New Agora

Dave Snowden has come up with a lot of complex and interesting ideas over the years, but often mixed up in a way that makes it difficult to tease out the individual strands.

However, a recent blog post is an excellent summary of his current state of thinking and is well worth a read. But from this and by chasing down the relevant originating blog posts, here is a summary:

The benefits of KM are:

1. supporting effective decision making
2. creating the conditions for innovation
3. improving organisational communication

Key methods for achieving this are:

1. having small teams of divergent people that conduct safe-fail experiments, with results made directly visible to decision-makers (The Resilient Organisation: Introduction)
2. using the See-Attend-Act model of sense-making to support effective decision making (A typology of Foresight
3. ensuring a degree of inefficiency and managing for exaptation to create the conditions for innovation (3 days @ Lake Garda, thinking about exaptation)
4. building a networked, tribal, and fluid ideation culture that uses systems of shared ideas, concepts, rules, and meanings (Vogons, values & verisimilitude)