This week, Tony joined fellow complexity explorer Marcus Jenal for a webinar hosted by Laurie Webster for Cognitive Edge. Looking at social change, both presenters talked about recent experiences of using SenseMaker to explore social and attitudinal change. The webinar was recorded and is available for watching at Cognitive Edge’s Read more…
Last week, Tony gave a talk at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Navigating Complex Adaptive Systems. Brilliantly hosted by the UNDP Innovation team, particularly Malika, the video from the hour-long presentation is here The presentation looked at the core elements of complexity, how to approach dealing with complex Read more…
A great morning at QCon in London today – speaking on using SenseMaker® to understand user requirements better. I had to rush out the door, so didn’t get to hear Chris Matts and Shane Hastie in the afternoon. As promised, the slides are here: Download 001 SenseMaker® frameworks For those Read more…
After a good six years of SenseMaker® projects, one of the consistent things has been the difficulty in feeding back results to stakeholders in ways that help them make better decisions. (I’m not a fan of big reports – partly because I think they tend to make great doorstops and Read more…
On the course next week, we'll no doubt get to the Longitude problem and the nature of innovation. If you haven't already heard it, I'd highly recommend Dave's video here. In the spirit of the original Longitude prize – how to solve a pressing problem that will have a positive Read more…
I’ve been working with SenseMaker® now in development projects for a few years and I was recently reflecting on how far we’ve come in what we do. Lots of lessons – often learned the hard way in the early stages, but never disastrously. It’s time to share some of those Read more…
Narrative research being run by the UNDP across Eurasia is providing useful insights to new programmes and activities. Using SenseMaker, new projects are about to be rolled out in Kyrgystan, Belarus and Georgia.
Further to yesterday's post about the upcoming courses with Cognitive Edge, diaries have worked out such that Washington DC (Details here) will be a two-handed affair with myself and Dave Snowden teaching, while London (Details here)will be a unique one – three different presenters: Dave, Michael Cheveldave and myself passing Read more…
Whenever I’m lucky enough to teach (DC next week for anyone who’s interested and Amsterdam in early February), one of the key points we cover on the Cognitive Edge Practitioner Foundations at the moment derives from James Suriowecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. It’s how when using large groups of experts the average answer is better than any single answer, iff: a) every respondent is knowledgeable about the subject; and b) answers are given independently, without seeing others’ answers.
For example, I sat watching a group looking at intervening in a natural disaster situation – extremely effective, intelligent people coming up with interventions that would be “safe”: funding local villages to find their own water (on the basis that they may know about natural resources, but didn’t have the wherewithal to transport it). … The upshot is that, for all the fear of the “f-word”, safe-to-fail probes are relatively simple to produce: Do no harm Make them low-resource Make them situation-relevant (much easier if you have narrative material coming in) Monitor them Increase the diversity of people looking at the problem