All Life Is Problem Solving

This entry continues the discussion of John Tropea’s “Knowledge Management as an Ecosystem.” In Part Twelve, I reviewed and critiqued a portion of the presentation up through the discussion of “the new KM.” Here, I’ll focus on John’s treatment of “the nature of knowledge” and in my next blog I’ll discuss his characterization of KM […]

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4) Another important point made by Dave in the podcast is that those looking to create a knowledge sharing culture are thinking about knowledge sharing from the wrong perspective. The problem is not to create such a culture, but rather to increase the connectivity of people, whereupon they will naturally share because the increased connectivity […]

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The next major contribution to the KM 2.0 discussion comes in an interview of Dave Snowden by Jon Husband entitled “The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management.” The interview was done on October 15, 2007, and then produced and distributed as a podcast.
This podcast was followed by many reactions in […]

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My last post commented on Dave Snowden’s primary argument against a National KM Center, discussed in “Emperor’s Chess Board: Pt. 1” and “The Empire Repeats.” In addition this argument however, in “The Empire Repeats,” he wrote of two themes that emerged in the actkm discussion on National KM Centers and “connecting the dots.” The first […]

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In a recent post entitled “The Emperor’s Chess Board: Pt 1”, Dave challenged “the concept of centralisation of a government knowledge function (I will qualify this a bit in a future post), arguing that it would manifestly lead to failure to achieve the key goals of making a nation more secure.”
Before I consider […]

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This post is about “safe-fail experiments.” The essential idea in safe-fail experiments was expressed well by Dave Snowden in this way: “I can afford them to fail and critically, I plan them so that through that failure I learn more about the terrain through which I wish to travel.”
And again, in another place, he adds:
“One […]

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There are three interesting questions we’d like to take up in this part.
– First, assuming that the approach taken by Cynefin, requiring sensemaking through first selecting the context type one is dealing with is appropriate, is the Cynefin framework complete enough as it stands or does it fail to identify important types of decision […]

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In earlier posts, I discussed Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework from the viewpoint of systems classification, offered an alternative to it, and then offered some critical comments. I did this because (a) Dave sometimes used the term “system” in describing one or another Cynefin “domain” and (b) a lot of the recent discussion on Cynefin in […]

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Types of Systems
The very circumscribed and also very partial and incomplete take on the history of General Systems Theory I provided in my last post, leaves us in the following position with respect to the problem of classifying systems. There are three very important dichotomies which have emerged out of the history of General Systems […]

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Introduction
 
One of the aspects of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin approach is the identification of three physical and five human “domains,” or “systems.” The physical systems are called “order,” “chaos,” and “complexity.” In the area of human systems Dave breaks “order” down into known (simple) and knowable (complicated) systems, and also adds a fifth “domain” called “disorder.” […]

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