Sensemaking & Complexity, Dave Snowden

dave welcome yeah pleasure to be here so we have talked about sense making a lot on the channel we're currently doing a series called the state of sense making and you are we called you the sense making o.g is that fair enough i mean you you've been talking about this for an awfully long time yes i mean you know people like vic and irving come before me but the and and klein right and i know brenda and gary really well but i think yeah i've created a distinct school of sense making i think and that's been acknowledged in the literature yeah and i'd love to to get a little bit of this history and kind of contextualize it because it was something that we um we find very useful as a as a term it sort of feels to me like no other word quite encapsulates it so i'd love to hear why you think the word sense making or the concept sense making is important it's how you define it and it's interesting whether you have a hyphen or not is very significant in certain circles i use it with a hyphen carl doesn't right i define sense making as how can you make sense of the world so that you can act in it and with that con comes a concept of sufficiency but you can never know all you need to know but how do you know when you know enough so there's that very action focus in it and that comes from my background in building and designing decision support systems because and that was a strategic level the naturalizing element is absolutely vital that's in philosophy which is my main background means to root what you do in the natural sciences so what i do is we actually use natural sciences what's called an enabling constraint in complexity [Music] so you basically say there's things we know about human beings so for example we know that nobody scans more than three or four percent available data we know that you won't see things that you don't expect to see we know that systems have certain properties so those actors what are sometimes called counterfactual statements it means you can't break them so you have to develop methods and tools within those boundaries that also significantly reduces uncertainty i mean it's also an approach called abduction rather than induction and the danger with inductive approaches or case-based approaches is aside from the common thing of partial selection of cases in complete selection of cases um confusion of correlation with causation which is an endemic problem in social and management science the fundamental problem is if everything's changing there's no point in using cases from the past to decide what you do now anyway so natural science gives us a level of certainty within which we can operate and i think that's key to the approach on sense making and you've already used a few concepts that i'd love to unpack and because i think they're really beneficial and helpful for people you mentioned enabling constraints and i think there's a distinction between enabling constraints and a different kind of constraint yeah enabling constraints and governing constraints i mean alicia gerardo is the best on this um she really gets it um so a governing constraint if you want a really simple way a governing constraint contains an enabling constraint connects now that's not completely true all right but it's a good way of getting the point across so if something is contained you know its boundaries and if you go into systems thinking you'll find they all define systems as having boundaries that's one of the ways you know you're talking with somebody from systems thinking not complexity in complexity we know that connectivity matters and systems may or may not have boundaries but they're connected so that that's a key distinction yeah and their boundaries can be indeterminate the other point is what an enabling constraint does sorry about the academic language here it disturbs the equi-probability of the system so if you don't have constraints everything is equally probable which means no evolution happens so without constraints you don't get evolution yeah the issue is what type of constraints and their fluidity and a whole body of stuff around that can you describe what an enabling constraint is well a good example is wikipedia um somebody told me i had to go in and investigate wikipedia many years ago now and i became an addict all right wikipedia has no mechanism to adjudicate content that's actually it's great strength it's why it succeeds and it grows the constraints are on behavior so if you edit war you'll get blocked for a bit if you carry on edit war you'll get permanently blocked if you use that honeymoon argument so if you don't base yourself on third-party reliable sources you'll get blocked so effectively behavior is an enabling constraint and what that does is it forces you to work with people you fundamentally disagree with i mean i monitor a lot of far-right sites in the uk and the us and some of the creationist nonsense but if i'm honest about i've got some quite good friends on the far right on wikipedia because they play by the rules and they know how it works whereas other people who just jump in and say they're right yeah it doesn't work that way so i think wikipedia is a really good example of behavior being used as an enabling constraint which means that content can be relied on yeah and that's working indirectly not directly which is what you tend to do in complexity anyway and in a moment we'll go into some of your frameworks the connection framework is the one that i think many people will be aware of and i think is hugely influential on many of the people we've spoken to on the channel over the last three years or so so maybe it might be good to just sketch out what that looks like so there are three basic systems in nature all right there's there's ordered complex and chaotic now just to be clear this is an emerging field so some people will use chaos in a very different way from the way i'm using it it's not that one of us is right or one that is wrong it's just the language hasn't settled yet so order is a system with such a high level of constraint that you've got a degree you've got prediction the same thing will happen again the same way twice chaos in my language is give an example an ordered system driving on the left driving on the right yeah um yeah expert knowledge is actually generally an ordered system my an expert can tell you things will happen that you may not know but there's still order in it yeah a chaotic system in my language is one with no effective constraints which means it's actually quasi-random which means it's only a temporary state it never lasts for long yeah and then complexity probably the best definition about complexity is it's an entangled system again alyssia juror's got this wonderful phrase like bramble bushes in the thicket which is a great image right and everything is entangled with everything else and you pull one thing and you don't know what will happen the only thing you know with absolute certainty is any intervention will have unintended consequences and that is ethical consequences for government by the way because once you know that you're responsible for it now those three states have phase shifts between them so the metaphor for this is solid liquid and gas [Music] so if i heat water to 100 degrees it doesn't become steam until i put more heat in that's latent heat that's the phase shift so those order complex and chaos have energy gradients between them in which they do a phase shift change so it's not a gradation and of course there's a thing and this called a triple point which is a balance in between pressure and temperature which means it's equi-probable whether something would become solid liquid or gas in kinevin that's called the apparatic domain i'm quite proud of that actually i've got a phrase from derrida into common use in business it's not many people can claim that andera de famously said if you know the answer to a question it's not a question it's a process the only valid question is the one to which you do not know answers so that's an aparia or at the operatic state that's the central domain of kinetic and it means from here we could go in any direction but we have to hold our belief in fact we have a whole typology of aparia now both physical artistic linguistic types of apparea to create that state so that's the kind of like basic kinetic framework which we call three plus one you can then separate um order into two where the relationship between cause and effect is clear and where the relationship between cause and effect is complicated so that's the difference between driving on the left and an expert telling you what's happening to your engine if it goes wrong so but they're both types of order and then finally when you get really advanced kinevin has a liminal liminal states which is one more line on the framework and that the liminality is this anthropological concept of a state of suspended transition which is a key concept in connecticut so basically you have a liminal domain between complex and complicated where things are becoming structured becoming ordered becoming predictable but not that quite not quite there yet huge amount of software development methods like scrum for example sit in that domain their linear iteration the degree of uncertainty you then got this really interesting little area in complicated which is where experts disagree so we had that in covit you know behavioral scientists didn't agree with epidemiologists and so on and one of things we developed over the years is a method called the tricot triopticon which is a sort of highly structured dance between experts which the decision maker can observe yeah so that they can resolve things there then you get this sort of liminal area between complex and chaos which is in chaos and that's where you use chaos deliberately so that's where for example we use wisdom of crowds so if lots of independent agents assess something independently of each other so that's deterministic chaos you can trust the results so we use hell of workforce engagement there and then you get this split in the central domain apparatic becomes either apparatic which is fine or confused which is a bad idea so the nice thing about canada it originally started as a two by two and then it developed it was 21 years old last year in its five domain format but the thing with kinevin is is evolved over time as more theory has come in more practices come in yeah it's changed um there's a big change coming where we're going to change constraints to scaffolding which i'll announce shortly right and there are reasons for that and i think that's why it survived and had the longer the impact it's had because it's adjusted and changed it wasn't a one-time framework based on a one-time study it emerged in this this lovely intersection between theory and practice yeah and you mentioned covid and i think maybe we can use that as an example to make it a little bit more relevant uh to a real world example because the sense that that i i've had and i think many people have had with covert is that it's been a real stress test to the system and one of the issues that it seems to have shown up is that centralized top-down solutions to a rapidly evolving complex problem seem to create problems further down the line uh i'd say yes and no and i think what that question illustrates another one of these big complexity differences we always talk about context sensitivity not context context independent so nobody who understands complexity will ever make an absolute statement because in different contexts different things work right so if we take kovid it's actually a good example of that and i actually wrote the european union field guide on managing in complexity and chaos which has just come out in paper form that was with alexandra who did the design and did the editing so that was that's a good book and it talks through the whole process now if you look at that it says there are basically four stages in the way you manage something like covid yeah assess adapt accept transcend so i'll just run through those quickly at a high level so the assessment is kind of like are we really in a crisis or not i mean you may not be all right if you've got contingency plans if you've got all of that stuff worked out that's not a crisis yeah that's actually probably complicated because you know what to do go do it if you are genuinely in a crisis i you haven't planned for this it was unexpected or you planned for it but you didn't really believe it would happen so you let the plans lapse which is what happened in the uk then you're in a crisis and that's the only time you do heavyweight top down management the way we say it is you impose draconian constraints you're in chaos you impose draconian constraints to shift it into that apparatic domain and the essence of draconian decision-making is to keep your options open not to solve the problem so for example the new zealand prime minister did that really well she actually broke her own law but she closed new zealand down and she's had much more options as a result whereas britain sweden and the uk waited in the u.s waited until they had no alternative and then they finally did it by that time their options were severely limited and a lot of people died unnecessarily once you've done that you've got it into an operatic domain and then the rule is very simple you centralize coordination you distribute decision making and that's a generic principle and i mean i've been sea level a lot in my life right the higher you get up an organization the more you only meet angrier and angrier customers and the more you realize you can't make any decisions anyway because you just don't know enough right so that's where we get into what's called the apparatic turning kin evidence and now we're into adapt and that's kind of like well what's complicated i which experts do we ignore okay give them resources get them to solve those problems yeah do we have conflict between experts you run a trioptic in over 24 hours you decide what you're going to do in what parts you've got complex you've got multiple hypotheses this by the way is a definition of complexity if you have multiple competing hypotheses all of which are supported by the evidence all of which are coherent and you can't resolve which is right within the time frame from decision then it's complex so instead of trying to resolve it you actually run a safe deferred experiment for every coherent hypothesis and see what happens to change it's technically a probe not an experiment because it will change the space and if you haven't got hypotheses or you don't think you've got enough that's when we move into that luminaria of chaos we use a sensor network to get multiple perspectives so that's kind of like that build right um we then have three things that you need to do and you should have done these before the crisis if you haven't done them you have to pedal fast one is you need dense informal networks so informal networks in organizations the metaphor for this is the fungal routes that connect tree roots without which the soil isn't healthy and nobody can trace the fungal roots because they're fine-grained and all over the place so i've talked with a lot of executives and the thing which mattered to them young curb which is they fell back to their informal networks not their formal system and there's a scientific reason for that in the informal networks are context-free information channels whereas formal systems are context-specific information channels so they're less adaptive yeah they haven't been predicted and there's an interesting difference here between singapore for example which is where i've done a lot of work and they initially funded or funded us where everybody is an informal network based on the fact they did military service together so it's quite democratic whereas in britain the informal networks are based on a couple of private schools in a couple of universities and so they're quite perverted so one of things you do and there's techniques like entangled trios and social network stimulation you want to build informal networks across silos so that you you want everybody within three or four degrees of separation of everybody else and that can be done quite quickly so that's a resilience measure you need to map what you know at the right level of granularity this links in with the third stage which is accept now that's a concept from evolutionary biology gould was the guy who originated it so it's where a trait which evolved for one function and distress accepts it doesn't add up for something completely different so dinosaurs wings for example actually the feathers originally evolved for warmth and sexual display then there was a small fast running dinosaur which developed skin flaps under its forelimbs and when it was running to escape bigger dinosaurs it took off that's how we get flight it's an accident the cerebellum at the base of your brain evolved to manipulate muscles in fingers it exacts in humans to manage grammar in language so the step to grammar is too big a step for a linear process it requires a non-linear acceptation microwave ovens we have because somebody noticed a chocolate bar melted in their pocket when we when he was maintaining the magneto of a radar machine brian arthur has written a lot about this the the innovation in humans generally is acceptive not original and we called it in the u hand but radical repurposing so one things we do is you if you actually store what you know at the right level of granularity you can combine it with previously unarticulated needs to suggest exceptive links and that's critical for innovation in generally but critical in the crisis and then the third thing you need to do is to build your sensor networks um give you a bit of basic science on this so if you give a radio radiologist a batch of x-rays and you ask them to look for anomalies and on the final extra you put a picture of a gorilla in plain view which is 48 times the size of a cancer nodule on average 83 percent of radiologists will not see it even though their eyes physically scan it and the 17 who do see it come to believe they were wrong when they talk with the 83 who didn't now the reason for this is you only scan three to five percent available data that then triggers a series of body brain and social memories it's not just the brain you they're fragmented they're messy you then blend them together to come up with a pattern and the minute you get a pattern which appears to a fit you apply you what you satisfy you don't optimize and in evolutionary terms that makes a lot of sense you know the early hominoids on the savannas of africa something large and yellow runs towards you at high speed you don't want to artistically scan all available data look up a catalogue of the flora and fauna of the african belt and then look at best practice case studies on how to avoid lions you know by that time the book of jonah from the old testament will have utility because it's the only example i found of how to escape from the digestive tract of a large carnival written by a survivor so we evolved to make decisions very very quickly based on a partial data scan and privilege in our most recent experience so what we do is we convert the whole of your workforce or your customers or your population this comes from the counter-terrorism work i did in washington as a human sensor network so they can all independently assess a situation and give you real-time maps which show dominant views minority views and outliers so those are three key components and only then do you move into transcend and the trouble with most organizational change it starts with the transformation objective and it doesn't realize transformation is only ever an emergent property of other things you do sorry that was a very long answer but yeah i just wonder whether they're using covert as a case study um using your framework to kind of evaluate what you think governments have done right what governments have done wrong what would would there have been a different process involved yeah they would and we've we've actually just put together an assessment process for which a government or company can actually go through against the field guide and assess what they did and that interest and he has three sort of criteria one is yeah we did this but we didn't do it that way again so we need to think about how we would do it the next time so for example in the nhs they set up um facebook groups to share medical knowledge and now they're in deep trouble on yeah data security and everything else so they can't do it that way again but the principle was good yeah um there's n things that we worked out which we can continue we just need to codify them and train people and there's things where we completely messed up so what we do is we sort of map that against what you actually did and then there's a whole body of methods and tools which okay start to experiment with these see if they work and i think the key thing which has come out of covid it's now a lot easier to talk to people about the difference between resilience and robustness um so i always make i always say you know robustness is like a sea wall it keeps the sea out until it breaks and then you wish you hadn't built it whereas a salt marsh absorbs the sea and even if it fills up doesn't break catastrophically so a resilient system survives with continuity of identity over time and by the way that incorporates talibs anti-fragile which is not a very effective way of becoming resilient to be honest yeah it's always been in the literature and the resilience anyway and you're starting to say to organizations resilient systems actually are inefficient and for the last 30 years you've focused on efficiency so you've reduced resilience in consequence so you need to start to build redundancy and variety into the system and there's a body of tools around that so i think yes and i said famously when govid hits here's god's gift to humanity because it's a containable crisis compared with what's going to come afterwards i mean first of all it's permanent we're not going to get rid of it secondly there are much more nasty things coming out of the tundra in siberia which is defrosting which we have no immune system to handle and antibiotics are losing value and then we've got global warming so coverage is a chance to sort ourselves out so it's covert as a kind of stress test of the system that we can learn from rather than yeah and i say the god's gift to humanity is kind of like it's a bit cruel but it's sort of here it is you've now proved you don't have to travel so much you proved that you can actually do lockdowns you prove that you can actually behave socially in better ways you've also proved that people are still evil and you can't just assume everybody will be good and yeah corruption exists i feel in britain i'm living in a banana republic at the moment given the level of government corruption but all of those sort of things yeah it gives you a chance to sort of rehearse pretend and build systems which have that sort of long-term continues and when it comes to sense making what are the different strategies for the different um states that that have covered in the in the framework okay so if it's clear which you know order divides into clear and complicated if it's clear you sense categorize response yeah it's fairly simple it's a taxonomy it's kind of like okay i'm in i'm in this country what class of country it is oh they drive on the left i'll do that so that's fairly simple yeah and there's a lot in organizations which fits in that domain right the danger is if you apply that when you shouldn't then i mean the border between clear and chaos in kin heaven is drawn as a cliff you fall over it and most companies collapse because they assume too much order you know they get they get complacent it's what um clayton christiansen who had the privilege of working with briefly called competence-induced failure you don't fail because you're incompetent you fail because you're too competent with the paradigm which is now out of date and so that's that break complicated you sense analyze respond you know the analysis may actually be bringing in experts who already know but that's the process sorry in both those domains there is a right answer in complex as we've already discussed you do parallel safe to fail probes the parallel is the thing everybody forgets it's it's like pilot projects always work it's called the hawthorne effect if you do something novel it always works it doesn't mean it will work again all right so you do the parallel probes and in chaos you act sense respond you act decisively to open up the options so and notice that in complex and chaos there's nothing between sense and respond because you just don't have the time to do that and when it comes to sense making what do you think are the um the most common mistakes or the most common things that people should know and don't um i think there's several one is over reliance on black box ai i mean the whole move to digitization is deeply problematic at the moment um partly because nobody's paying attention to the training data sets i remember at a conference in washington 20 years ago when i was starting the darpa work and i was sat on a platform with john poindexter who used to be reagan's national security adviser i didn't know who he was until i decided i liked him then i discovered who he was and i wasn't meant to like him so that could be confused for a bit and somebody asked us what we thought about ai and this is 20 years ago in this we were heavily working on counter-terrorism this is all around 9 11. and both of us said the problem is the training data sets um and i'd worked on ai for years before that now nobody believed us but if you now look at the scholastic parrots paper from the google employees everybody understands that's an issue so there's a body of sense making which is about data analytics which actually doesn't pay sufficient attention yeah um to training data sets and also over relies on written text which is about 10 of what humans know anyway so i think that's one problem i think the other problem is where people do too much on the inductive case-based side so about 99 of management textbooks are very similar i studied these 8 10 15 companies over one two three four five months i observed they all have this quality which you think is desirable and they all did these things therefore if you do these things you too will have the desirable property that's called the confusion of correlation with causation yeah and you sometimes that's legitimate so for example good to great which is a major textbook but if you look at it i remember the first time i read it and i said but you've chosen the apex predators so you've chosen companies who are the first to establish a market well they survive no matter how incompetent they are so there's a much simpler explanation if you understand ecological life systems and then you get some really bad books so there's one called lean startup where the guy goes and studies or interviews a series of people he knows who ran successful silicon valley startups and identify things they do publish is a best-selling book well when i was in ibm we did a similar study with dorothy landed at harvard and we found that all companies who failed did the same things as the company succeeded it's just you had a market so some people are bound to fail and some people are bound to succeed so that's another bad book and probably the worst of all time ms lacrox is reinventing the organization yeah where he's actually got a religious fervor around the style of organization he would like i mean he also gets into the spiral dynamics nonsense he said he has jade because everybody in spiral dynamics has to have a new color so they can do it that way and he only selects partial evidence from his own cases to support the proposition and that sort of thing in management books it's really dangerous it's really bad science and it's really dangerous for companies yeah i was going to come to your attitude to developmental thinking um you mentioned um is it philippe la cru the author of that book reinventing organizations yeah i mean i know a lot of people who were heavily influenced by that who tried to kind of use some of the lessons in their company and generally weren't successful it didn't didn't work um so yeah broadly speaking developmental thinking we're talking kind of spiral dynamics um ken wilber's work and i know a lot of people have tried to apply it to kind of businesses and and failed and i know you're quite skeptical about the whole idea of developmental things actually fairly antagonistic to be honest i think it's i think it's morally dubious i mean nora bates and i are having a lot of fun on social media on this at the moment we're both going for it um which people didn't expect right so i think there are several things first of all you've got legitimate ends and non-legitimates but if you go back to adult maturity bottles and things like keegan again that goes back to original research from piaget which has been disproved people have tried to replicate the experiments and not got the same results and that's a real problem with a lot of this stuff certainly the psychological approaches and the idea that you yeah children go through stages we can measure maturity there are issues about blame plasticity there are things like that but you can't take that sort of physical development then apply it to people's social ability um i'm quite interested in taking kagan stages and making the modulators in a complex system i they will have different influences in different contexts and then that i think is quite powerful right um but the step stuff consultants like that too much because it privileges the person there's almost this weird thing is i've got a maturity model that means i'm mature and you're not and i'll take you through at the extreme that's where spiral dynamics went you know if you look at spirodynamics the original research is very culturally specific and the guy did it on his own students in a very limited and structured way so you can't from that generalized to a world pattern all right um it then gets picked up by beckham cohen right and cohen probably more authentic than back beck is a you know back ends up with wilbur and john from arlington institute in the turquoise institute sorry i know this stuff backwards right and they then create this highly progressive things in which you are at different stages right and i still remember when they created the turquoise institute i got um i was at an event should we say and i got told that i couldn't possibly discuss it with them because i was an angry green and i hadn't reached the turquoise state of enlightenment so i had badges made that night proud to be brown and got everybody to wear them and of course brown isn't a killer and they didn't get it so they no ironic sense of humor i think there are two or three dangers here one is techniques which come sideways from therapy are always dangerous in organizations because they assume people need therapy and they privilege the therapist and stage based models are even more dangerous because they privilege and imagine future state and they don't realize that in different contexts we can all be play different things so if you take the tennis at the moment we've got an 18 year old displaying more maturity than most adults in the context of tennis but that wouldn't mean i trusted with a nuclear weapon you know it's this context-free thing which is which is another problem with it and you mentioned keegan um sir robert keegan from from harvard he's got a sort of a stage model as well are you saying that you don't think there's any underlying phenomena that they're picking up or you just think it's definitely actually saying at that end i think that's interesting i just think it's not it's not linear so i'm playing around with using his his stages not as stages but as modulators so modulators is a complexity concept the way i describe it is you've got magnets you know which can change in polarity and strength and then you've got steel iron disks in the table so if all the magnets keep the same polarity and strength stable pattern if they all change the patterns are unstable so in different contexts it will work so i think the keegan stuff has got research behind it it's got this fundamental flaw and it's based on prj who's been challenged significantly but there's still value in it um so i can do something with that right but treating it as modulated spirodynamics after wilbur got involved became a cult and it's an esoteric cult and it's a i call it faux buddhism and i think that's just dangerous so are you saying that you don't think there are any underlying phenomena that models like keegan's are pointing to or is it the way that they're used or you just don't think that it's it's i don't think it's right and the way it's used is generally bad right so i think adults i mean the trouble is they're taking a metaphor from physical growth stages and assuming that applies yeah it's like dawkins makes this ridiculous metaphor between memes and genes and gene isn't the primary unit anyway i mean no geneticist would support that the danger is we take the physical context where we can see something and assume that applies everywhere where it doesn't right and it's also linked in with this highly social atomistic this focus on the individual which is a northern european north american characteristic and what we call a cartesian model of consciousness so the assumption that the brain directs the body yeah now actually most of our decisions are made by our body not by our brain and by our social interactions i mean this is where we don't work with the lose and assemblage theory yeah that creates a construct which we can't escape yeah so it's a lot more messy it's a lot more context based and it's a lot more flexible and linear models actually are really poor as a representation of that yeah and you mentioned um that a lot of thinking and our working is kind of embodied and i know you often work with people walking for example maybe getting their bodies involved and it reminded me a little bit of um john viveki's work and he talks about 4e cognitive science and says that within cognitive science now the the cartesian split is has gone but they're completely the idea is we are completely participatory are you familiar with with the fourier cognitive science model do you think it's useful yes and i think it's interesting all right i think andy clark is actually more interesting if you want to look at this but there's a whole body of stuff on that i think everybody needs to realize as well that the reason descartes created the separation of the mind and the body was to create was to make sure he wasn't burnt alive for heresy because it created a space for the church and a space for science i mean mary midgley pointed that out years ago one of the great british philosophers so i think yes it's a natural i mean if you look at autonomic novelty receptive processing i mean this is the one where you kill the free will so people say you know if you pull your hand away from a hot plate your brain fires afterwards therefore you haven't got free will well that's ridiculous the point is your brain is fine afterwards to check if it got the automatic response right or not this time yeah it's only if you believe the brain has to direct things you make that mistake clark's work on scaffolding which links in with the fourier stuff basically and we do been doing work with him on our work on narrative is that narrative constructs are also part of extended consciousness so conscious and this is my point about systems with boundaries a human being's consciousness is not boundaried it's multi-tendriled and multi-interactive and we know and the physicality is key i give a personal example i um two things all right i've had two near fatal injuries right so one i got type 2 diabetes my own fault i left ibm i ate too much was grossly overweight you arrive at a hotel in new york late at night and you just have the burger and chips right so i got a type 2 diabetes diagnosis which was a shock i was lucky i knew you could reverse it yeah and you reverse it through starvation and exercise so i dropped 35 kilograms in four months which took a lot of doing right all of a sudden i'm walking and riding again and i'm actually thinking clearer i mean because that physicality is part of it if we want to resolve tension with somebody in the company we go out for a walk together yeah in the same way and you know second thing is when i got a massive brain bleed that was really interesting because i woke up one morning and went down to the computer and i couldn't type this couldn't coordinate and i foolishly carried on for two weeks and drove around the country and ran workshops by the end of it i couldn't even write coherently so i eventually gave in yeah went in they thought it was a stroke i was depressed went back to the pub before she didn't take the tablets because this frantic phone call came in and said you haven't taken the blood thinners have you and i said no and got hiked into the radford because they found this massive brain bleed so i got two holes drilled in my skull and you can still see the scars there right um and i still remember waking up after the operation and all of a sudden i could just think clearly it's also been really useful living near avery by the way because it means i've been traipanned and that's an 8 000 euro operation for shamans so i've dined out on it ever since all right i have a third eye but i think we get we misunderstand the nature of the physicality and it is also a major problem with it programmers because they don't get that physical interaction yeah and that impacts things on things like ethical judgments and moral judgments can you say more about that how do how do we how do we bring more okay so there was a there was a famous case where a young kid um actually fooled a whole set of people to believe he was trapped under a bed in the hawaii earthquake and he didn't understand he did anything wrong he just thought it was a game just didn't understand it um and we had an interesting newspaper report in marlborough the other day so somebody in swindon had called out the police because kids had drawn chalk on the pavement to play hopscotch and they called out the police because the kids were vandalizing it yeah and it was kind of like do you want to spend all your time in home on a computer we know this is epigenetics all right we know that environment triggers genetic changes so if you spend your key formative years on a screen the autism gene is far more likely to be activated than it isn't yeah um the epigenetics is fascinating right i mean eva javonka's work is brilliant there so i think we we don't have that complete self-type concept the danger is that you get into certain new age mysticism when you start to talk about this which we need to avoid we need the scientific discourse around it in terms of where it works what heuristics do you think are beneficial for people in to make in in the in the sphere of sense-making um i've developed a whole load over the years i mean one of those is hindsight isn't foresight yeah that's a good trigger mechanism um knowledge has only ever volunteered it can't be conscripted we always know more than we can tell we can always tell more than we can write down there's a whole body of general they're more aphorisms and heuristics heuristic development is actually something we do for companies you you gather their stories you identify the heuristics people are making for decision making you then consolidate and make them memorable and attach them to teaching stories and that provides a better governance mechanism than rules if the world is complex so we have this sort of if it's ordered you have rules if it's complex you have heuristics so give you two examples the us marines this is work that klein originally did if the battlefield plan breaks down capture the high ground stay in touch keep moving yeah and if you do that and you fail that's okay now notice they're measurable heuristics are never we will be customer oriented that's called a platitude they're measurable yeah so that that's fascinating we do work in safety we did it with boeing and like where we basically created heuristics for when rules can be broken so if these applies and somebody with this experience signs it off you can break any rule provided you document it this way and you follow these two or three principles yeah so favorite story of mine right so when my daughter was very young i carried her up to the top of conwy castle in north wales uh her mother and her baby brother stayed down because they have a fear of heights all right and we were a bit naughty and i had her on the harness but she'd almost run off the irish ferry the week before right so i had a harness on her with a dog lead extendable dog lead which my wife didn't approve of but i think is very good for toddlers so we get to the top of the castle and we hang over the top and wave to mother below just to scare the living daylights out of her yeah and then she dropped her fluffy toy rabbit while she was over it drops down 20 feet lands on a ledge now i'm now in deep trouble all right this is the rabbit without which we cannot sleep at night all right um which means i'll be the one who gets punished for this and knowing my family that assemble on my death bed to remind me of the day i did this right so i was then a climber right so i tied her to the flagpole in the castle so she couldn't get away yeah went over the side climbed down these castle walls from a climber's point of view and nothing right got the rabbit climbed back up handed it over got a nice hug um went down to meet the police the columbia police were really excited because they'd finally had a crime they didn't get many crimes in conway so i got taken to the police station and then they realized what i'd done and we had tea and coffee and they played with that and then i realized we'd left my wife in the middle of the castle for two hours so it got difficult right but when i climbed back up i suddenly started to say to myself three points of contact three points of contact three points of contact because that gets drummed into you when you learn to climb and after you've learned it you often don't do it sometimes you hang in by one finger but i've got no protection i'm not properly equipped three points of contact that's how heuristics work they can drive into people's memory and we touched at the beginning about the history of of sense making um it's obviously become a lot more we're hearing a lot more people use that term now and are you pleased that it that it is becoming more well known or do you think it's not now i think it's it's good news and i think it's good news i mean oxford recently published a summary of the five different schools right so you've got carl vik is the great granddaddy of all of us right and he's the classic sort of american normative study what companies done draw conclusions from that and some are good some are bad all right i mean he has a tendency towards context independence particularly when he writes with subcliff you've got a whole bunch of people in data processing that's where i came from originally right yeah data analytics loose on information theory you know we're using early stage computers to actually understand and present data in different ways so that human beings can make sense and that tradition still exists you've got gary klein who's a really good friend who was the first to identify that people make decisions based on pattern recognition not on structured processes his original book is brilliant his latest stuff on shadowboxing is excellent and then you've got brenda durving who's fascinating and she cured herself of what was meant to be an incurable cancer she's a wonderfully eccentric woman and she comes from post-modernism and library science and then you've got me so those are kind of like five recognized schools and we're seeing the same in complexity so we now make a distinction between computational complexity and anterior complexity the anthro complexity is complexity in humans you'll have intelligence identity and intention and when a field starts to create different schools it's starting to mature yeah and that that's why for example i really object when people subsume all of this under the general title of systems thinking because that's meaningless and in the popular imagination systems thinking mean systems dynamics that's cengi's fault and is there much of an overlap with the rationalist community i mean they talk a lot about cognitive bias and the way that mistake there isn't there isn't all right so i mean klein has said and i will say that there's no such thing as a cognitive bias there are cognitive heuristics and they actually overall in evolutionary terms all have major advantages so we should stop thinking about them as biases yeah um our materialist and a rationalist all right but that doesn't the concept that human beings make rational decisions is a very quaint post-enlightenment european concept which actually doesn't apply right so it's and it leads to this fundamental mistake incense making if you give the right people the right information and they have the right training they'll make the right decision and that's not the case right it's the big mistake people make with people like trump or brexit all right they try and argue rationally against what is called in narrative theory a trope or in delusion epistemology an assemblage or in complexity a strange attractor it's a pattern of belief which is actually formed based with knowledge of the rational arguments against it and it can sustain itself against them so i don't believe in that type of rationality but i am a materialist i yeah i think social constructivism and critical realism were bad stages i mean critical realism arose in response to social constructivism and still defines itself that way i think to be honest we we can move on from that now the science is a lot better so do you think that we may consciously know that we're not rational agents but we still whenever we construct a model of the world make bring bring those kinds some cultures do i mean it's interesting i'm about to do um a series of dialogues with indigenous leaders first with the author of santa which is coming up here and i did a lot of mine early work in knowledge management in kakadu in near darwin in australia back in the 70s when to be quietness it was genocide i remember seeing an aboriginal activist literally murdered in front of me by my security guard and the police said it's only an it wouldn't do anything about it so it was difficult right but there's a key distinction if that there's this tradition which grew up post-enlightenment in northern europe north america i keep saying that rather than west because it's not true of the celtic fringe it's not true southern europe right of the way we solve problems is we sit down and talk about them decide where we want to be and then we close the gap and that's almost universal our approach which is also an indigenous approach is you do some things together and then you have the conversation so for example i was working on peace and reconciliation in ireland in the 70s yeah and that time i was going to be a jesuit that didn't work out i failed the test of obedience right which has been the story of my life to be honest um and i said i mean it was bad in those days i was walking down the falls road once and i got picked up by a police land rover and asked which of my legs did i want broken first yeah and then i heard my accent and realized i was from mainland so they threw me out of the land rover if i'd been irish yeah and to be quite honest if the provo commander had come around that night and it probably joined yeah and it was that level of distress right now you then got attempts to reconcile that so coramila claimed a huge amount of success you know because it got everybody together they all agreed they're nice to be other they all stopped throwing petrol bombs something which was brilliantly satirized in episode one of series two of derry girls where the catholic girls are brought into a peace and reconciliation process with protestant boys one of the most funniest episodes ever particularly if you're around at the time we took a different approach we took people from both communities and dumped them into latin america for six months and we didn't talk about the troubles effectively they did things together and the conversation could occur naturally now that's one of the big things organizational change consultants health hate because it means they don't mediate the conversation we're doing the same on peace and reconciliation post-election in the states and this desire of consultants to be the mediator the interpreter the coach is a real problem yeah can you talk more about that i know you talked about sort of like the white savior complex that all of these kind of interventions bring about well part of it's what i talked about earlier is is bringing things sideways in therapy yeah and i know this is controversial but i've never liked the tavistock institute i think it was born to be manipulative and it stayed manipulative ever since right and i think it's time for us to move away from young and freud i mean they were really progressive in their time but we know so much more now it's the wrong framing you get into the hero's journey nonsense right so i think the danger is that a lot of facilitation techniques do come sideways from therapy yeah appreciative inquiry is another one right and all of those privilege the therapist and imply that people need help that's the same problem with spirodynamics you haven't reached my state of enlightenment and i think that's deeply problematic i mean when i did most of the method development when i was in ibm i did it in denmark so i could facilitate in english but they would speak in danish so i couldn't get involved in the content and it all became a matter of managing the process or a dance so that people could find meaning for themselves and create their own direction and i think that's what facilitation should be about but the problem is the minute you take the coach role the council role the therapist role you're looking for evidence to support your therapy therapeutic theory yeah and that's the trouble you will then find it you'll also suggest it and you can end it with people getting quite distressed as a result and you've also talked about the that you disagree that we're in a post-truth environment we've never been in a truth-based environment ever i mean anybody said the classics know that you know whatever it reads cicero right i mean cicero and caesar is anybody with trump it's the same story is the i mean one of the other kind of frameworks that you can look at it is that okay we're not any more in in a more sort of post-truth world but we are in a world that we can't trust the institutions as much okay so there are several things all right one is the scaffolding has changed right so it used to be people trusted experts yeah really from the end of the second world war yeah and before that it didn't matter because not many people had to get involved and kind of like that didn't pan out so well so we're trying demagogues instead for a change my point is we always hand over a lot of our information process into third parties or to institutions of various types and that's problematic because if you if trust breaks down in the system people will go to whatever they think is convenient and just to write a blog post on this because i found somebody who's actually quite left-wing who's running conspiracy theories about wikipedia and the guy got thrown out of wikipedia in 2008 because he was an arrogant academic who thought he had more rights than other editors and since then it's all conspiracy theory so we do have this tendency to do that right and i think that's where we that's where i find dulu is really useful so we talk about you know that pattern of narrative which you get sucked into and that forms an interpretive framing for the way you see the problem so it acts as a filtering device you know so it reinforces the lewis came up with this really interesting concept called lines of flight so how do you find the weaknesses in the sandbridge theory which means you can escape those lines of flight so the work we're doing in the states at the moment on this post-election peace and conflict in stage two will use children as ethnographers to gather stories about local conditions we'll find common issues or problems which apply to both red and blue politics and then get people from both backgrounds to work on those problems we won't talk about the political divide that's the same as the reconciliation stuff you allow the conversation to emerge through action and that the assemblage can't escape yeah that's a line of flight because people start to see people through a different lens i have a lot of arguments with boston brahmins about this because they think the way to do that is for all these people to come into a workshop and they'll explain to them how you know if they would only adopt the cultural and attitudinal beliefs of white mit lecturers then the world would be a better place and it might well be but that's too culturally specific you know it's the problem with both sangee and sharmaga you know they're culturally very specific in terms of what they value and it ends up as a new form of neocolonialism and you're familiar with the work of joseph henrich the he he talks about how weird people like um anglo-saxon effectively um that we are we've outsourced so much of our sense making so much of our authority to institutions that we're actually different kinds of people so the fact that these institutions are now failing is actually a much more and they're sure about that because i think institutions have always been around i think there is something distinctly anglo-saxon um but i think actually that's protestantism so if you look at it social atomism is a phenomena and the classic comparison social atmosphere communitarianism yeah and social atomism is the protestant states because it's the emphasis on the individual the individual has a relationship with god society is an assembly of individuals institutions are the same way right if you go into communitarian cultures they also have institutions and they trust and don't trust them in similar ways they're just different institutions yeah we then got into the sort of techno specialist we started to get consumed by the idea that a 19th century concept of science could solve all our problems and we still haven't updated on that people who are pro or anti-science of pro-anti-19th century they haven't got up to date on epigenetics quantum mechanics or anything and what is the impact that your work has had on on others i can having has been taken up i keep finding new ways of people i'm quite proud of that because they haven't been trained but they use it the the article i'm fond of it was used by the british cabinet office to explain the role of religion in the bush whitehouse which is a published paper and we had a police swat squad in the states who actually drew it with a rusty nail on the back of a breeze block and decided the problem was complex so they didn't follow standard operating procedures they did probes and people's lives were saved but critically when they phoned up headquarters they said it's complex we're probing they use kinavian strategically as well as operationally so they understood it so there's lots of good cases like that i think it's the essence of our approach to sense making is these micro impact is like the problem with climate change it needs to be a micro problem for people before it can be a macro problem for politicians and we get those things the wrong way around and what have we not talked about yet that we should do before we finish that uh the latest stuff i'm doing is to take deutsche's work on constructor theory which came out of quantum mechanics which is not the same thing as constructional law which came from thermodynamics which is very different i'm not sure about that that's a flow problem so the way construction theory is the first attempt in physics to deal with a system as a whole rather than reduce it to the smallest possible particle and project forwards i mean i love quartz i think quarks is a great idea it's probably as far as you should go but yeah so the way constructor theory works is you start off by saying what's the counterfactual situation so what is physically impossible and that defines your space so you don't start with where i want to be you start with what's not possible then you can say constructors which isn't a term he invented but he's developed it which produce replicable outcome so and what the key thing here is whatever has the lowest energy gradient will win yeah so we've now adapted that extensively so we've taken our constraint mapping technique and our scaffolding concept from the work we did on alternatives to design thinking which is terribly linear and we're basically saying well you start off by mapping the constraints and the scaffolding in play and that creates a counterfactual universe you can then look at the constraints and say could we change any of these at what risk because that would change the counterfactual space and maybe not now but maybe in six months time so the temporal aspect of that and then you build constructors and i've given you examples like you know myths structures rules whatever yeah heuristics and see if they replicate in parallel and what you're overall doing is you want the energy cost of doing good things to be lower than the energy cost of doing bad things and this is i think the mistake with all organizational development and society changing data it hasn't listed energy cost so it assumes if we want to do this the right thing and we advocated enough and we explained enough people will do it actually if the energy cost is high you won't do it so i think that's that to me is transformatory and that's the thing which really excites me at the moment and where do you think i mean you've been working in this area talking about complexity working with organizations working with governments where do you think that the conversation is at now do you think it's it's it's reached the point that the most most organizations and most authorities are aware of it or yeah and these things go in movements or i mean i developed this in a theory called flexus curves which is a development of market life cycle theory so if you look at scientific management which persisted to the 80s right it got displaced by systems thinking and most people who criticize scientific management are actually criticizing system thinking i taught leadership with drucker and he maybe learned this right in scientific management actually they had management apprentice schemes and they had a lot of redundancy in the system they automated the manual stuff but the management stuff and the strategic stuff and they didn't have three or five year plans they had more adaptive systems and then systems thinking came along with its engineering metaphor i mean if it had come from chaplain not from forrester or rather from sengi's perversion of forrester it would have been different business process re-engineering six sigma so the assumption is we remove human judgment from the system we've had that for about 30 years hasn't worked you know the soft side is learning organization you know all of those sort of things the hard side is bpr um and i'd argue most of the psychological techniques the freudian jungian stuff you know psychodynamics actually fits within that framework privileges the expert privileges structure assumes context independent repeatability complexity is now in the same position systems thinking was in the 80s and 90s and it went from esoteric idea to dominant theory over about five years and we're seeing that with complexity and the signs are there so i get mobbed by a whole bunch of what i call cybernetics bully boys every now and then because they've suddenly realized cybernetics was a cool idea but it's completely out of date and they're losing business i think so they're basically coming and saying you're you know we've been dealing with complexity for years you're not doing anything different and you explain very patiently well we doubt we we used gravity before newton came along but now we've got a science and that changes it yeah so all of a sudden most of the people who've been making money and living out systems thinking for the past 20 or 30 years are talking complexity complexities in the language of people um the eu handbook i died it's inconceivable i would have got to write a field guide for the whole of the european union based on complexity theory before covet yeah um so that's so i think we're at that growth but it's why we're now talking more about sense making and less about complexity theory there's a danger we don't want this to be another fad cycle you know throw out everything which went before and replace it with complexity but there's a lot of good stuff in systems thinking there's a lot of good stuff in scientific management and that was one of the original drivers for connecting i was an executive i just got fed up with every two years of different fact i kept saying but the old stuff worked it's just we took it too far so why don't we work out the boundaries and do something differently on the other side and that's what kinevin is all about and just how how does um talking about sense making avoid it becoming a fad i think the key thing is you have to keep changing language people don't get this it's like i would ban the world holism more holistic because it's just become a terrible platitude right it doesn't mean anything anymore it's like we had to abandon the world knowledge management because it became information management and we changed it to decision support so language mutates and changes over time and to quote heidegger all right man thinks he's the master of language language but language is a master of man so language actually matters in terms of making distinctions and getting people to do the right sort of things so my gut feel is complexity is just going to become something everybody talks about and they'll do agent-based modeling they'll incorporate it in data analytics mckinsey will mckinsey will start to write reports about it and i want to escape that fad cycle i'm trying to break that and how long do you think we've got before everyone's really pissed off with sense making as a term and i think actually i don't think so i think i think this is scientific management lasted for about 50 60 years i mean it did this is me getting into hegel right it's theseus antithesis synthesis yeah business process re-engineering was an anti-thesis to the thesis of scientific management it didn't really change things that much but it said it was radically different it's created the space for something new so i think we got a few decades dave thank you very much real pleasure our ability to make sense of the world is breaking down we're making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense making to inform those choices which is kind of running increasingly fast through the woods increasingly blind over the last two years rebel wisdom has interviewed some of the world's top thinkers now we've brought them together for an eight-week online course sensemaking 101 with daniel schmacktenberger diane mucho hamilton john viveki and more improve your sense-making develop your sovereignty and join a wider community looking to do the same [Music]

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Published: Wed Sep 22 2021