All Life Is Problem Solving

  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, […]

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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 […]

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  It’s now time to review Dave’s characterizations of the three remaining contexts and to comment on them. Again using the HBR article as the primary source for my discussion, the “complicated” domain is characterized as follows. Complicated — Expert diagnosis required — Cause-and-effect relationships discoverable but not immediately apparent to everyone; — More than […]

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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 […]

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The Relative Risk Intelligence (RRI) of a President, Prime Minister, or other Chief Executive of a Nation State is the relative ability of the Executive to solve problems and reduce the risk of error in decision models of his/her Government in its various domains of activity or risk compared to other Chief Executives. Domains of […]

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This is my second blog entry commenting on Dave Snowden’s “Wave-particle duality” piece. My first reply addressed the strawman, knowledge as thing and flow, and paradox issues. This one will address the other six issues he raised. Once again, they are: 1. “If you think in categories, then the world is presented in categories or […]

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This week Dave Snowden discussed my views in two of his blog entries. My last blog entry, “Is There A Correct Interpretation of Hamlet?” answered his first entry. This blog installment and at least one, perhaps two, following it will begin to answer his second entitled: “Wave-particle duality.” I must admit I had a funny […]

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Turner’s Evening of the Deluge (1843) In a recent blog entry, Dave Snowden, commented on a statement I made in an exchange in the actkm.org list serv group. Here’s the quotation from my post: “I do believe that there is a “correct” interpretation of Hamlet, and also that we can select among interpretations and find […]

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Lascaux Horse One of the most popular techniques identified with Knowledge Management is storytelling. Led by Steve Denning, Dave Snowden, Katalina Groh, Larry Prusak, John Seely Brown, and Seth Weaver Kahan, storytelling has become a vibrant movement within KM with a life of its own. Two new books, due out in June 2004, by Denning, […]

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Keelman Heaving Coals by Moonlight, (J. W. M. Turner, 1835) Commentary on Dave Pollard’s Blog on Social Networking (continued from Part 2) The Exchange: KM Failure or Conceptual Confusion? The thread running through my commentary in Parts 1 and 2 is the idea that Dave’s blog and his position that KM should be re-invented as […]

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