Dave Snowden

And they were working in combination. That's what mattered. Yeah, and that's my point. Roles working in combination works human beings did not and this is a real problem both in North America and Northern Europe. And I blame Protestant for the Protestants for it, to be honest. And the Reformation is an over focused on the individual. And that's what it goes back to, is the sudden emphasis on the individual as opposed to the collective.

00;25;08;05 - 00;25;24;23

Dave Snowden

Now what's interesting is the army never advances the collective because it knows it works. And it's very difficult for people in what's called a socially optimistic culture to get the concept of group decision making because their whole theory has been about the individual need, etc., etc..

00;25;24;29 - 00;25;43;23

Mark McGrath

Have you seen anything in business that you would say would be a good example? I mean, we talk about doctors and nurses that reflect what you said, that they're really good at that sort of, you know, fusion between the two approaches and working in a collective, you know, I guess other than the military where Ponch and I come from, you know, other, examples.

00;25;43;23 - 00;26;03;29

Dave Snowden

Know when you see these to make it, I can give you several examples. So the way we used to run sales, for example, is we used to have sales consultants, consultants, and then we used to have hunters and farmers in the sales force. That's what they were called. So hunters hunt new business, farmers mappings and contracts. Sales consultants are brilliant.

00;26;03;29 - 00;26;24;09

Dave Snowden

It's making the sale of a crop at execution because what they do is they reposition the client to want what we can deliver and they work in tandem with the sales force. So in the IT industry, when I was first in it and we trained on that, I inherited that. It was heavily robust. Even with a consultancy sales force, we would swap roles between sales and consultant.

00;26;25;03 - 00;26;47;06

Dave Snowden

You know, before we went in, we never went in solo. So okay, it's my turn to be sales today it's your turn to be consultant because the roles were different. Yeah. And you can see that we tended to lose about that in training, but that was common training practice and a lot of that actually came from IBM sales training in terms of recognizing different roles in the interaction of those roles, in terms of the way they work.

00;26;47;10 - 00;27;10;06

Dave Snowden

Yeah, I think you start to see it in the Agile community and you're starting to see it with Non-Management tenure tracks in business, either recognition. So, you know, a friend of mine just got made, a fellow at Boeing, right, completely down a technical route and they created technical fellows so that you didn't have to become a director or a manager to get that sort of status.

00;27;10;18 - 00;27;31;22

Dave Snowden

And notice the examples I'm give you are all pretty much role based. They're changing the roles in the interaction of roles and seeing people is incidental to that. And I think that's that that all I could give more examples but they all come back to that sort of basic process. Some of the work we're doing at the moment with some of the big farmers is to institute distributed decision making.

00;27;32;11 - 00;27;56;11

Dave Snowden

Yeah, because you can't afford to waste time going through referral processes. I'm writing the paper for the NHS at the moment. Yeah. And we reckon with distributed decision making we could improve the quality of decision, we could reduce the cost and we could get rid of admin down to about 30% of its current level as a provisional statistic because we, we put, we put authority into roles interacting with each other rather than the authority into people.

00;27;57;18 - 00;28;04;19

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

What seems to be the pushback from your clients on this, or is there any push back?

00;28;04;19 - 00;28;23;24

Dave Snowden

There was a huge amount. I think Covid triggered the switch to complexity. I mean, complexity's been around for a long time, right? It's been there. It's been early adopter markets. What happened after Covid is people stopped asking how we did this and they asked what it would do for them. And that's the classic sign you flipped. Okay.

00;28;23;24 - 00;28;35;16

Dave Snowden

Yeah. Also, we came into massive attack from systems thinkers. I mean, they ignored us completely up to that time, but all of a sudden we're being attacked all the time, so I think we're taking business off them is my rough summary.

00;28;36;18 - 00;28;38;21

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Right. I think when we're.

00;28;38;21 - 00;28;40;27

Dave Snowden

System thinking has dominated the last 30 years.

00;28;41;24 - 00;29;04;23

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah. When we were in Lisbon, I think I brought up process engineering, what's happening in a lot of large organizations where they want to understand everything that's happening with their human systems and their technical systems. So to me, that's applying an engineering approach to a human system as well as potentially using systems thinking applied to anthrocomplexity.

00;29;05;15 - 00;29;06;17

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

And any thoughts on that?

00;29;07;18 - 00;29;26;13

Dave Snowden

And I mean, I went on from that to a more so and Steve Denning was also at that and there was a sort of a major row on the stage because I went for his gullet over the concept that leaders make a difference. I mean, he keeps writing books about individual leaders changing things and they don't. It's affordances and assemblages.

00;29;27;07 - 00;29;49;11

Dave Snowden

You know, the leader acts as a catalyst, but you got this and that was my problem. Also with Lisbon, the whole weekend was about, you know, replacing capitalism like the previous time. It was about Agile. In the previous time, it was about radical leadership. Everybody's trying to produce a magic recipe every couple of years and then try and pretend they didn't produce one two years ago when they produced the next one. 

00;29;49;27 - 00;29;57;24

Dave Snowden

And we really need some scientific thinking and discipline in management at the moment, right? Yeah. And not a series of fad driven recipes.

00;29;59;22 - 00;30;11;24

Mark McGrath

You mentioned when we're talking about individuals versus the collective, you mentioned the United States and northern Europe. Are there other regions or ways of thinking that around the world.

00;30;11;29 - 00;30;38;16

Dave Snowden

No they dominate. I mean, former Eastern European countries, I mean, you can almost say anybody who takes Ann Rand seriously, which is sort of Eastern Europe, North America but not anywhere else. Right. But the sort of extreme individualism really comes with the Reformation, with the rise of Protestantism, with the rise of capitalism. So it's a northern European, North American phenomenon.

00;30;38;16 - 00;31;00;18

Dave Snowden

And the famous one, if you ask people, which is the opinions of cow, chicken or grass, most people in North America and Northern Europe will actually get rid of grass because they think in categories everywhere else in the world, including those of us who are Welsh, Irish and Scottish, get rid of the chicken because the cow has got a relationship with grass and they think in terms of relationships, not categories. 

00;31;00;27 - 00;31;22;18

Dave Snowden

Yeah. And I think that's actually quite important. I mean, you know, the, the way we think about the planet, the way we think about resources, that sort of heavyweight, expansionist capital capitalists look after the individual, it's going to kill the species and potentially my children's lifetime if we don't change it.

00;31;23;17 - 00;31;43;10

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

So we're kind of talking about orientation here with culture, language. And you brought up epigenetics earlier, but is that where you're going with this? If our collective our individual orientation is built upon the values that our parents put on us and the culture we grew up in, is that going to change the way we answer that question about the question. 

00;31;43;10 - 00;32;19;05

Dave Snowden

Of the biological mechanism of it? So we know the mechanism by which culture is inherited over two generations? Yeah, I mean, that's one of things epigenetics has brought up. I'm a materialist and also Roman Catholic materialist and that the world is materially constituted is knowable. Yeah. And the fact that we're now starting to understand things like epigenetics, which actually explain cultural inheritance or the way we're now starting to understand in which the way narrative micro narratives create an assembly structure, which patterns, human responses, you know, there's a science to all of this sort of stuff.

00;32;19;05 - 00;32;23;14

Dave Snowden

And that's why I say we're not about complexity thinking, we're about complexity science.

00;32;23;24 - 00;32;36;00

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Right? So when you look at John Boyd's orientation, I'll just pull out a few things. We have cultural traditions, genetic heritage and previous experience. To me, when you brought up the connect.

00;32;36;02 - 00;32;37;19

Dave Snowden

Yeah, that's the way I get rid of.

00;32;38;17 - 00;32;38;23

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Okay.

00;32;39;06 - 00;33;03;20

Dave Snowden

I think that's, that's the one bit on OODA which is really dated. Yeah. We now talk about agency assemblage and affordance as a better way of looking at what, what, what's, what's in that stage. Yeah. So what has agency, what audience is provided by your background and by the situation. What the assembly structures which are pattern in the way you think about the problem.

00;33;04;26 - 00;33;27;03

Mark McGrath

Can I keep you on this topic? Because I think this is one of the impetus behind Ponch and I starting this venture to have these continued discussions of developing Boyd's theory. But you mentioned earlier at the very beginning, you know, if Boyd had lived longer, his thinking might have changed somewhat. And our experience of going into the archives and reading his stuff, we certainly concur.

00;33;27;03 - 00;33;49;00

Mark McGrath

And that's part of our mission is, you know, what would he have what where would he have likely taken it? And, you know, where could the work be best developed next? And obviously the naturally rather the connection with Cynefin. But you know, staying on that theme of like saying to Boyd, you know, we're going to get rid of these five things that you have inside of orientation.

00;33;49;00 - 00;33;58;16

Mark McGrath

Instead, let's replace them with X. How would that conversation go? And I mean, because I think he would have been open to that as we know him to be.

00;33;59;12 - 00;34;21;29

Dave Snowden

You also map it. You'd say, look, we know that culture is not culture. Culture is a mixture of affordances and assemblages. And so we're going to a level yeah. If we go down a level, we can actually get a more generalized approach which has more utility, right? So we, we, you know, culture is made up of watercooler stories, but some of it is biological.

00;34;21;29 - 00;34;46;00

Dave Snowden

Right. So you've got to think about that. All right. So I say that with better science. I think that would have changed. I think also I think in complexity, you're talking about multiple parallel micro OODA loops rather than the single OODA loop because you can't know what the outcome is. So you have to test hypotheses in parallel, right? So the issue is how do you test that?

00;34;46;00 - 00;35;11;27

Dave Snowden

How long do you get into? And I think so. Observe and orient, observe orientate decide are really starting to fuse more in complexity science than in Boyd's time. Now you can see that, now the trouble is Boyd underlined every bloody thing in everything he wrote so you don't know what he was taking seriously what he wasn't all right but I think I think fusing stages is also interesting. 

00;35;12;15 - 00;35;16;02

Dave Snowden

Yeah.

00;35;16;02 - 00;35;23;06

Mark McGrath

What do you think is Boyd's biggest value if you were if you know, I mean, we're obviously talking about that now is.

00;35;23;07 - 00;35;36;17

Dave Snowden

Use dynamics he made it dynamic not static. Yeah that was that was the single biggest contribution I think of OODA. Is the whole thing became a dynamic process, not a static linear process.

00;35;36;17 - 00;35;54;11

Mark McGrath

Yeah, that's I couldn't say that better. I mean, I, I wanted to ask you about we're talking about entropy and I and I understand what you're saying. You're saying that human systems by nature are always are always open. But there's something to me, you know, how would you. 

00;35;54;11 - 00;36;18;04

Dave Snowden

Explain processed symbolic species? Yeah, well, let me give you an example. Right. So one of the really interesting things coming out of theoretical physics at the moment, I mean, this is very speculative, is the idea that information has mass and that accounts for dark matter. Now, that's really interesting because information has mass and the biologists have been tending that direction for a long time.

00;36;18;18 - 00;37;03;07

Dave Snowden

And it also has momentum. Yeah. Yeah. Now, what that means is human beings are able to create reality. By the way, we talk about forms. This is called the cold near materialism, by the way, which is kind of feminist literature in the states. And people like to land the recognition that humans symbolic acts have material existence and that gets rid of modernism, postmodernism, you know, social constructivism, critical realism all those dichotomies go out the window when you just make that simple switch. The other thing that is coming out of that is basically if modernism and postmodernism goes and basically socialist and capitalist goes so the political

00;37;03;07 - 00;37;13;27

Dave Snowden

distinctions of the last century have little or no meaning in the Anthropocene. What would be another the interest in the landing land, the wrote in that recently a brilliant book.

00;37;15;08 - 00;37;22;16

Mark McGrath

Like you said for example, that authority goes into roles and the authority doesn't go into the people role.

00;37;22;16 - 00;37;45;00

Dave Snowden

Combinations. You have smaller political units, not larger political units. And one of the really interesting things I did for Poindexter when I was working on the DARPA programs is we ran a We had a whole bunch of historians in Richmond and we ran. We spent a whole week constructing alternative history of the US in which the South win the Civil War as a result of British and French intervention.

00;37;45;00 - 00;38;03;00

Dave Snowden

Because Lincoln doesn't play the slavery card now I actually was interested in the wilderness, it becomes very different because you never develop superpowers. Yeah, which actually means you get a more balanced system. Mm hmm.

00;38;03;00 - 00;38;03;25

Mark McGrath

But you wouldn't say.

00;38;03;25 - 00;38;06;29

Dave Snowden

And say this is just numbers from history.

00;38;08;08 - 00;38;15;15

Mark McGrath

What you wouldn't say in those systems where, say, mindsets were closed or debate was closed off, you wouldn't call those entropic.

00;38;17;09 - 00;38;37;22

Dave Snowden

Or I think, well, I mean, the Civil War fundamentally still impacts in the American sense of itself. I don't think any American historian can write an objective history of the American civil War. It's so fundamental, and it creates a series of dichotomies which you're still living through today in different ways. Right. And but that's the way it was handled.

00;38;37;22 - 00;39;05;00

Dave Snowden

And if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated and he could have worked with the you know, with Lee and other people, which is the plan, you wouldn't have had the carpet baggers. And if you didn't have the carpetbaggers, you wouldn't have had the Ku Klux Klan. And I could go on. But the whole series of what ifs, you that the fact is if you consolidate things into two big units, you mean you make them more rigid, they become more effective, they become less flexible.

00;39;05;00 - 00;39;30;29

Dave Snowden

I mean, that's my point. If you notice it, countries which are really successful at cohesion are countries with less than 5 million population. They're actually very successful. They provide very high quality health services at significantly lower cost than countries who are bigger. So there is something about scalability and size that we're not paying sufficient attention to in businesses or in or in politics at the moment.

00;39;32;14 - 00;39;50;05

Mark McGrath

I was listening to a conversation the other night at dinner. They were talking about how could a population of three or 350 million have only 535 people representing them effectively, that the system might be too big or overexpanded.

00;39;50;07 - 00;40;13;22

Dave Snowden

The problem is one man, one man, one vote. And it always was one that until fairly recently was designed for low populations where you knew who you elected. It's quite interesting. I mean, if you look at the American Constitution, it looks at the scale issue and it basically the original Constitution says nobody should be elected president from the popular vote because we'll get demagogs and populists.

00;40;14;08 - 00;40;33;13

Dave Snowden

So it creates the electoral college then then you idiots allow the Electoral College to be mandated. So you got the worst of both possible worlds. The original idea is you all elect a couple of people you trust and they go to this place and they discuss who should be president. And that's actually quite sensible.

00;40;33;13 - 00;40;34;00

Mark McGrath

Well.

00;40;34;11 - 00;40;37;07

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah, no way to get there.

00;40;38;00 - 00;40;48;16

Dave Snowden

Yeah, sure. I mean, Europe. Europe learned centuries ago. You don't elect your judges. It's a bad idea.

00;40;48;16 - 00;40;54;16

Mark McGrath

Do you think historically in Europe, the church was the moderator? You mentioned the Reformation.

00;40;54;16 - 00;41;14;06

Dave Snowden

Yeah, it was. That's another thing which had wrong with the ref. The Reformation created doctrine. Before that, priests were normally community mediators and the Reformation made it a matter of doctrine and faith. And lots of things happened after that. But originally that was one of the roles of the church provided a counterbalance to the Kings.

00;41;14;29 - 00;41;24;17

Mark McGrath

And there was a lot of foreign disputes settled from the church, like the, the partition of South America and, I mean, you could go down the list of things.

00;41;24;27 - 00;41;44;29

Dave Snowden

And tension you got out the South Americans on that. But yeah, the point is there was there was more than one authority for one area. Yeah. And I mean the UN has never managed to do that but we haven't got an equivalent. Now you then got this and one thing which really worries me is that are people trying to design a new religion at the moment?

00;41;45;18 - 00;41;58;23

Dave Snowden

This the bad end of ? Mormonism. And the idea that a bunch of intellectuals from a very specific culture with a very specific history should be allowed to design a world religion. I find significantly scary, but.

00;42;01;08 - 00;42;29;17

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Dave I want to kind of build on this some more, but connect it back to the strategic game of interaction and isolation by John Boyd, and this really connects to what's happening in our environment now. You know, I have my view on what's going on when people get canceled. Or we talk about misinformation and disinformation. But can you put a complexity spin, not spin, but just connect it back to why we need to keep the lines of communication open rather than shut each other off and just hear your thoughts on that.

00;42;30;00 - 00;42;31;13

Dave Snowden

I think it's less about that. 

00;42;31;20 - 00;42;31;28

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Okay.

00;42;32;01 - 00;42;57;25

Dave Snowden

I think what complexity tells you is that systems evolve. So you can't define what a system should be based on how you would like it to be. And I think what you see I mean, I think, you know, it's not about connecting people in that sort of very liberal sense of the word Ponch. It's about recognizing that societies evolve with different places and different things are possible at different times.

00;42;58;17 - 00;43;24;06

Dave Snowden

They then have some absolute questions. So, for example, I don't think you can justify female genital mutilation in Africa on the grounds of cultural, cultural dependency. All Right. But I think you can define. And I don't think you can define attitudes to people of African, Caribbean or origin in the States on the basis of our custom practice in Mississippi is to treat them like slaves.

00;43;24;08 - 00;43;44;15

Dave Snowden

Right. So I think there are some things at one end of the scale where you're entitled to do things, but between that, I think it's deeply problematic. So, you know, if you take an example which was quoted interestingly it quite a proportion bunch of Mexican students who said they were traumatized by the earthquake I think was enough to sit exams.

00;43;44;29 - 00;44;08;29

Dave Snowden

That's getting dubious, right? De-Platforming people is nothing. I mean, I did a lot of work to try and stop fascists having platforms back in the seventies, but we didn't start stop everybody having a platform just because we disagreed with them. What they didn't say the right thing. If you look at the evolution of obscenity laws, what we would accept now is completely different from 60 years ago.

00;44;09;21 - 00;44;28;16

Dave Snowden

So I think complexity talks about evolution and dispositions and when things can shift, they can't shift. And when you can intervene to change them. The trouble is that people keep trying to intervene to design an ideal system and that never works. It never has worked in the history of humanity. Yet dystopias are far more realistic than utopias.

00;44;29;06 - 00;44;34;04

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah.

00;44;34;04 - 00;44;38;27

Mark McGrath

Yeah. How many dystopias have been created by trying to create a utopia?

00;44;39;09 - 00;44;40;18

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Is that. Yeah.

00;44;40;18 - 00;45;05;19

Dave Snowden

And generally, well, those are actually interesting. Huxley There's a review which says he thought it was a utopia, not a dystopia, which is interesting, right? Actually think of the I mean you can say there's three or four great dystopian novels, I think now and Handmaid's Tale in the traditional three, but the traditional three in 1984, Brave New World and Darkness at noon, everybody neglects darkness at noon.

00;45;05;22 - 00;45;31;02

Dave Snowden

But it's the most important because. The Russian anti-hero realizes he has to go to Siberia and/or be executed for the good of the party. And it's in his interest to do so. And the wake up to bills, that is terrifying. Yeah, but that has huge implications in modern American society as well. In terms of what's tolerated, what isn't tolerated, what fits within groups.

00;45;31;25 - 00;45;57;13

Dave Snowden

And I think again, the world is becoming too big and people are in too big populations to actually sustain viable differences. We just announced an initiative with GMU, with the Carter Center on Peace and Reconciliation. That's all about getting very small groups of people together, working together where they can talk about their differences once they realize they've got something in common, rather than get them into a big workshop and talking about how they should think about each other.

00;45;57;13 - 00;45;58;10

Dave Snowden

That never works anyway.

00;45;59;03 - 00;46;23;29

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah, let's come out of this. This is kind of I mean, we could spend hours on this, but it's the okay, let's go back to OODA and agility and maybe safety and then I want to get Dave's perspective on what's going right and wrong or well or good and others inside today's consulting space or business transformation, digital transformation agile Transformation, Safety, resilience, innovation, design thinking.

00;46;24;20 - 00;46;35;13

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Let's, let's go look at that space for a little bit. And I just want to get Dave's thoughts on the disposition of where are.

00;46;35;13 - 00;47;03;21

Dave Snowden

So I think you I've seen two, three major shifts in the way we think about firms and organizations. So when I was coming into business, we were at the tail end of scientific management. Yeah, that really went through until the eighties. Yeah. So it was functional type organization that was before the advent of computers. So you needed functions to handle information volumes, etc., etc. and everybody derides Taylorism.

00;47;03;21 - 00;47;23;04

Dave Snowden

I think that once and Peter Drucker beat me up and I learned the error of my ways and I didn't do it anymore. Taylor was actually trying to humanize the workforce. Everybody's forgets that I forget what it was like before he came along. Right. What happens in the eighties is systems thinking takes off and it doesn't take off so much against the cybernetic side.

00;47;23;04 - 00;47;47;16

Dave Snowden

It takes off around systems dynamics, and it takes off with two big things. One is business process re-engineering. Yeah, horizontal. See the system as a whole, multiple feedback loops. And the other was saying you learn in organization, which comes from exactly the same school. So you got this rigid process or soft fluffy leadership. But I mean, saying this book basically says everybody does what the lead tells them to.

00;47;47;29 - 00;48;11;26

Dave Snowden

I mean, that's what it starts off with. You know, the role of the leader, similar direction. And we all subsume our individuality in the greater good that the greater leader is what I call folk Buddhism a few times. Right. So what that really comes in, in the eighties and the metaphor switches to a military metaphor which is actually quite flexible to an engineering metaphor, which isn't that flexible because engineers want to produce the goods.

00;48;12;17 - 00;48;29;23

Dave Snowden

And it was interesting, H.R. departments used to be an ex-major or colonel with a couple of secretaries, and now it's whole industry, right, in terms of the way it works. And I think we now see in the next switch on that and Covid was a trigger mechanism, but it was coming anyway.

00;48;29;23 - 00;48;55;15

Dave Snowden

It just happened once with COVID. That's the switch to complexity, which is a switch to an ecological metaphor. Yeah. Now you always get some hangovers. All right, so we're getting some systems thinking hanging over into complexity thinking, and there's ways we can accommodate that. And I find some of the cybernetics have some patterns really useful because if I didn't take the patents as a definitive range, they give you valuable learnings from diverse perspectives, right?

00;48;56;26 - 00;49;23;05

Dave Snowden

So I think that's where we are and I think you can see it illustrated in things like let's take for example, design thinking. So design thinking came out of systems thinking. So it assumed the double diamond is a linear process and it was developed by a management consultant, not a design professor. Most design professors I know were appalled by the double diamond and we spent four or five years working on this and we're now talking about distributed ethnography, distributed ideation and exaptive design.

00;49;23;24 - 00;49;44;24

Dave Snowden

And that's taking a complexity perspective. So we broaden the scope considerably. We've respected what came out of the systems thinking era, but we said it works in part Cynefin does the same with BPR. There's nothing wrong with BPR in the bid domain and to some extent complicated, but it's total crap when you come to complex. So it's a both and strategy, not an either or strategy.

00;49;45;19 - 00;50;11;09

Dave Snowden

So I think that's what's happening. I think Agile. Agile is a really interesting case because there were three main feeds into Agile. There was XP, there was DSDM and there was Scrum, all of which preexisted. Yeah, DSDM was actually I was one of the three founders of DSDM. Yeah. Three of us got together in the pub in Cheltenham to create standard for rapid application development.

00;50;12;03 - 00;50;39;03

Dave Snowden

Yeah. And that went on to be in business agility etc.. Now the problem is that when you get to Snowbird, the only thing this is Brasso's concept which is has the right level of abstraction and codification to scale is scrum. All right. So if it hadn't been for Scrum, nobody would have heard of Agile. Yeah, but actually XP is closer to the heart of Agile with apologies to people who've used that phrase.

00;50;40;09 - 00;50;59;29

Dave Snowden

So I remember saying this at the conference is, you know, agile scaled because of Scrum, but XP is the real value in Agile and all the XP people cheered me. And I said, but the trouble is, you guys can't talk to mortals, so you were never going to scale anyway. And they're still trying to work out that that was an insult. And I think they probably I think they think it was a compliment.

00;51;00;04 - 00;51;26;01

Dave Snowden

All right. They don't want to talk to ordinary mortals. So I think what then happened is Scrum then set the standards for training, certification structure form, and that stuck with Agile ever since. And now we've got a whole bunch of bloody idiots, you know, trying to set up a new Agile, whether it's Agile two or MPO. Yeah. Or that nonsensical, you know, graphically redrawn version Spotify for music.

00;51;26;01 - 00;51;46;11

Dave Snowden

And also everybody's just trying to repeat the same model. Yeah. And make their money out of training. Now we're taking a different approach and we're doing it collaboratively. Open source with multiple partners is we're breaking all the agile methods down into their smallest components and then actually selling kits. So you can combine and recombine those components so you're not locked into a single framework.

00;51;46;11 - 00;52;08;21

Dave Snowden

Then that's a complexity design principle. You scale by decomposition to the lowest level of coherence and recombination. That's what we do well now that's got a lot of traction. Now we've got the two main scrum communities committed to it. We've got the team incumbents community to it. We just got the DSDM and the business agility community's committed to it.

00;52;08;21 - 00;52;35;29

Dave Snowden

Yeah. And I think people have recognized we need to move in, not just produce a new version of Agile, but produce a version which makes all the things we've done on Agile over the past 20 years work better. And that's kind of like the direction that's taking complexity design approach. So this concept of scaling by decomposition and recombination, the concept of using science is an enabling constraint which kills off empiricism is not your impetus.

00;52;35;29 - 00;52;55;06

Dave Snowden

I mean, other people do not understand what the word empiricism is. It means they need to use some basic philosophy, but what it means for them is what happened last time that I think might work again. And there's no basis for scalable method. So we use natural science as an enabling constraint to actually say we want methods to develop of value than what we invented.

00;52;56;29 - 00;52;58;11

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

We could argue that there.

00;52;58;11 - 00;53;09;15

Dave Snowden

Is an exciting time to, you know, we need a radical change because we can't take a resource specific view of industry or that or governments anymore.

00;53;10;07 - 00;53;10;16

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Right.

00;53;11;06 - 00;53;12;14

Dave Snowden

You got to rethink that.

00;53;13;05 - 00;53;21;29

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

I would argue that John Boyd did the same thing, more of the natural science leveraging lessons from there and applying it is highly respected.

00;53;22;02 - 00;53;22;15

Dave Snowden

And you read.

00;53;22;16 - 00;53;24;14

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

It. Yeah. And then something I think.

00;53;25;04 - 00;53;43;27

Dave Snowden

You and I say you disagree with him on this. So I think there's a huge amount involved which we can still use, but I think we've got to repurpose it now so we can't take the OODA loop as was anymore with what we know. And Boyd would not have done that anyway. He would have changed it radically, but it.

00;53;46;05 - 00;53;55;12

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

But even today, many people don't even understand what he wrote 25 years ago. Right. With a sketch. They kind of simplify it.

00;53;55;12 - 00;53;56;01

Mark McGrath

They reduce.

00;53;56;01 - 00;54;00;09

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

It. Yeah. So I agree with you, Dave.

00;54;00;13 - 00;54;13;19

Dave Snowden

And I think part of the problem is the way he drew, it wasn't designed for scale. I think it was his notes to himself. I don't think he ever designed something which was designed to scale anyway. I mean, it took me 20 years to get Cynefin right.

00;54;13;20 - 00;54;15;25

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

And you still working on it, right? Or is it perfect?

00;54;15;28 - 00;54;16;10

Mark McGrath

Yeah.

00;54;17;21 - 00;54;20;16

Dave Snowden

No. It's not perfect, but it's more or less finished.

00;54;20;26 - 00;54;21;03

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Okay.

00;54;21;19 - 00;54;30;05

Dave Snowden

Well, I think the minute you resolve the final unresolved conflict, you're there. So disorder was always the end result conflict. That's now resolved. Yeah.

00;54;31;06 - 00;54;49;23

Mark McGrath

I am frantically agree with you, Dave, because the Chet Richards has a beautiful piece called The Epistemology of the OODA loop graphic, which shows its evolution over 20 years right up to the point where it passed. And I completely agree with you that had he lived, he certainly would have not only been open to it, but we can almost guarantee that he would have changed it.

00;54;49;23 - 00;54;57;14

Mark McGrath

And even the version that we're all familiar with, he was very hesitant about because he didn't like to put things in writing because he thought that things were always dynamic.

00;54;57;15 - 00;55;07;26

Dave Snowden

And that's why I'm interested in these fractal layers, because you can reduce and you can continue to look at the grand strategy level or tactical level, but it wouldn't look like an OODA loop. But it's the same sort of principle.

00;55;08;00 - 00;55;09;05

Mark McGrath

Same principle? Yeah.

00;55;10;05 - 00;55;22;07

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Boyd's work is open source. It's Creative Commons with attribution. That's. That's what we've been told and guided. And I think your Cynefin framework is the same way we're going back to the Agile community. Yeah you know everything you think.

00;55;22;07 - 00;55;24;21

Dave Snowden

Outside the game. Before they realized what I was doing.

00;55;25;02 - 00;55;26;09

Mark McGrath

Could you recap it? 

00;55;26;09 - 00;55;40;06

Dave Snowden

No, no, we, we, we. That guy was responsible for me. We just run a training course and we met with open source and all of this and we got the email submitted. So everything went out. Source, IBM on it. Nobody, nobody realized what we done until it was too late.

00;55;40;15 - 00;55;46;10

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

But even today, people still are going to say, Bastardize your work, right? They still don't understand it or they don't read it.

00;55;46;10 - 00;56;06;20

Dave Snowden

Oh yeah. It was what you meant the other day. What amuses me, I mean, there are several things which amuse me is people use key phrases without attribution or they. Yeah, I mean, I had somebody there explain Cynefin. I mean, I haven't, I mean if I don't comment already generally because I've decided I'll be nice to them. But somebody basically said, you know, they didn't quite get the phase shifts between the main domains.

00;56;06;20 - 00;56;26;08

Dave Snowden

Right. And if you get that wrong, everything goes all right. But I mean, I'm relaxed about it. I mean, you can't expect if you want something to propagate and change the way people think, you can be really tolerant about people not being completely right and, you know, do some mild corrections. They steer the ship and don't blow don't blow people up if they go off course.

00;56;28;01 - 00;56;36;20

Mark McGrath

I guess that was the thing I was thinking of the importance of things being open source and collaborative at versus closed and.

00;56;36;23 - 00;56;58;10

Dave Snowden

Well, yes and no. I mean, you don't want to open source stuff when you're creating it because it will end up homogenized. So the principle is you keep I mean, I lost two members of staff over this because I just didn't understand it. I mean, we blaze in rows, right? So when you're creating something, you hold it very tight and you make distinctions between your stuff and other stuff very, very clear.

00;56;58;23 - 00;57;17;20

Dave Snowden

So I was I've been until recently I was fairly vicious on the complexity is not systems thinking because of the danger of homogenization now that danger has gone away I'm being really reasonable because I don't need to be. And the minute the market took off, we open sourced everything because it's better for people to copy us and to create competitors.

00;57;17;20 - 00;57;40;06

Dave Snowden

So it's not that there's one right way when something is created, hold it tight. Otherwise it will get corrupted. But no, when you move it, open source, open APIs and software is better than open source software because it gives more, more growth and stability. Just open. You know open source software privileges techies, it doesn't privilege ordinary users.

00;57;42;28 - 00;57;50;27

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Dave, we've been taking up your time I know you got a cold beverage in front of you need to get back to you, but I just want to leave it or turn it back over to you.

00;57;51;08 - 00;57;52;12

Dave Snowden

So I need to refill it.

00;57;53;08 - 00;58;04;15

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

So we're standing between you and a beer. It's not a bad thing. But anyway, any last shots? Any, any. Anything you want to throw out there to the group or to our listeners about complexity?

00;58;04;15 - 00;58;33;22

Dave Snowden

No, I think I think John Boyd needs a lot more sort of recognition for his contribution to development. But I think I'd say that recognition will be by modifying what he did, not by creating some sort of carrot to that, which I think some people do with OODA. Right. So I think it's recognized the field is changing. When you when we go through these phase shifts in the way people think, it's very important.

00;58;33;23 - 00;58;52;04

Dave Snowden

Well, you have the apex predator next time as we don't know. But the good news is I think the big consultancies can't work a complexity business model, they just can't work it because they're based on large for metalization manufacturing. So I think this is the time of small consultancies working in groups.

00;58;53;04 - 00;58;55;08

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

And that's exactly what we want to do and that's how.

00;58;56;17 - 00;58;57;17

Dave Snowden

I mean, that's what we're doing with.

00;58;58;03 - 00;58;58;20

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

Yeah, yeah.

00;58;58;20 - 00;59;08;03

Dave Snowden

That's what we do with Agile. It's, you know, multi-vendor multi methods, but have things in common that you can put together which don't lock you into a single supplier.

00;59;09;08 - 00;59;27;22

Brian "Ponch" Rivera

I completely agree with you. That's, that's why we have AGLX, the Flow Consortium, the Flow System, right? I mean, it's a slow uptake on it. But, you know, many people will argue that their legacy approach to project management works best in anything out there, and it's really their orientation.

00;59;27;22 - 00;59;51;10

Dave Snowden

You have to wait for your time. I mean. Yeah, and we're launching something new on project management at University College London in March, and I've waited to do that for about 15 years. You don't do something radical until the market is ready for it. Exactly right? There's no point in being right if somebody's been right, if nobody listens to you.

00;59;51;10 - 01;00;12;23

Mark McGrath

Thanks for tuning in to No way out. We appreciate you joining us. And we hope that you check out the show notes page to find all the links that that we described in the podcast. For more information about AGLX, please go www.aglx.com. Thanks and see you again soon.