November 21, 2020
Problems of diversity, inclusion and associated conflict pervade modern society. To be honest they always did but we are more […]
November 20, 2020
In my earlier post on focus I identified the need to shift from the alpha to the omega points in […]
November 18, 2020
This post (which will be several parts) is an extension of my posts on contextual strategy that started with a […]
November 15, 2020
Yesterday’s post took around 18 hours of elapsed time interspersed by a dashed visit to the shops and two hours […]
November 14, 2020
I’ve always been fond of wolves, something that is probably due to a childhood spent with Kipling’s Jungle Book and […]
November 13, 2020
I’ve never really been a player of games. I dabbled in chess when young and the family rituals on wet […]
November 12, 2020
This is the first of two posts that deal with existing from a crisis, the final stage of Assess – […]
November 10, 2020
A health warning – this is an exploratory post starting to develop an anthro-complexity theory of organisational change. As such I am working […]
November 7, 2020
Just as a warning, this is a rather rambling post. The overall theme is about constraints and is another theme […]
September 11, 2020
Just before Christmas 2015 I posted on the subject of What’s in a name? That was the first time I […]
September 10, 2020
Back in October 2017, I published a blog post on what I was then calling the Ticotocon. The context of […]
September 8, 2020
The banner shot here was taken by me last Sunday in the late afternoon of what was a delightful hike; […]
September 5, 2020
The tenth chapter of St Matthew’s gospel has two of the best-known quotes from the bible: the advise that if […]
September 1, 2020
This is the first in what will be an occasional series of posts in which I want to examine, in […]
July 30, 2020
On September 16, 2019, Cognitive Edge was invited to a Research Meeting convened by the Stanford Center for Design Research […]
June 18, 2020
I have been thinking a lot about climate change during the COVID-19 times (and so have many many many others). […]
June 16, 2020
On 11 June 2020, I had the privilege of being part of a fascinating conversation about leadership. We had a […]
April 23, 2020
Three weeks ago, my uncle died from COVID-19. He was a second uncle and I hadn’t seen him in a […]
April 20, 2020
This blog post is written by Dave Snowden (the Cynefin Centre) and Millie Begovic (UNDP) to launch a critical experiment […]
April 20, 2020
This blog post is written by Dave Snowden (the Cynefin Centre) and Millie Begovic (UNDP) to launch a critical experiment […]
April 19, 2020
I love this cartoon by Shannon Wheeler, that was posted by the New Yorker. When we watch apocalyptic movies, what […]
April 18, 2020
This is the second post of several that I am publishing this month to update some of my original work […]
April 17, 2020
Some time ago while watching one of Iolo Williams reflections on the Welsh Landscape I noted his use of the […]
April 12, 2020
Plans for a series of key blog posts after my March update series on Cynefin have been disrupted by COVID-19 […]
April 9, 2020
In 1990, from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometres away, the Voyager 1 spacecraft took a now-iconic picture […]
April 5, 2020
I am officially on Day 13 of my strict Stay Home Orders. I have not stepped out of my house […]
March 27, 2020
These have been trying times. Yesterday, I watched our National Development Minister tear up at a national address as he […]
February 23, 2020
In the first of these articles, I looked at Borton’s W³ question from the 1970s and more recent adaptations (with […]
October 22, 2019
In 2002 I published Complex Acts of Knowing, the first major article to include Cynefin in its near current form; if […]
October 13, 2019
From time to time in social media I resist the temptation to respond when people talk about the Stacy Matrix; […]
August 31, 2019
One of the few good news items yesterday (don’t ask but it involves more tests) was my discovery that we […]
August 26, 2019
In yesterday’s post I said: as you increase variety within the system to the point where it becomes heterogeneous, it […]
August 18, 2019
I’ve been thinking about the whole approach we are adopting to design thinking as the Whistler retreat approaches. We […]
August 15, 2019
Working in complexity you soon get a sense of which ideas and concepts are causing (sic) people problems. One is […]
May 19, 2019
On the 11th of March this year I sat down for a meal at the Bridge Inn in Ratho (top […]
March 2, 2019
Around five years ago I spent a difficult and unplanned night in Toronto airport. I didn’t enjoy it but in […]
August 12, 2018
Long distance walking is meditative in nature and often metaphorical in the nature of the reflection. Once you go beyond […]
August 1, 2018
If I look back at the highlights of my various speaking engagements over the years then those to librarians are […]
July 19, 2018
In architecture a spandrel is the space between an arch and the vertical wall. It had no purpose until artists […]
July 17, 2018
In yesterday’s post I illustrated the difference between a resilient and a robust system by contrasting a salt marsh with […]
February 1, 2018
Pressing demands on my time have meant I had to delay this final post of three. I’m also building a […]
January 25, 2018
Most people came to Ursula Le Guin through the Earthsea novels. I only read those as an adult and came […]
January 24, 2018
One of the major issues in virtually any change initiative in organisations is the constant assumption that one can start […]
January 21, 2018
Probably the key phrase in my post yesterday was “Start not with what things should be, not how they came […]
January 20, 2018
I probably shouldn’t have brought an ancient scholastic text book with me but I still have a fondness for it, […]
January 19, 2018
I’ve talked about some of the intellectual origins of Cynefin and yesterday addressed the question of quiddity, on in more […]
January 18, 2018
For those not familiar with it, quiddity is not about games played by wizards (although for all I know it […]
January 16, 2018
Taking the A5 route Anglesea late in the afternoon is normally a delight as the mountains of Snowdon start to […]
January 15, 2018
I really should be cutting back on the email and task backlog at the moment but I keep getting distracted […]
January 14, 2018
Having written yesterday’s post I started to play around with mapping various approaches to measurement, goal setting and the like […]
January 12, 2018
I had a really interesting exchange on twitter over the last few days. It’s nice when you can have an […]
December 25, 2017
One of the oddiities of our increasingly digitial world is the way that birthday and other reminders pop into view […]
December 6, 2017
Teaching intelligent people with real world problems is always one of the great pleasures of life and also a chance […]
November 13, 2017
It been a week since my tirade against the abrogation of leadership by falling back to the crutch of a […]
October 30, 2017
The picture here is of Michael Bryant as Mathieu Delarue in the BBC production of Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom. […]
October 29, 2017
An abiding memory of childhood is being sent home by a Chapel going Welsh Primary School teacher with instructions to […]
October 28, 2017
One of my best ever Opera experiences was back in 1986 when I went to what looks to have been […]
October 8, 2017
Over the years I’ve developed a range of facilitation and workshop techniques based on the underlying principles anthro-complexity. Ritual dissent […]
October 1, 2017
I wrote a series of posts about scaling over three year ago which in part addressed some of the perversities […]
September 10, 2017
Over the years I have had various emails, social media links and other links to various versions of the Cynefin […]
September 4, 2017
I started to make some real progress on the development of constraint mapping when I realised the typology I was […]
August 30, 2017
Coming to the end of two weeks in New Zealand and I’ve been struck by a dreaded lurgy, or possibly […]
August 27, 2017
I’ve been developing a theory of constraints both as a method for strategy mapping and as a way of […]
July 2, 2017
To Longborough Festival Opera today for the final performance of Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera and one of a handful of […]
July 1, 2017
Many moons ago in the early days of knowledge management I argued that the ubiquitous DIKW pyramid was both flawed […]
June 22, 2017
Remember Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cookoo’s Nest? Louise Fletcher won the Oscar for a brilliant portrayal of […]
June 21, 2017
A recent post by Sonja caused some reaction in social media and I promised to write something to clarify my […]
June 20, 2017
The Cynefin framework tends to be used in the main to categories situations within the four main domains (and for […]
May 28, 2017
I’ve been teaching a masterclass her in India to a mixed group and took the opportunity to push myself to […]
May 12, 2017
Love is one of those words which has so many meanings in differencing contexts that any exposition on the subject […]
May 7, 2017
In my keynote on Friday at Agile Maine I opened by suggesting that there was a schizophrenic dichotomy in the […]
May 5, 2017
So its day five of the Gaping Void blog month and today’s cartoon brings together my earlier post on small […]
February 24, 2017
The first time I went to Wellington I tagged on a visit to a speaking engagement in Brisbane around twenty […]
February 22, 2017
Two sessions in Wellington today along with a dinner meeting and I’m starting to loose track of what stories I […]
February 21, 2017
Cadence and granularity represent concepts where we get some strong links between Cynefin and Kanban. In this context I am […]
February 14, 2017
An odd combination of things came together for this post. I was working earlier today on a signifier set to […]
February 12, 2017
I was catching up on episodes of Melvyn Bragg’s In our Time in the car today and listened twice to […]
February 6, 2017
I spent a good part of today talking about our planned project on Meaning Making or The Making of Meaning […]
January 11, 2017
In my last couple of posts I have been talking abound boundary conditions in Cynefin. I now want to extend […]
January 9, 2017
For various complex reasons which started with a casual throw away remark at Lean Agile Scotland followed by a brief […]
December 28, 2016
Yesterday I took a fairly positive poem from R S Thomas as my them. Lovers of the poet will know […]
December 27, 2016
Anyone who has ever been walking in the hills will have had the experience of a sudden shaft of […]
December 23, 2016
Attempts to see a performance of the Seven Acts of Mercy at the RSC were thwarted last night by the […]
December 22, 2016
My last two posts in this mini series selecting on the post-fact issue are going to titled with quotes from […]
December 21, 2016
Rahner, who I referenced yesterday stands in a tradition that traces itself back via Geist in Welt (a fluid combination […]
December 20, 2016
I’ve chosen Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy to illustrate this post on the concept of grace. To my mind one […]
December 19, 2016
The theme of a post-fact, post-truth society is ever present in the press, social media and various think tanks, one […]
December 18, 2016
In my last two posts I have emphasised the need to get behind surface statements of requirement(s) to unarticulated needs. […]
December 17, 2016
My post of yesterday made the point that it is difficult to get anyone to state what they need in […]
December 16, 2016
I promised yesterday that I would pick up the question of unarticulated needs, so that is the subject to today’s […]
December 12, 2016
As promised yesterday I will return to the issue of constraints and constraint mapping in a series of posts over […]
December 11, 2016
In my post of yesterday I identified Dark Constraints within my wider category of resilience. The reference is to the […]
December 10, 2016
I’m getting increasingly excited about the work I am doing on constraints. I first posted on this with an initial […]
December 7, 2016
Reflecting on the previous two days and more conversations over multiple meetings before boarding a flight to Helsinki I was […]
December 6, 2016
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/on-navigating-conflict/ Interesting session today on the role of art in achieving change. I have long observed that one of the […]
December 3, 2016
I made the point yesterday that the disordered domain within Cynefin is one of false confidence, assuming you know how […]
December 2, 2016
Most people who have walked in the mountains will have experienced a temperature inversion at some stage. You suddenly discover […]
October 30, 2016
The daily email from Gaping Void is saving me the effort of searching the internet for images before posting. The […]
October 29, 2016
I’ve had a frustrating few weeks since my last post. An as yet uncorrected error in Blogo (which I otherwise […]
October 14, 2016
I don’t know how familiar readers are with Dali’s 1943 painting Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man. […]
October 9, 2016
Yesterday’s post received a gratifying response, thanks to all who volunteered and I will be in touch soon to elaborate […]
October 8, 2016
There was a wonderful, if depressing, tweet from J.K.Rowling yesterday: If we all hit ctrl-alt-del simultaneously and pray, perhaps we […]
October 1, 2016
I’ll never forget the first time I saw the murmuration of starlings. I’d arrived at the Hilton in Rome which […]
September 26, 2016
A long time ago I settling into a new strategic role within DataScience following the best part of a decade […]
September 25, 2016
I landed in Melbourne after two long flights but with the satisfaction of an email in box reduced to 40 […]
September 23, 2016
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about constraints in the context of complexity in general […]
September 15, 2016
I’m still working on the new use of coupling and boundary constraints for Cynefin so readers will have to wait […]
September 14, 2016
As promised yesterday it is more than time to update some of my thinking on narrative as communication. I’ve taught […]
July 29, 2016
I intended to complete these three posts linking ideas from Alice in Wonderland with the work of Agryris (and in […]
July 21, 2016
Yesterday’s post had a somewhat ambiguous title and illustration and I’m going to continue that today. Discovery often involves enigma […]
July 20, 2016
Yesterday I referenced Max’s reminder to me of a conversation we had in which one or other of us came […]
July 17, 2016
There is an old african proverb: When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. The third party damage […]
July 17, 2016
Help, help!” cried Piglet, “a Heffalump, a Horrible Heffalump!” and he scampered off as hard as he could, still crying […]
July 16, 2016
I argued in yesterday’s post that to resolve conflict we first of all had to change the filters through which […]
July 2, 2016
Yesterday I referenced a tweet from the Welsh Academy session at which I was a keynote Thursday. A frantic couple […]
July 1, 2016
Just over a week ago I posted at the end of day one of the Helsinki think tank on Leadership. […]
May 11, 2016
I’ve choose Van Goch’s (after Millet) 1889 painting The Sower to illustrate today’s post as I want to build on […]
May 9, 2016
In Alan Gardner’s The Moon of Gomrath, Almanac, the last of the Children of Danu is called by the Hound Of […]
April 24, 2016
I’m finally getting on top of the backlog of email and writing after the Annapurna trek. Travel hasn’t made that […]
March 13, 2016
I posted on the subject of the lowest energy cost of replication while I was in the Yukon a month […]
March 13, 2016
I posted on the subject of the lowest energy cost of replication while I was in the Yukon a month […]
February 26, 2016
For those not familiar with our distant ancestors, this is a therapsid or one of the early mammal like reptiles. […]
February 23, 2016
And so to the last, and most problematic of my 3’I’s of anthro-complexity, namely intention; problematic as it is one […]
February 22, 2016
Moving on from my consideration of identity yesterday we come to intelligence. Again I am exploring if my original 3’I’s […]
February 19, 2016
I’ve been using this slide for some years ever since it emerged from a conversation between Max Boisot and myself […]
February 17, 2016
I opened yesterday’s post with the metaphor of a river in flow but with stable, or semi-stable elements. A river […]
February 16, 2016
I’m enjoying being back in Whitehorse and its day two of the course. The name of the town references the […]
February 15, 2016
First day of the Cynefin and Sense-making course here in the Yukon to a government audience. Also one that has […]
February 11, 2016
I spent an enjoyable day with the LINK research group at UTA. A mixture of conversation and presentation with more […]
February 9, 2016
In Act I of A Midsummer Nights Dream Bottom is asked to play Pyramus, “a love that kills himself, most […]
February 8, 2016
I promised yesterday to republish this table which I created some time ago after I had read Martin’s book on […]
February 7, 2016
Mary Boone and I spent all day working on our article on Complexity Theory and design thinking. It is the […]
February 6, 2016
Back in May 2011 I got an email from Max Boisot, pictured enthusiastically engaged in a ritual food ceremony in […]
February 4, 2016
I promised to summarise my contribution to the Kuwait event on the Knowledge Economy. The subject has been around for […]
February 1, 2016
I’m in Kuwait for the next todays taking part in a Government event on the Knowledge Economy. My first time […]
January 31, 2016
I’m feeling rather pleased with myself for getting back into the habit of daily blogging. Today makes it a full […]
January 19, 2016
The last two days have been spent in Shipley in Heaton Mount which is a part of Bradford University. […]
January 13, 2016
One of the insights which can come with age/experience is that the vast majority of people have good intentions or […]
January 10, 2016
So in this final post on the 3Cs of research in organisations I’m returning to the Cynics. I might have […]
January 9, 2016
For those who were emotionally deprived in childhood by not being read the Pooh stories I suggest a quick refresh […]
January 7, 2016
In the course of writing my Christmas series I came up with a throw away comment about the 3Cs of […]
October 25, 2015
I left the question of direction open in yesterday’s post; if evidence is an emergent property of a complex system […]
October 24, 2015
Somehow an image from the Salem Witch trials with a powerful image of patriarchy seems appropriate to continuing by discussion […]
October 23, 2015
If you read the report I referenced in yesterday’s post you will find multiple claims that there is growing evidence […]
October 7, 2015
Laudato Si’is the latin title of the encyclical letter On Care for our Common Home which has caused some controversy […]
October 6, 2015
Today started early with a brisk walk in the rain to explore the area before getting a lift back […]
October 2, 2015
A brief two day visit to San Francisco saw me teaching day three of the Cynefin and Sense-making course with […]
September 17, 2015
The recent White House Executive Order has given considerable credibility to behavioural economics and to the whole idea of Nudge […]
September 16, 2015
One of the illustrations given when I was at the session on Constructor Theory at Hay-on-Wye was the difference between […]
September 15, 2015
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I was starting to think about the range of the work I and others […]
September 14, 2015
A couple of years ago I coined the phrase Just because you draw a linear process as a circle it […]
September 10, 2015
I gave a longish lecture today as a part of the Public Service Commissioner’s event in Whitehorse, Yukon. I started […]
August 29, 2015
Many moons ago I used to drive into work everyday from Lockeridge to Farnborough. It took around an hour and […]
August 28, 2015
In my last post I asked the question Are we doomed to chaos? I planned to answer the question with […]
August 26, 2015
One of the cases used in Embracing Complexity (see my post of yesterday) is a reference to Holling’s work on […]
August 25, 2015
I was reminded of the Daoist quote of the title while reading Embracing Complexity over the weekend. I knew it […]
August 21, 2015
I wrote my first post Towards a new theory of change some weeks ago, but life has been frantic since […]
August 2, 2015
A few things came together this morning: the quote on growing people through empowerment from yesterday’s tribute, Accenture giving up […]
July 30, 2015
Cynefin as a framework has always been as much about dynamic movement between domains as it has been about the […]
July 6, 2015
I recently heard that Complex Acts of Knowing had been assessed as a classic paper in Knowledge Management, moreover it […]
July 4, 2015
I couldn’t have found a better image for today’s post which is about the proper balance of theory with practice; […]
July 3, 2015
A fractal in mathematics describes a phenomena where similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, each pattern or instance is […]
June 30, 2015
The essence of my post yesterday was to suggest that much of Nudge Theory involves a form of reverse linear […]
June 29, 2015
My first full day in New Zealand involved some interesting meetings and a presentation to the Hugo Group in the […]
June 28, 2015
Yesterday’s post was about the need for abstraction, something I recognise years ago when I first met Max Boisot and […]
June 27, 2015
One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin Probably […]
May 9, 2015
I think this is the first year in which I have not been in the UK for a General Election. […]
April 22, 2015
I tend to ration my use of Gaping Void cartoons otherwise I would be using one every day! However this […]
April 21, 2015
There are some words that irritate the hell out of me for the concepts they embody. One of those is […]
April 19, 2015
One runway was out at Bogota when we flew in late last night so we had to circle for 45 […]
April 18, 2015
April 16, 2015
So back to New York last night to open the second day of LeanUX2015. Last year we were in […]
April 14, 2015
We’re finally there with Culture Scan but its too late here in New York for me to put together a fairly […]
February 23, 2015
One of the problems with cultural surveys in organiations is that they tend to be evaluative in nature. The […]
February 22, 2015
This is going to be a little out of sequence, but I want to come to how we gather narrative […]
February 21, 2015
There are some basic truths about culture in organisations that are pretty self-evident to anyone prepared to engage with either […]
February 19, 2015
Up to Hull today to deliver my first lecture tomorrow in what I hope will be a long term relationship. […]
February 13, 2015
I’m back in San Diego again for a series of meetings and if things work out I am going to […]
February 10, 2015
Most of my journals are on the iPad these days, but I keep a few in paper form. One […]
February 8, 2015
An article in the Guardian today argues that axing anthropology as a subject in schools in cultural barbarism. Ignoring the irony of […]
February 6, 2015
For those not familiar with the term it describes the various changes that take place in an eco system when […]
February 4, 2015
An interesting day working with a group of Partners from ETHOS with whom we are starting to form an interesting series of […]
January 31, 2015
One of the things I am enjoying at the moment is the way a lot of things are coming together […]
January 30, 2015
My promise of yesterday to post on the question of transparency was promoted when I came across this image in […]
January 29, 2015
Day three of the Cynefin and Sense-making course focuses on new forms or organisation and the various aspects of cognitive […]
January 28, 2015
I’ve been developing more material around the whole issue of dealing with the humanity (a double edged word) in complex […]
January 27, 2015
I taught the first day of of the Cynefin and Sense-making course here in Zurich without slides. I’m breaking […]
January 26, 2015
A transition through Bonn today to spend time with the German Development Agency before moving onto Zurich. It involved […]
January 23, 2015
Given a weekend in Brighton anything involving mountains is not really possible but the Downs and the Seven Sisters are […]
January 21, 2015
I’m still working through possible material for next weeks training programme in Zurich. One thing I want to tackle in more […]
January 13, 2015
After the cathartic moments last night we moved on this morning spending forty minutes discussing if we should spend and […]
January 12, 2015
An odd sort of day today, the first of two in a small session discussing system thinking, complexity and the […]
January 8, 2015
Yesterday was a frustrating one in many ways. I had to write a brief summary of SenseMaker® and its […]
December 23, 2014
A rather complex set of circumstances involving the family, two cars and the need for daughter to visit aunt; all […]
December 18, 2014
Over the years I have increasingly used a picture of Cynefin which includes three dynamic movements rather than just present […]
December 15, 2014
Yesterday’s post was partly inspired by my reading David Chandler’s 2014 book Resilience: The Governance of Complexity. My daughter recommended […]
December 14, 2014
My other vivid memory of Peter Drucker (and it still hurts) was when I naively criticised Taylorism and ended up […]
November 25, 2014
A couple of things came together to stimulate writing this post. One was thinking about issues of management and control […]
November 7, 2014
It was good to see the strategy workshop picked up by Ian Thorpe in his blog and he beat me […]
November 5, 2014
As I described yesterday, my use of narrative started with the need to discover decisions and their nature as part […]
November 4, 2014
I’m back at KM World in Washington having keynoted at the event for well over a decade now. Once it […]
October 25, 2014
Yesterday I made my views on making a difference clear in terms of what I valued, what Cognitive Edge is capable […]
October 5, 2014
A good conversation in Moscow this morning with David Anderson around and about the issue of managing a complex system […]
September 21, 2014
I had to get up at 0400 this morning to make the morning flight for Berlin. The reason was that […]
September 20, 2014
Last month Paul Tudor alerted me to a 2012 McKindsey report Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and […]
September 18, 2014
It would be too easy to comment on the Scottish referendum tomorrow, or even late tonight when we know the […]
August 4, 2014
Luckily I had my Yellow Fever vaccination certificate with me this morning or I might have had a problem getting […]
July 30, 2014
Probably the most important phrase in The Children's Party Story is the conclusion: We manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, […]
July 23, 2014
To my final post on scaling, at least for the moment as it's a big and developing subject. There is […]
July 22, 2014
In my second post on scaling I talked about about two types of scaling and the last two posts handled […]
July 21, 2014
Yesterday I promised to move on the How do you scale success? question but working on Friday's seminar with Simon that […]
July 20, 2014
I had more time to think than I planned on the flight to Sydney last night. I got upgraded to […]
July 20, 2014
Scaling as a subject seems topical at the moment. Cognitive Edge has been working with the UNDP on how […]
July 17, 2014
I had a key meeting with a Singapore government agency today, in part to report on a SenseMaker® project and […]
July 2, 2014
An interesting first day at the Summer Institute; we started with a Danish song about love and followed that with […]
July 2, 2014
An interesting day at the Summer Institute which ended gloriously with a long evening of discussion and story telling with […]
July 1, 2014
I'm in Copenhagen for the rest of this week for the Summer Institute where I am speaking or facilitating several […]
June 29, 2014
The original plan for today was to walk from Goldcliff into Cardiff taking advantage of the family being together with […]
June 22, 2014
Ye pushed them raw to the battle as ye picked them raw from the street. And what did ye look […]
June 21, 2014
I KEEP six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And […]
June 20, 2014
One of the common social media comments post a Cognitive Edge course (especially when I run it) is that people'r […]
June 5, 2014
After yesterday's productive session at Bangor University I got the train back to London and took daughter to dinner and […]
June 4, 2014
In my first post on our new project(s) in Bangor yesterday I promised to make some comments today on complexity […]
March 21, 2014
The luddites were not the first to resist the introduction of new technologies and I have always had some sympathy […]
March 18, 2014
One of the points I have been making for years is that a degree of failure is inevitable in any […]
March 16, 2014
I ran a workshop today for several NHS groups in Leatherhead. It was a basic introduction to complexity theory and […]
January 27, 2014
My little tirade yesterday about the primitive linear causality of Blair's article in yesterday's Observer prompted a few to ask […]
January 17, 2014
The trip home overnight was a lot less eventful than the flight out! The plane left Minneapolis on time, O'Hare […]
December 20, 2013
I promised yesterday to talk about peer-to-peer knowledge flow. Like yesterday's post this has an ideological aspect as well as […]
December 19, 2013
Another too long day with an early morning flight to Amsterdam. I had booked an airport hotel and should […]
November 3, 2013
I'm continuing the lichen pictorial theme for these posts in which I am exploring a definition of a new type […]
October 18, 2013
Today was a day without work. We started with a brief tour of the cape and in part the route […]
October 17, 2013
We had a lot of fun in a intense one day workshop at the Worldsview Academy today and my thanks […]
October 8, 2013
I flew into Frankfurt with David Gurteen today who sinned greatly by messing up the on line checkin to confine […]
October 5, 2013
In my last post in this series I argued for managed exaptation as a method to avoid premature convergence. I […]
October 4, 2013
In a very important sense, then, from the perspective of material engagement, cognition has no location. The active mind cannot […]
October 4, 2013
In a very important sense, then, from the perspective of material engagement, cognition has no location. The active mind cannot […]
October 3, 2013
I promised to address this yesterday following a presentation on Design Thinking at the conference here in Ohio. I […]
August 30, 2013
The advanced seminar we held in Seattle earlier this month was very useful in developing a whole bunch of stuff, […]
July 20, 2013
Foresight week over and I am flying back to the UK today. I will then take a few days off […]
July 15, 2013
An exciting week in Singapore with a series of events including IRAHSS 2013 all held in the Raffles City Convention […]
June 10, 2013
Yesterday I pre-ordered Iain Bank's last book The Quarry, today I learnt via Neil Gaiman that he had died, shortly […]
May 25, 2013
One of the thing that was an undercurrent of thinking and discussion in Paris this week was the perennial debate […]
May 23, 2013
I often get asked about the two transitionary domains in Cynefin and its not in frequent for people to assume […]
April 25, 2013
Nancy Dixon, in response to my keynote yesterday, expressed a preference for getting people together to talk about things rather […]
April 25, 2013
It's been the best part of twenty years now since I moved out of operational and strategic management roles and […]
April 18, 2013
My original plan for yesterday was to spend the day walking around Krackow with the camera before getting the flight […]
April 16, 2013
Yesterday I updated the Complexity domain model, but left the coherence diagonal for today. I promised to do this in […]
April 15, 2013
I've fallen behind on this blog over the last week and I have some backfill posts to make on IT […]
March 22, 2013
I don't think I ever repeat a presentation, but over time certain elements stay constant, then new ideas are tried […]
March 10, 2013
I really apologise for the opening picture, but it was too good not to use. Yesterday I picked up […]
March 1, 2013
The power went out this morning in Lockeridge and the surrounding areas. The some what cryptic Southern Electric answering service […]
February 25, 2013
If in doubt, blame the culture seems to be a golden rule in consultancy and management alike. And of course […]
February 16, 2013
One of the problems we (in the sense of all users of) get with Cynefin is the temptation to put […]
February 9, 2013
Today was a good day, in part due to events in Paris but also for good conversation and good ideas. […]
February 8, 2013
Coevolution in biology occurs when two parties exert selective evolutionary pressures on each other as a result of which they […]
February 6, 2013
As I returned to the car from Castell-y-bere last Friday the beech trees on the side of the hill were […]
February 6, 2013
Those who know their Dr Doolittle will know that the Pushmi-pullyu has two heads, one of a gazelle and the other […]
February 5, 2013
I made it back to Henley in the early hours of the morning following an outstanding production of Eugene Onegin […]
January 31, 2013
I was thinking a lot about identity today. I'm at Bangor University, running a whole day seminar for the Welsh […]
January 29, 2013
There are those who love the language of complexity, but fail to really think it through. Self-organisation and emergence are […]
January 27, 2013
It used to mean Godly now it means to be marked by kindness and courtesy, marked by tact, characterised by charm, […]
January 21, 2013
I promised some time ago that I would post on Scharmer's Theory U. I wasn't that impressed with the 2005 […]
January 19, 2013
Today was a somewhat bazar set of coincidences. I had little sleep in part due to the travel traumas of […]
January 9, 2013
This picture of a Gypsy boy in Hungary taken in 1931 and it tells a story; what story is an […]
January 8, 2013
One of my favourite columnists in the New Statesman is Martha Gill with her Irrational Animals piece. In the 4-10 […]
January 6, 2013
I made some progress on patterning the various approaches to narrative today, but less on the two encyclopaedia entries I […]
January 5, 2013
As I indicated yesterday I have to write one, possibly two entries for Sage's forthcoming Encyclopedia of Action Research and I […]
December 16, 2012
Yesterday I referenced the tragic events in Connecticut. The day before at the MIT Press I had both Neiman's Evil […]
December 15, 2012
On the plane back from Boston today I was reading some back copies of New Scientist. One article suggested that […]
December 13, 2012
Yesterday I talked about parables, heuristics and ritualised habits as ways in which virtue could be instantiated in practice to […]
December 12, 2012
I promised to pick up from my philosophical musings of yesterday with a more practical working out of the use […]
December 11, 2012
The question of purpose is an important one for anyone trying to apply complexity thinking to any human system or […]
December 7, 2012
As most people know the meaning of the word Cynefin does not really translate directly into English, its literal translation […]
December 1, 2012
I managed to get back to daily blogging in November, albeit with the odd retrospective posting. Its good to be […]
November 29, 2012
I made a promise yesterday to talk more about the questions posed by the Auditor General and to do so […]
November 29, 2012
When I said that this series would be two or more posts I don’t think I realised what I was […]
November 25, 2012
The parable of the sower occurs in three of the four gospels, and its always been one of my favourites. […]
November 22, 2012
Either the adrenaline search of my hoodie-avoidance behaviour of last night or the general state of exhaustion resulted in my […]
November 13, 2012
One of two most popular, and to my mind least useful, models in knowledge management has been the DIKW pyramid. […]
November 11, 2012
Mark Hart made an important point in his comment on my post of yesterday. Boyd’s model was developed for decision […]
November 10, 2012
Earlier this month I picked up a tweet from Clay Spinuzzi of Austin University asking how the Cynefin framework related […]
November 9, 2012
One of the very strong memories of my youth is the scene in the BBC production of Sartre’s Roads to Freedom where […]
November 2, 2012
Following on from yesterday's reflection its worth remembering that today is The Day of the Dead or more famously Día de los Muertos. […]
November 1, 2012
Today is hallowmas or All Saints Day in the Catholic tradition. It celebrates the Community of Saints, those who have […]
October 29, 2012
I did a lot of thinking on the walks this weekend, especially during the painful finale to day two where […]
October 20, 2012
If asked for which poems first impressed me at school I would list two. Crow by Ted Hughes which inspired […]
September 25, 2012
Excitement mounts. In a couple days I'll be flying to Jakarta as one-sixteenth of Cappella Martialis to sing Brahms' Ein […]
September 11, 2012
To the Netherlands today, after a brief respite from travel. Setting the alarm for 0430 to make the early morning […]
August 23, 2012
I'm not a huge fan of De Bono but one quote from him is just perfect: Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; […]
August 22, 2012
Its time to bring this series of posts to an end, but it is far from an end for the […]
August 21, 2012
After due consideration I've settled on sidecasting over the alternatives. It has an edge to it, and was the favourite […]
August 18, 2012
A longer than normal title to this post (from Martin Luther King) should not be seen as a modern day […]
August 17, 2012
The response to 'sidecasting' (in contrast with forecasting and backcasting) as a name was generally favourable and it is a […]
August 15, 2012
One one flight in the last few weeks (to be honest I cannot remember which one) I caught up on […]
August 14, 2012
I've been enjoying myself at various client meetings here in Singapore demonstrating the new SenseMaker® app on the iPhone and […]
August 2, 2012
I promised in my last post that I would talk more about coherence as a part of my development of […]
July 28, 2012
Just to be clear up front, the title of this post is intended to be ironic and self-deprecatory as a […]
July 27, 2012
Yesterday I took up again the exploration of Cynefin that I started back in January. In that post (please read before […]
July 26, 2012
Back in January I started to share some of my thinking about the next evolutionary phase of Cynefin. While […]
July 23, 2012
Today was one of those very long days, mitigated, nay transformed by good conversation. I had to get up at […]
July 14, 2012
Another cartoon from Hugh opens these continued reflections on project management and its a good one. The hairy assed project managers […]
July 8, 2012
From time to time in knowledge management circles the cry of standardisation is raised. It's just happened again with a […]
June 8, 2012
Flying into Bristol from Belfast last night was a good preparation for a consideration of evil. The pilot did well, […]
June 6, 2012
Pope Julius II left two things to the Vatican, his preserved ears and, through patronage of Michaelangelo, the painting of […]
June 5, 2012
The phrase I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, attributed to […]
June 4, 2012
Bad weather and to much work prevented my taking the bike into Hay today and it was a full day […]
June 3, 2012
The festival is now moving into full swing, but I was confined to one morning session by an afternoon appointment […]
June 1, 2012
The festival is still in its warm up stage with evening events only so I spent the morning working then […]
May 31, 2012
The festival starts on Thursday with an evening session or two so I planned to get down to Hay-on-Wye in […]
May 30, 2012
I first went to this celebration of Philosophy and Music last year for a few days and resolved to spend […]
May 9, 2012
Picking up on yesterdays post on ABIDE. As I suspected forcing myself to teach the idea produced some innovation and […]
May 7, 2012
When we put CalmAlpha together back in January I was somewhat shamed by Joseph Pelrine talking about his use of […]
May 4, 2012
I'm not sure why Shawn over at Anecdote reacted so badly to Jonathan Gottschall's article on Story Telling. Ok it not […]
May 1, 2012
My determination to spend at least one day every weekend on a long distance walk is starting to pay dividends. […]
April 2, 2012
In this second of three posts on exaptation I am going to continue to build on reporting discussions and ideas […]
April 1, 2012
The feather original evolved for regulation of temperature, but then evolved for flight. In 1942 a scientist at Raytheon was […]
March 15, 2012
For my many and various sins I have, for the last few months, been engaged in one of the strangest […]
March 4, 2012
The title of this post is from my all time favourite poem by Robert Frost, and the picture is of […]
February 24, 2012
My last day in Singapore on this trip, although I will be back at the end of March. It's been […]
January 16, 2012
I have always rated Yiannis Gabriel’s writing and the various conversations I have had with him over the years. Of […]
January 9, 2012
It’s not often a month goes by without one Gaping Void’s cartoons providing cause for thought. This one came in […]
January 5, 2012
For over a year now I have been playing with differ ways of representing the complex domain of Cynefin. As […]
December 31, 2011
Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you can imagine Goethe I’m not […]
December 28, 2011
Last night I took Eleanor and Huw to Stratford for the RSC production of David Edgar’s Written on the Heart. […]
December 27, 2011
When I was young there were only four TV channels available in the UK, heating was confined to one room […]
December 2, 2011
I flew into Barcelona yesterday on the final leg of an overlong trip. The reason was to attend a gathering […]
November 19, 2011
The trouble with allocating Saturday as a work day in a city centre apartment hotel on floor four is that […]
November 17, 2011
Coevolution in biology references a change triggered by one object interacting with another over time. Bumblebees interact with flowers over […]
November 14, 2011
I never liked Utilitarian Philosophy although I can see its popular appeal, it has an element of mathematical calculation to […]
November 11, 2011
A few days ago I got a friendly reminder from Plaxo that I should schedule an eCard for delivery on […]
November 10, 2011
There was a speaker panel at KM World with myself, Verna Allie & Bob Buckman, chaired by Patrick Lambe. All […]
October 27, 2011
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of […]
October 23, 2011
Now it may not be immediately obvious, but this picture contains one of the most dangerous of predators a Grizzly […]
October 22, 2011
The Academy of Management award for my HBR cover article with Mary Boone says among other things that the paper […]
October 20, 2011
I enjoy the responsibility of summary type presentations. You have to sit through a whole day of speeches that vary […]
September 10, 2011
It has taken me some days to be able to write this, and I still have not come to terms […]
August 15, 2011
Not so much “a train heading straight to Heaven’s Gate” but we made progress today. Yesterday was more “Fire rages […]
August 11, 2011
One of the pleasures of returning home is to catch up on the various magazines I subscribe to. For the […]
August 10, 2011
Paul Cilliers died of a brain aneurism on Sunday July 31st at his apartment in Mouille Point, a memorial service […]
May 7, 2011
At LSSC11 I used the constraint based definition of different system types: Ordered, highly constrained; Chaotic, no constraints; Complex, partial […]
May 6, 2011
One of the points I made in yesterday's keynote was that it is a mistake to write down your values, […]
March 23, 2011
Yesterday I talked briefly about the need for a prepared mind, and a prepared organisation to ensure the fast detection, […]
March 22, 2011
One of the key points I have been making in the new seminar (and a few keynotes) over the last […]
March 13, 2011
I was catching up stored documentaries this morning and a BBC documentary on Sir Kyffin Williams RA, whose use of […]
March 11, 2011
My post on resilience yesterday got extensively re-tweeted with a lot of favorable comments, so thanks for that. The presentation […]
March 11, 2011
This posting continues the theme of the past two days so you might want catch up first! I’ve been talking […]
March 9, 2011
We’ve been involved in an interesting project on social resilience and I have been working tonight on the presentation for […]
March 8, 2011
Two interesting articles (well more than that actually, but two in particular) in the current edition of the New Scientist […]
March 7, 2011
If you move around government and intelligence circles, or touch them tangentially (as I do) from time to time you […]
February 11, 2011
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain — and back in rain Today […]
January 27, 2011
I took a late train up to London today to see the ENO perform La Boheme in a revival of […]
January 22, 2011
Last time (and too long ago) I talked about some general principles, many of them society based, which presented possible […]
January 14, 2011
I flew into Toronto by way of Miami last night (don’t ask its just the way the flights worked out) […]
January 13, 2011
For many years now I’ve made a strong distinction between narrative and story telling. In IBM days and afterwards I […]
December 15, 2010
An interesting conversation this morning about war. I was talking about the greater ease of getting the US military to […]
December 12, 2010
In my two earlier posts on this subject I started by challenging the knowledge management orthodoxy of codification and then […]
December 10, 2010
For over a decade I have been immersed in issues around asymmetric warfare (otherwise known as terrorism, liberation struggles etc.) […]
December 4, 2010
The heading of this post is an indirect reference to the incomparable Tom Lehrer’s The Masochism Tango; listen before proceeding. […]
December 3, 2010
Dilbert is one of the challenges is a classic knowledge management will occur today. Back in 1990, more people claimed […]
December 2, 2010
Today’s Dilbert raised one of the classic issues in knowledge management. Back in the 1990s people argued that core knowledge […]
November 28, 2010
One question raised in the comments to my post on Perdition was from Chavin Parekh who asked for my views […]
November 22, 2010
The news today that Germany is to abolish Military conscription triggered a memory or two and a reminder of an […]
November 9, 2010
Final session of the Phoenix conference and I have a brief to provide a What do you do next summary […]
October 22, 2010
I was sitting outside chatting with our Thatcher yesterday. As you can see from the picture he has had to […]
September 25, 2010
Last Thursday I was invited to attend a seminar organised by the Institute of Physics at the Judge Institute in […]
August 18, 2010
I watched Rabbit Proof Fence with the children tonight (well at 18 & 21 children no longer). It is one […]
August 17, 2010
To Middlesex University today for a startup meeting on the use of SenseMaker® to understand student experience. The idea is […]
August 13, 2010
Washington DC today, and an all day session with Global Giving who have been running a project with SenseMaker® for […]
August 8, 2010
I promised a more substantive post about our Friday session at the AoM on new forms of research, and I […]
August 6, 2010
First day of the Academy of Management today and my session with Jim Hazy, Max Boisot and Pierpaolo Andriani was […]
July 31, 2010
It’s being interesting over the last couple of weeks to come across several examples of people defining their position either […]
July 30, 2010
I sat up late tonight, well into the early hours of the morning but I will backdate this post to […]
July 28, 2010
My thanks to Iwan Jenkins for drawing my attention to this article by economist John Kay which acts as a […]
July 24, 2010
I’ve made numerous attempts over the years to watch The Hunt for Red October through without dozing off. The reason […]
July 17, 2010
In my post of yesterday I suggested that: far too much management “theory” is shoring up executives by making them […]
July 15, 2010
Two similar quotes from contrasting sources which capture (in very different ways) the essence of dealing with uncertinaty: “The key […]
July 13, 2010
It's time to bring this series of seven posts on the origins of Cynefin to a close. I started it […]
July 12, 2010
We've now reached the penultimate episode in this series (and don't worry Dumbledore won't die, this is not The Hero's […]
July 11, 2010
The Cynefin framework is frequently (and legitimately) used as a categorisation model around the four domains of simple, complicated, complex […]
July 10, 2010
We ended episode 3 of this series with the Cynefin framework in a recognisable form after well over a decade […]
July 9, 2010
I have resolved to complete this history over the next couple of days. In part 1 I took the history […]
July 7, 2010
Moving on from the yesterday’s Vogans to their traveling companions the Dentrassi; for those who are not aware these creatures […]
July 6, 2010
To continue with my theme of yesterday by looking specifically at the near obsessional need of many organisations to write […]
July 4, 2010
Catching up on my RSS feed late last night while watching Godfather II into the early hours of the morning, […]
July 2, 2010
I agreed to take part in an interview some weeks ago on success. The transcript is now available here. It […]
July 1, 2010
The Sloan Managment Review recently published a paper on evidence based decision making which is well summarised in the abstract […]
June 7, 2010
I’m looking forward to my impending four week tour of New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. A mixture of meetings, project […]
May 29, 2010
I’ve never really understood why anyone gets taken in by arguments along the lines of “get the individuals right and […]
May 12, 2010
I had a fascinating ad hoc meeting with various US Army KM people in Washington just over a week ago […]
May 9, 2010
On a whim I recently bought CDs of all the LPs that I had loved and lost from the early […]
April 17, 2010
I’ve been under the weather this week, starting with flu and moving on to a poisoned toe. Interesting reflection there, […]
April 9, 2010
A very confusing thing happened today. Google alert and a few friends pointed to this interesting post by Harold Jarche. […]
April 3, 2010
I made the point yesterday that many of the tools and practices used within the HR function are focused on […]
March 24, 2010
Its been a long time coming but I'm getting to the next stage of the Knowledge Sharing Across Silos series […]
March 14, 2010
I’m sitting in my room at The Residence in the Singapore Recreation Club looking out of the window onto the […]
March 2, 2010
As ever Gaping Void gets to the heart of a dilemma. When to compromise and when to stand firm. It […]
March 1, 2010
In 1998 my parents gave me a book for a Christmas present. It was the 80th year of the life […]
February 11, 2010
I was half way through writing KSS4 when I realised I was taking some language for granted, so expect a […]
February 7, 2010
I’m working on a history of the Cynefin model. The number if citations and mentions seems to have gone up […]
February 5, 2010
A literate insult, with complex metaphors can be a delight. Regardless of your views on the legitimacy or not of […]
January 15, 2010
So far I have talked about the issues and common misunderstandings as to the nature of the problem and its […]
January 12, 2010
Just before Christmas I started off this thread by summarising the reasons that people have given me over the years […]
January 10, 2010
Just before Christmas I got a paper from Bill McKelvey of UCLA with a request to see if I could […]
January 8, 2010
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of an evening at home with daughter. Her work had been cancelled due to […]
December 22, 2009
Apparently my Ballerinas and Aircraft Carriers post gained some interest at ministerial level in Wales last week, and I was […]
November 6, 2009
I found this telling cartoon in the process of hunting down references for an overdue chapter in a book on […]
November 5, 2009
My earlier post on The Chef & the recipe book user attracted several interesting comments and was heavily re-tweeted. One […]
October 31, 2009
Overall October has been a bad month for the blog. I normally achieve a daily contribution, but I will only […]
October 9, 2009
To the opera yesterday for he opening night of the ENO’s new production of Turandot. Now if you go to […]
September 8, 2009
Gala Dinner: Bresaola con rucola e grana, Verdure grigliate, Insalata; followed by Gnocchetti sardi gorgonzola e noci with Crespelle al […]
September 7, 2009
Lunch: Pasta agli spinaci, Coniglio al forno con patate, insalata & Frutta Siesta time here at the Palazzo Feltrinelli (pictured […]
September 7, 2009
Dinner: Pasta spek e piselli, Strudel di verdure e formaggio, Verdure al vapore, Insalata & Dessert After an afternoon catching […]
September 2, 2009
I was pleased to find from a google alert that my recent posts on Go/Chess and Resilience/Robustness and saved me […]
August 30, 2009
Go uses a 19 by 19 Grid, 181 black stones and 180 white stones. While the average number of legal […]
August 1, 2009
Settled into Adelaide for a weekend of email catch up and hopefully writing, I went out for a morning walk […]
July 30, 2009
If I look back at the years at the really memorable keynotes, then Melbourne audiences stand out. To speak well […]
July 26, 2009
Thanks to the twitterverse (@iharkness to be precise) I discovered that I have now been posting to this blog more […]
July 22, 2009
Today was the first day of my three day programme at the Civil Service College in Singapore. It’s my second […]
July 15, 2009
I was chatting today with a former Harrier Pilot in the US Marines, now in a senior position in Boeing […]
July 9, 2009
A good article in the Independent today on the growth in the market for coaching in touch typing skills and […]
July 3, 2009
It’s been an interesting few weeks managing a narrative capture in the UK and Pakistan, interpreting the material and writing […]
June 18, 2009
An interesting email came in from my old friend Karl Wiig this evening. He is looking for a list of […]
June 2, 2009
I enjoyed the two London sessions to day, talking in seminar form about version 3.0 of SenseMaker™. It was good […]
June 1, 2009
For those of you in the UK with access to the BBC iPlayer I can strongly recommend this wonderful narrative […]
June 1, 2009
And while we are on the subject of the BBC iPlayer and culture, this is a real treasure. Only the […]
May 12, 2009
I shared a quote from Brave New World a couple of days ago, so thought I would follow it up […]
May 9, 2009
I was chatting with David Tebbutt on Skype today on a range of subjects from knowledge management to some named […]
May 7, 2009
I’m looking for help with a very interesting project we are about to start. It will look to measure the […]
May 6, 2009
BBC2 has a very interesting programme on snow this evening, some fascinating stuff on the only major casualties from an […]
May 5, 2009
I started today with a 55 minute walk down country lanes to catch the 0700 bus to Swindon and thence […]
April 30, 2009
i have been working up some new material around the pattern basis of human intelligence. As a part of that […]
April 29, 2009
I was back in the small unit excellence session this morning before moving on to a part of the World […]
April 20, 2009
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which […]
April 13, 2009
I have long suggested that the vast bulk of management literature confuses symptoms with causes. The classic one is the […]
March 20, 2009
The new(ish) US government KM listserv is proving interesting although its not very active yet. However some real issues and […]
March 18, 2009
For those who don’t know today is the anniversary of the sentencing to transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834. […]
March 12, 2009
Last week’s New Statesman reported as follows: There is much symbolism in the removal from the Oval Office of a […]
March 3, 2009
Last night I had to call out an ambulance and the spend from 1800 to 0200 in the Accident and […]
January 30, 2009
I had intended to be home today after a long three weeks that has taken me to Atlanta, Washington, Connecticut, […]
January 22, 2009
As part of the book writing (and the Cognitive Edge business plan) several of us have been looking at models […]
January 14, 2009
I think I have found the Scottish equivalent of Cynefin. This article from the Times uses it in the paragraph […]
December 13, 2008
Early this morning I was watching the History Channel while catching up on email, wikiwars etc. over the first coffee […]
December 13, 2008
Brian reminded me some time ago that today is the 40th Anniversary of the publication in Science of The Tragedy […]
October 27, 2008
We can succeed only by concert. It is not “can any of us imagine better?” but, “can we all do […]
October 26, 2008
I have just loaded the podcast of my speech in the Melbourne Arts Centre last week. There are no slides, […]
October 21, 2008
Some time I ago I hazarded 3Cs of complexity. At the time Daivd Cronshaw suggested I add context which was […]
October 19, 2008
Bob picked me from the hotel in Hobart today for a full day trip out to the Tasman Peninsular with […]
October 16, 2008
I’ve been working on chapter two of the book (yes I know, its been a long time but it is […]
September 7, 2008
We had an excellent course in Amsterdam last week. One of those where you get challenged by the audience, always […]
August 17, 2008
I was enjoying a pint of Red Ant Ale in the Mountain Brewery here in Big Bear Lake and chatting […]
August 15, 2008
I have been derided elsewhere for referencing Harry Potter, when my elder and better is paying attention to Herodotus, Thucydides, […]
August 14, 2008
I didn’t like the title of my last post so I changed it to The Emperor’s Shadow as the various […]
August 11, 2008
I’m never doing one of these blog sequences again, it means you miss out on timely blogging about paranoid rabid […]
August 8, 2008
I’ve missed blogging for a couple of days, in the main because I want to complete the Emperor series without […]
August 5, 2008
My original blog The Emperor’s Chess Board was republished on the ActKM forum and its been interesting to observe some […]
August 3, 2008
Interesting conversations in Washington a week ago, some traffic on ActKM and the odd email brought the question of national […]
July 26, 2008
A wildly enthusiastic blog from Ron Young in favour of knols (Today, I claim that knowledge management has taken a […]
July 1, 2008
A chance question in a plenary session here in Kuala Lumpur today, and a glance at the home page of […]
June 25, 2008
An interesting question came up in some one to one discussions yesterday in Bangor. Namely when does patriotism become prejudice? […]
June 9, 2008
My post of yesterday back referenced an attack on Sick Stigma which in turn prompted an excellent mini-case from John […]
June 7, 2008
This apparently innocent question was asked on the ActKM forum this morning. I replied and reproduce that response below. Michael […]
June 3, 2008
I’ve always found it difficult to understand eliminative materialists. For those who don’t know their basic position is that concepts […]
May 31, 2008
A few weeks ago I presented to an evening session at Curtin Business School in Perth. As a part of […]
May 30, 2008
I just put together a short thought piece on leadership for Catalyst, the magazine for Public Service Management in Wales. […]
May 28, 2008
There is a flow and pattern to narrative that can entrance and entrap at the same time. You know the […]
May 27, 2008
Picture courtesy of Victor Nuno via Flickr I’ve been reading around and about the subject of coherence for the last […]
May 24, 2008
John Bordeaux leads the KM working group for the Project on National Security Reform. He recently broadcast an appeal for […]
May 14, 2008
One of the key aspects of managing a complex system is the switch from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation. The […]
May 4, 2008
This blog was stimulated by two things: (i) A useful post from Doc Searls on advertising in the context of […]
April 26, 2008
Many years ago when I spent some days with Thames Water field staff one of the water quality inspectors, learning […]
April 23, 2008
I just returned from a performance of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy in the Young Vic. It was his first opera […]
April 12, 2008
How about this then! I do believe that there is a “correct” interpretation of Hamlet, and also that we can […]
April 12, 2008
One of the reasons that we moved to Lockeridge some 15 years ago is its proximity to Avebury. For those […]
April 9, 2008
Anyone know what has happened to Boje’s planned book Story Telling Organization? It was due out from Sage last June […]
April 2, 2008
I was in a taxi from Belfast International AIrport this morning and as we came in we passed a police […]
April 1, 2008
To all those who asked, yes today is my birthday not an April Fool’s joke and thanks for all the […]
March 26, 2008
An interesting day in Hong Kong, all good and brightened by some outstanding service from the duty manager at the […]
March 24, 2008
Interesting to see a discussion opening up in the UK on the nature of participative democracy. It would appear that […]
March 14, 2008
It’s always a pleasure to witness the moment that someone decides to come over to leave the darkside of the […]
March 13, 2008
While I was in South Africa last week I met some interesting people. That included a long conversation with Mark […]
February 23, 2008
I woke up to eager anticipation of Wales v Italy later today, two hungry cats and emails on research from […]
February 22, 2008
As some of you will know there has been controversy in the ActKM list serve on the subject of surveys. […]
February 18, 2008
One of the really interesting things when you start to deal with fragmented narrative (of which blogs are a subset) […]
February 17, 2008
The memories continued today. I got a bus from Cardiff Airport into the centre to meet up with Steve, Michael […]
February 16, 2008
Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers interviewed in the Arts Guardian recently reflects on Cynefin in respect of the influences […]
February 13, 2008
I have been playing around with a way to describe a complex system in such a way that you ca […]
February 10, 2008
I spend a lot of my time doing conference keynotes, presentations to companies and tele-conference support for the network. Some […]
January 27, 2008
An interesting set of presentations down here in Tampa, Florida over the weekend. More reflections over the next week, but […]
January 23, 2008
The above quote is from Dylan Thomas one of the great (if not the greatest) poets of the last century. […]
January 12, 2008
Thanks to Thinking Meat for this article in the Economist. It challenges the idea that our Pliocene hunter gather past […]
January 9, 2008
An interesting bit of writing from David Aaronovitch in The Times, after Iowa but before new Hampshire. When it comes […]
January 5, 2008
I have said before that there is something deeply personal about the blogosphere, it allows communication which is both public […]
January 3, 2008
I was a little surprised by the nature of Shawn’s reaction to my disagreement with his original and bold assertion […]
December 30, 2007
Like many others I have been watching Dave Pollard’s postings within a mixture of interest and growing concern for several […]
December 29, 2007
One beautiful night on the banks of the turbid Amazon, Painted Jaguar found Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and Slow-Solid Tortoise sitting under […]
December 24, 2007
Some time ago Nick Carr, who for me writes one of the most intelligent technology blogs, made an offer to […]
December 23, 2007
We had the obligatory family outing to see The Golden Compass last weekend. I was nervous going into it, a […]