(Originally published in The Welsh Agenda #63, Autumn / Winter 2019)
David Snowden is Director of the Cynefin Centre which focuses on the application of learning from the Natural Sciences to social systems, and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge (the Cynefin Centre is the not-for-profit and research arm of that organisation). He has been working in the field sinceleaving IBM in 2004. and has developed a practice that covers four continents. His work ranges from counter-terrorism to understanding agency in health journeys and many other applications. Noreen Blanluetasks the questions.
What’s your biggest achievement?
Anything that has been achieved has been achieved with colleagues – but the creation and subsequent evolution of the Cynefin Framework for decision making is one thing. Aside from making cynefin one of the most referenced Welsh words worldwide, it’s made a real difference in a range of fields. It has been used in the Cabinet Office to explain the role of religion in the Bush White House, a whole range of health applications and many others. Making a difference to how people make strategic and operational decisions is rewarding. The other main achievement is the design of the first distributed ethnographic tool in SenseMaker. We used that on a pioneering project in the Valleys using children as ethnographers to their own communities, a whole range of projects in Northern Ireland including one of the first fully functional patient journey systems, multiple projects to understand impact in the development sector, many others.
What are you excited about at the moment?
We’ve now got enough experience to scale up a lot of our work. The Citizen Engagement work that was pioneered in Wales has now been taken up in Singapore and Colombia, and we are looking at other European and US pilots at the moment. We have a big vision here: to get every 16 year old in every school in the world acting as a citizen ethnographer to their own community-giving real time feedback on the street stories and day to day concerns of their communities. We’ve also pioneered the idea of trans-generational teams working on local interventions to improve conditions. Linked to that we’ve been looking at issues on plastic waste, domestic violence and obesity reduction along with other projects. A common theme of all of these is to increase agency both in situational assessment and decision making on a local, regional and national basis. Letting people tell their story is one thing, but we also empower them to interpret what that story means. To adapt a quote speaking reality unto power!
If you could change one thing about Wales to improve people’s lives over the next twenty years, what would it be?
We need to understand the little things that make a real difference and from which greater things can grow. We need to empower communities to do that within a wider governance framework and move away from grand schemes that make good press stories at the time but make little difference in reality. If all local authorities in Wales, along with voluntary groups took up the Citizen Engagement capability, we could achieve that. In short, make Wales a centre of excellence for new forms of governance and government.
Photo credit: Cognitive Edge video on YouTube