Sense-Making Through Uncertainty: Stories, Signals, and Swarms with Dave Snowden

Key thing is that think about how you manage your family and friends. Do your children have KPIs? Do you have a family mission statement? Do you link the KPIs to whether you pay your children allowances month or not? I mean nobody would be that bloody stupid. The reality is our day to day lives in our families, we manage the world as a complex adaptive system. Anybody who's got teenage children knows that all you can do is just try and make it easier for them to do the right things and harder to do the wrong things. If you tell them what to do, it won't work. So we got all of the practices, all of the understanding of how to manage complexity. We just forget it when we go out to the front door and go into the company. Can you achieve extraordinary results while making the world a better place? I'm Bruce Kempkin and together we'll explore how welcome to Humanity at Scale Redefining Leadership podcast. Join me as I speak with visionary leaders and top experts to uncover the secrets of humanity centric leadership. Ready to rethink leadership? Let's dive in. Welcome back to Humanity at Scale. Leadership today is full of confidence. Dashboards, frameworks, forecasts, clear answers delivered quickly. At the same time, though, the systems shaping our organizations and increasingly our societies are becoming more complex, less predictable, and harder to control. The old playbooks don't just feel outdated. In many cases, they're actively dangerous. Which brings us to a question that leaders are wrestling with right now. How do you lead when cause and effect aren't clear, when certainty is an illusion, and when the situation keeps shifting as you act? I can't imagine a better person to explore that question with than my guest today, David Snowden. David has spent decades studying how people and organizations make decisions under uncertainty. He's worked across government, technology, and large global institutions. And he's best known for creating the Carnivan Framework, which helps leaders recognize when problems can be analyzed and when they need to be explored, tested and learned from in real time. David, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be with you. Now, before we talk about complexity frameworks of leadership, I want to spend a few minutes getting to know you and the path that led you here. You began your career in NGOs and later moved into HR, finance and systems design. How did those early experiences shape the way you think about people, organizations and decision making? So I went after university to read physics and philosophy and was very active in student politics. So that was part of my life. Right. And then the NGO work that was World Council of Churches Things like student wing combat racism, that was fundamental. I still remember working on indigenous land rights in Northern Australia and one of the aboriginal activists had his head shot off by a shotgun by the mine security guard. And we went to the police to report it and they said, it's only an abbo and it's getting those experiences in your 20s and I worked in the slums of Rio. I worked in what was going to be Zimbabwe. Right. So it's hugely valuable. Right. It kind of like makes you realize the world is not the sort of encompassed by your own cultural experience. And then, as you say, I moved through other environments. I think I was really lucky I was there when computers just started. So I was sitting by that time as a sort of deputy financial director implementing computer systems and starting to realize their potential and to actually count the number of oranges in Portugal in a week rather than six months. All right. And I think my generation start we were practitioners who used technology rather than technologists who talk to practitioners. And I think that's a really important distinction. And that stayed with me ever since. What's interesting is one might say based on that background, that when you came into using computers and the things that you saw were almost like frameworks for leading in a world of even more certainty, was there a moment early where you saw how management decisions made with good intent ended up harming people on the ground some way? Oh, yeah, loads. I mean, when IBM took us over, it, it came out in spades. We were a small company, we have three levels of management, and then we're the ones, the world's largest bureaucracies. And I think one of the things that struck me then is that everything was done with the best of all possible intents, but there was a failure to realize the nature of organizations. And one of the things you saw in IBM, and I lasted seven years before I failed the test of obedience, is that the key thing was to work out how to work around the system, not work within the system. So the actual rule base, the highly bureaucracy of IBM, it survived because people worked around it and it wasn't really challenged because it wasn't worth your while to challenge it. And there's loads of examples on that. I think the other thing which hit me during that time is I got a phone call from the CIA, which I really wasn't expecting, but at least they weren't knocking my door down. And I ended up down in Virginia and met a really nice old guy and we got on really well. And then I suddenly discovered he was Admiral John Poindexter, who you might remember was Reagan's nsa. Now I'm Welsh. I come from a background which is very definitely left wing. I'm not meant to like this guy, but I like him. It was too late for me to realize and I think when I then spent the next 10 years of my life working on counterterrorism in the US, in Washington, working with people who my mother had brought me up to think were evil and discovering that they weren't, they understood things in different ways. And I think one of the key things that leaders often don't get is they don't get that variety. They sort of. They do a ba, they do an mba, they join a big consultancy firm, they get parachuted in sideways. They've got no real practical experience of the organization or the ground. So they manage by rules, they manage by spreadsheets, they manage by measurement. And because they're powerful, they don't see the things which they need to see which would make them realize it wasn't working. Interesting. So you have such a varied background. I wonder how you describe what you do now to people who don't know you. Yeah. My daughter heads our health service practice. She's over 35 and a medical anthropologist. And she says, how the hell do I explain what we do? I think it's really simple. We focus on intractable problems, problems that conventional solutions can't manage. And we don't use a case based approach. We think cases are a waste of time. You get the confusion of correlation with causation. From a physics point of view, social scientists never have enough data to form any valid conclusion anyway. And neither do management consultants. We used to say they suffer from physics envy. So we take a different approach. We basically say this is the problem. Now what do we know from complexity science, from cognitive neuroscience, from anthropology, from quantum mechanics? We have a huge network of people we talk with. I'm genderless by background. And we spend five or six years playing around with ideas that we have a tool or a framework or something which we think will work. And then it moves into practice for about four or six months, four or six years, and then it goes into implementation. So that's kind of what we do. We apply natural science as a constraint to develop tools and methods to help people make sense of uncertainty. And I'm sure that does not help my father in law or mother in law really understand what you do. I can throw some examples. So one thing we know from nature is if you go into nature, you get tree, you get in the forest, the tree roots are called arboreal. So I cut off a root here. Everything downstream dies. So take that as a metaphor for the formal organization of the hierarchy. Connecting those tree roots are multiple fungi, roots which are rhizomic in structure. Entangled. You cut them, they reform. Those rhizomic roots will redistribute resources to saplings from mature trees in drought. So we look at that, and I'll give you two other examples briefly in a minute. So what does that mean in an organization? Well, actually, the rhizomic mushroom groups are the informal organization. And informal organizations connect people in novel ways. And actually they're often the way that people really make decisions. It's who do you know? But you don't want a perverse system in which not everybody's connected. So we developed a method called entangled trios, which works very successfully. For example, put in a new employee together with somebody who's about to retire, with somebody on the management fast track and focus in 10 or 50 trios like that at Innovation for six months. Or a young coder with a systems architect with a user trained to talk to IT people. And we've done it in country. Teenager with grandparent with local council official. Now that actually has a powerful impact. It's a really good method. But within 18 months, we can have everybody within two phone calls of the CEO based on a trusted network. So that's really pragmatic. We're creating a very healthy substrate, a very healthy environment, which can connect very quickly under conditions of uncertainty. And one more example to make the point. All right, we currently we've been looking at the swarming behavior of bees. So in bees swarm, they always find the best site of all the sites they investigate, and they do it by multiple micro interactions at scale. So we've been developing tools which allow a CEO to pose a problem to their employees, get the feedback, and then AI basically feeds the data backwards and forwards until within one hour, you know what the consensus is and you know what the outliers are. So in one hour, you can do something which would normally take you three months. And that's the sort of thing we do. So how do you recognize in the world of sciences which one of those sort of behaviors that you see out in the real world are valuable to bring into organizations and leadership? Okay, then you need to understand dyslexic. I can't pronounce words from text. I need to hear people pronounce them and fix them. In my mind, I read two pages at a time. For patterns, I need three different colored pens to force myself to read it line by line. Dyslexics have always been associated with innovation and the problem if you're dyslectic, you can see the connections between things and it's so obvious you don't know how to explain it. So I can't really explain it. I read a lot. I'm perpetually reading. I constantly make sure I talk with people from scientific backgrounds. I make sure I'm humble about that because I know what I don't know. And I've got a background in physics and philosophy, so they're the foundation disciplines. And. And it teaches me what I don't know. And then it all starts to come together and you play with it. And I think, I mean, when I went to school, this is the Welsh Grammar School, so at that time, at the age of 11, you were split to academic or non academic. So I was in that generation. And the first Friday of my first day at secondary school and age 11, I could now wear long trousers, which in the British winter of 64, you wanted long trousers. And I walk to the front of the class and I'm given a card and on it says, you support capital punishment. Now I appalled Kalpa punishment. My mother was leading the Labour Party campaign in North Wales to abolish it, which we did in the uk. The teacher was being wicked on this. I had to speak for seven minutes without preparation for something I profoundly disagreed with. We did that every week from the age of 11 to 18. And those of us who were good at it got formally trained in rhetoric that made us journalists. We read everything. You didn't know what you were going to hit. We made us critical because we had to argue for things we didn't agree with. And I think that was the most foundation training I ever had in my life because that made me permanently curious. And the thing that rhetoric teaches you is to make novel connections so that you win arguments. I love that. So let's take the work that you do around. You described sort of looking at sort of scientific patterns that almost better explain how organizations operate and the structured things that we've learned about in the past and put them to use. But you do that also with the use of terminology like sense making and complexity. Let's go after sense making. What is sense making and how is that different than traditional sort of leadership judgment? So I mean, we sell sense making with a hyphen. Some people don't. All right. And it matters because if you have a hyphen it makes it a verb, not a noun. So I define sense making as how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it? So with that comes a concept of sufficiency. You never know everything you need to know, but you have to know what type of decision you make based on what you can know. And this is one of five schools of sense making, and ours is called naturalizing Sense making. Naturalizing is a philosophical term which means to apply natural science to it. So sense making is fundamentally about what sort of decision can you make based on where you are and what you know, and how do you minimize the risk in that decision making and maximize the opportunities available to you? And to what degree does traditional leadership training sort of fall apart? Because one might argue, oh, that's exactly what scenarios planning is about. But I know it's not where does it fall down? And how is it different from what traditional. So some really traditional training works well. So, I mean, I've done a lot of work with West Point and elsewhere. Yeah, the traditional training there is based on crews, not individuals. This is a fundamental principle. In military environments, in medical environments, in civilian defense, people work in role combinations, not as individuals. And the training is a mixture of theory and practice over time. Now, that's actually important because we're trying to replicate that. One of the frameworks I've got is called ashen, which stands for artifacts, skills, habits, experience, and natural talent. And in any human decision making, those all come into play. The trouble is, if you have formal structures and rules, you're assuming everything is an artifact and a skill. And you're forgetting the rest of the. And I had the great privilege of teaching leadership with Peter Druckup. It started with me saying something I shouldn't have said and been humiliated on a stage and him deciding I might be retrievable and taking me out for dinner. Right. So that's how it worked. But one of the things we both agreed on is if you go back on the history of management science, for example, we have scientific management, which starts with Taylor. Then we move into systems thinking, which is kind of like business process re engineering. PETER Senge and now we're shifting now to that, into the complexity era. And you can see these patterns. And one of the things that Peter and I agreed is that complexity has more in common with scientific management than it does with systems thinking. Because people denigrate Taylor, but they forget how bad things were before Taylor. And you had slave labor, you had mass accidents. He created structure, but he had the sense to leave management and leadership as an apprentice model. And the training that people got then was a mixture of some skills training, but it was mostly, you grew up in a company, you did the job, you got promoted, you changed your clothes when you got promoted, which we now know is really important because it changes the way you think about yourselves. And basically people knew how to work the company. Occasionally you got an accident. Influence and systems thinking came along. And we moved from the military metaphor of scientific management. And military metaphors are extremely adaptive. A sergeant outpoints a brigadier in some contexts into an engineering metaphor. Engineers hate ambiguity. So what we saw with business process re engineering, and that became what Gary Klein famously called Six stigma, which I love. I wish I'd invented that. And then the sort of Peter Sange. Well, the leader decides a direction, everybody aligns themselves with it. All of a sudden, all ambiguity is removed from the system. And this is actually when psychometric tests come up, like Myers Briggs, which is a pseudoscience. It's a pure pseudoscience. But HR departments want to put people as widgets into the engineering diagram. And I think that's where it really went wrong. So I think if you go back to leadership training in scientific management and the stuff we do in complexity science, which includes simulation games, that's actually quite powerful. And it's been around for centuries. We've had this weird period of three or four decades where we thought everything was structured, everything could be done by rules, we could train people in competences, we confused emergent properties with causality, and that's where it went wrong. Interesting. And by the way, I have to admit, I actually ran the first Six Sigma projects at GE way back when, so I don't know what that says about my need for. I remember that because I was working with your CEO partly then. All right. And he knew when to break the rules. And the trouble is the people that came after him didn't realize he broke Six Sigma rules more often than he followed them. Well, and I think you captured an interesting point which sort of triggered something for me, which is what you lose when you have leaders that haven't grown up in the system. Right, Right. All the things you talk about, how crews operate and the substructures of organizations, if you've been working there for decades, you inherently understand that, even if you can't articulate it. Right. And I think the other thing which you saw happen. So one of the things that business process re engineering did, and I set up a BPR business, so I have sinned as well. All right, is you ran the ARIS toolset, you defined everything and you structured everything, and then you sort of thought you'd done it. And that created a market for lots of junior consultants who do very rigid work, which the Big Six grew on. I mean, consultants were small companies before BPR came along. And that created a market for the business schools. And then the system became, in Lacanian terms, perverted. Because now you go to a business school, you go to a consultancy, and then you become an industrial manager. And you've only ever managed to have written reports and spreadsheets. And it is, to quote Lincoln, inadequate to the stormy present. And that leads us to the stormy present. A lot of things you describe actually in terms of understanding organizations and making decisions seem to me would be valuable in any period of time. Is it that we are facing so much increased uncertainty and change in the world that the old models are being exposed more than they would have been? I think we're facing no more uncertainty than we faced as a species over many over a hundred thousand years. The problem now is the consequences of us getting it wrong are existential. That's the difference. Let's lean into that a little bit. In what ways are individual decisions that individual leaders make? So political decisions being made now which will not be able to be reversed for some time are probably going to lead to the first mass heat death. We're currently. It's not only a question of when, a question of if, it's when and where. So sometime in the next 10 years, 35 to 50 million people will die in one day. Maybe India, it may be Indonesia, it may be southern United States. The temperature will go above 58 degrees. You die. Now, that's the sort of consequences we're now facing from decisions which have been made over the past 10 or 20 decades. If you go back three decades, decisions didn't have that type of consequence. So. So those are certainly big existential threat types of decisions. So, I mean, the other one as well is. I mean, we now know that AI use causes cognitive decline. Now, a lot of us expected it. We expected it to take years. We now know it takes days. But I want to go back to the. If the decisions that we make today are more consequential at that level, can the same thing be told about individual decisions that a leader makes in an organization? Are those more consequential than decisions in the past? And if so, how is it to an individual leader? How is it more consequential what they're doing because they have less Time to make decisions and less experience. And I was C level, right? I remember at C level. I remember one day I sat in my office, five teams came in to present the results of years of work researched by them with good PowerPoint slide sets. I was meant to decide who of them was right in 10 minutes. I mean, that's a C level dilemma, right? Is you're being forced into that position now, say, some of the work we're doing, like for example, mimicking the swarming behavior of bees, is designed to allow the executives to employ the whole of their workforce to assess a situation in less than an hour before they have to make a decision, or to bring in external networks. So there's lots we can do to make life easier for people, but it requires them to understand. The model is not a sort of enlightenment model of rationality in which if you have the right information to the right people with the right training and the right competences, they will make the right decision. Because that is completely hokum. It's not the way it works. If you're enjoying this episode, make sure to follow or subscribe so you never miss a conversation. We've got plenty more great stories coming your way. So I think you've talked about the notion of acting without certainty in that. What does that look like in practice? Does that mean slowing down and doing some of these practices? Or what should people do? You may speed nap or you can speed nip at scale. So I think one of the key differences between complexity science and systems thinking is since system thinking has traditionally tried to define a goal and close the gap, complexity science says that produces perverse incentives and you miss opportunities. So what really matters? Describe the present and identify where you can go next. Now, this is what I call the Frozen 2 strategy. If you've watched the movie Frozen 2 yet great complexity movie, in the middle of it, the young sister who's the real heroine sings this wonderful song. All I can do is do the next right thing. That's what Stuart Kaufman called the adjacent possible. So in complexity science, what really matters is describe the presence. So we, for example, have methods which map the energy gradients of the present and identify what can change and what can change easily and intervene to make effectively the cost of virtue less than the cost of sin. And they'll identify what is the next thing you can do and look again. So say we can develop methods and tools which allow people to start journeys with a general sense of direction, and that actually reduces the time and energy they have to spend making decisions. There's all sorts of stuff around this, but the idea of the decisive decision which sets a direction, once you get rid of that and say, well, actually I can nudge the system, I can micro nudge the system, I can understand the system, I can change the environment so that good things happen without me having to intervene. We can reduce the time that leaders have to spend making decisions and make better decisions as a result. So that's quite a departure from the way, as you described the way leaders work today. Try to have long horizons, visions of the future, get buy in for all that. How does a leader sort of balance the world in which lots of people expect that type of sequential planning? I mean, all of the vision statements are nothing but a bunch of platitudes. So you might as well construct it and put it out in the market. It's just don't take it too seriously, all right? The key thing is that think about how you manage your family and friends. Do your children have KPIs? Do you have a family mission statement? Do you link the KPIs to whether you pay your children's allowance this month or not? I mean, nobody would be that bloody stupid. The reality is in our day to day lives, in our families, we manage the world as a complex adaptive system. Anybody who's got teenage children knows that all you can do is just try and make it easier for them to do the right things and harder to do the wrong things. If you tell them what to do, it won't work. So we got all of the practices, all of the understanding of how to manage complexity. We just forget it when we go out to the front door and go into the company. Interesting. So if the example of working with a family to some degree, the people that I feel are best at sort of living the world in which they interact with their family and friends are the ones that have a really strong sense of self that helps guide sort of their interactions around them. Is there an equivalent to that in complexity theory? When we're working in the world, I think you're looking actually for slightly more fluid identity. You want people with good networks. Really good leaders have good networks and the time to draw on them. And it's not the sort of ego focus of them making a decision. I mean, one of the best vice presidents I ever worked with in Boeing, in the days when Boeing was run by engineers, not by management consultants. This is going back a decade or so. He used to have a week every year where he took all of his leaders off site. People like me were Employed to use large words and make them very uncomfortable and get their brains to hurt. If any of them had any contact with the office, he fired them, because if they couldn't leave their business for a week, they were incompetent. And that was a brilliant guy. He always had time. I mean, all the great leaders I work with and I've worked with a lot always have time. It's like if you look at a really good sports person, they always have time on the ball. And I think that's the key thing. And it comes from diversity of experience, diversity of background and curiosity, and a willingness to work with other people, but sometimes the willingness to be assertive. It's not that there's a single model of leadership. When I spent some time with Steve Jobs, I spent time with ge, with Lou Gerstner. The only thing all of those great leaders had in common is they were arrogant ambassadors who got their own way. But you don't see that in any of the future textbooks. You see this. It's not the way it works. I still remember Steve Jobs threw a pile of books at me with a bunch of invective, and I'd forgotten that day. So you do need people with that sort of drive in companies. All right, but the really good ones and the ones I mentioned, I could walk into Lou Gerstner's office and have an argument with him. I couldn't walk into Sam's office and have an argument. The really good ones listen to people, and they surround themselves with people who match their deficiencies and they listen to them and that actually, de facto, they form a crew. So interesting. If we compare that description of the crew and listening to stories, how do those stories and what let's call them informal signals inside an organization, reveal that dashboards and metrics and the more formal reporting structures, don't you have to do it at scale? I mean, you can tell. I mean, I work in several companies. The last thing you want is a CEO coming and say, I've just visited this customer. He told me this story, and you're, oh, my God, I've got to do everything. That's not what you want. So one of the things I developed originally, this was done on the DARPA programs for weak signal detection was gathering using distributed ethnography to gather stories at scale and to gather them in quantified format, not as qualitative. So we gather stories at scale, we look at the patterns in the statistical data, and then the story is in explain them for the statistical pattern. So I'll give You an example. All right, so 360 surveys in companies for leaders create massive trauma. It's an annual game. If you haven't learned how to game it yet. Yeah, forget it. I actually set up a website in IBM so you could find a third quartile responder and they'd be told how to answer the questions. All right. You live in a bureaucracy, you game it. We take a different approach so we know that evaluation creates stress that comes from cognitive neuroscience. Anything explicit you're going to gain, which is why surveys don't work. So what we happen is each leader next week, every time somebody comes to have a meeting with you or interact with you, they tell a story about the interaction, which is descriptive, and they index it onto four triangles, each of which have positive qualities. Now, we took a lot of time to develop this and patent it. So one of the triangles basically says, in this meeting, the manager was assertive, analytical, altruistic. So I can't say anything negative about the manager. And then the manager looks at the pattern over the last week and said, oh, I was all assertive, analytical, not sufficiently altruistic. They can then click on the observations and say, how do I create more observations and fewer like those? So that's using narrative at scale for what's called micromanaging. What doesn't work is if you get a consultant in to try and change the narrative, which you can't do, or if you try and decide what the narratives should be. What we do is we work with the narratives as are, and you basically say, how can I create more like this and fewer like those, which everybody can understand. Interesting. And I want to go back a little bit on the notion we talked about of almost like the next best move. Right where your point? I understand where I'm at now. How am I going to do the next move? How do well placed interventions then outperform large scale transformation efforts? Right, because there are lots of organizations doing big scale things when it sounds like we ought to be doing one at a time. If you want to transform the organization, the worst possible thing you can do is announce a transformation initiative. Because one of the characteristics of a complex adaptive system is it has a distributed memory. And in any modern organization, that means there will be multiple memories of previous transformation initiatives, all of which have failed. So you're just going to trigger negativity up front. What really matters is kind of like fractality. So let me give you a real example. I'm going to disguise the client on this. All right? It's a big Following. So we presented six cartoons about the next step. This is Three Horizons, so we're looking at Horizon 2. So we got a rough idea of the vision. That's fine. All right. That's a bunch of platitudes. Let's keep it. No problem with it. What we want to know is, where are we now? And how do we think? What's the next step before we move on that? So what we did is we presented six cartoons, which then you can see some on the wall behind me. This is one of the cartoons we use. Gape Convoid. Right. One with a red cross. Says, same cross, different nails, which makes me think every time I look at it. So we present cartoons which have bite. People choose the cartoon which represents the current state of the organization. They tell a story about that, they index it, and that's into six triangles we'd normally use and some other factors. Now we can use that, for example, to create sacred storybooks, which are ways to instantiate change in merger and acquisition because it creates a ritual transfer. But fundamentally, what you're doing is to say, hang on a minute, let's look at the picture of the whole company. So we represent this like a landscape map with contour lines, because this is looking at culture. So if the contour lines are close together, it's going to be difficult to change it. If they're far apart, it's easy to change. So the executive board look at that map and say, well, we'd like the densities to be more over here and less over there. So what can we do? But then from the same source data, we give every unit their own data. And of course, they're all in a different starting position. So they look at it and say, well, how would I create more like this, fewer like that? So everybody's going in a different direction, but the organization is aligned. So you get rid of those one size fits all transformation initiatives. I mean, I worked with Janet actually on Merger and Acquisition when he was CEO of SmithClun Beecham. We came up with a heuristic at the end of this which says anybody who looks good in the first six months of the acquisition should be fired because they're just playing the game. It's the awkward buggers, the cynics we need to promote because they actually care about the organization, and they're prepared to do it. Interesting. So I want to shift gears a little bit to the future. You mentioned a little bit about AI and how AI can help, especially sort of gather and amass those narratives and pull from them. As you look forward, what changes do you see either helping or hurting leaders when it comes to AI? And what other changes do you see coming that are going to affect how leaders lead? They're going to get a nasty shock this year because the bubble's going to burst. We knew about cognitive decline. That's going to happen faster. It's quite interesting. Apple are hanging back and waiting to see what happens. And that's classic. Apple have always had that strategy. Apple, they're brilliant at repurposing other people's technology for things you didn't know you needed and you become dependent on. Right. So they're very clever. My speaker's an Apple buy and surrounded by the equipment. So I think what we'll start to see is people will start to realize that human beings think abductively. AI thinks inductively. So human beings evolve to make decisions without training data. And we know that art comes before language in human evolution. So we actually use music and art to actually see the world in different ways and to make completely novel connections in unexpected ways very quickly. That's called abductive logic. Downside is it makes us prone to conspiracy theories. AI just repeats past patterns. So we're running programs now at the moment, for example, where we're capturing from employees of a company all the capabilities they've got, which the organization isn't using. And we're saying, before you replace these guys, you want to replace these guys with AI, that's fine, but use the things you're not using and keep them on board because the AI may not be able to replace them. So that reduces risk, may give you opportunities. We're also doing work to map what type of decisions are made. So if the dominant aspect of good decisions is, is experience, natural talent and habits, you shouldn't let AI anywhere near it. And there are also human skills which get acquired by doing things AI can do better, but unless you do them for four or five years, you don't develop the higher skill. This was an argument I had with Sam Polizano in IBM. He said, we can replace middle management with AI. I said, well, where the hell do you think senior management's going to come from? It's funny, I've heard from a number of guests the notion of expertise being lost, especially in jobs that have heavy reliance on the notion, notion of apprenticeship, which a lot of roles do. Apprenticeship and journeyman people forget the journeyman stage on that as well. So as you look ahead, are you bullish or bearish about the future? Where do you stand. So I'm Welsh. And if you don't know, we're a tribal people. So there's a classic question you ask people, which is the odd one out of cow, chicken or grass? And most people from a Northern European, North American background say grass because it's a vegetable. The other two are animals. Africa, Asia, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, actually get rid of the chicken because the cow has got a relationship with the grass. And tribal cultures think in terms of relationships, not categories. And it turns out that's actually more important in evolutionary terms. The category thinking really comes from the Reformation and the growth of individualism. So I think what you're actually going to see is the rise of non North Atlantic, I call it North Atlantic, it's not Western. So cultures which are tribal, cultures of remained education, which is not just information regurgitation, which is what we're seeing with AI, those are going to have the strategic advantage. And also there's going to be huge opportunity because we're about to suffer a series of catastrophic changes. I'm going to say temperature in God rio went to 52 degrees centigrade last year. If it goes to 58 degrees, you die. End of argument. If you look at the storms we're having in the UK at the moment, I mean, it used to be where there was snow in Orion in North Wales, we all phoned each other up and dashed up there with crampons and ice axe. Now he's up there for three or four weeks every year. So the world is about to change in radical, unexpected ways. And the people who maintain human connectivity, the generalists, the people who understand the science, the people who maintain connectivity and the countries which do that are going to be the ones which survive. Great. So I'm interested, given that view of the future, what do you imagine is the next chapter of your work and how do you think you're going to change what you're doing and the models you're doing to help the rest of the world deal with those situations? We're currently looking for investment to scale some of this stuff, by the way. So the swarm compass concept, the concept of using swarm intelligence, what we're doing on that, and this is next generation market research, is to say we can sell you a panel of academics, of journalists, as well as your own employees. So shifting decision making to one hour, rather the substrate management, the context, understanding the context of the decision and getting support for that to an hour from months, is one of the things we're working on. And also the really big ambitious project and we proved this now on four continents is we've worked out how to get children in schools at the age of 16 to be ethnographers to their communities. So it means they go into their community every week and they gather stories into a quantified framework. It ticks a huge box in all the school curriculums. So teachers love it because it's something they're going to do anyway. Our ambition on that is to have every child at the age of 16 in every school in the world gathering stories every week into an open source database that everybody can use. And that's the counter to social media. And there's a book by a friend of mine, Neal Stephenson, brilliant science fiction writer. I actually don't like this book apart from the first three chapters. It's called Dodge in Hell. But in the first three chapters he describes a world in which only the rich can have their information curated. Everybody else is sold to a company or a religious group. And that's where we currently are with social media. So producing a counter to that based on real human interaction. And we're building that into peace and conflict research. So back in the 70s, when I was working on this in Northern Ireland, the Catholic Protestant Divide, there was one approach which is get everybody together in a room and get them all to agree that they would be nice to each other. Well, that never worked. Wonderfully satirized in Derry Girls, which is a great comedy, we took two Catholics and one Protestant, or vice versa, and we dumped them into the slums of Latin America for three months. And they realized pretty fast they had more in common than they realized. And they had a conversation about their differences in the context of working together. What we're now doing with Children of the World is say we can find stories which are common, say to Red and Blue. We can then algorithmically allocate resource to people who come across that divide to work on a common problem. So we build empathy at scale. And I think that's one of the most important things I've ever designed in my life. One of the most important things for the world. If we don't make the world more empathetic, both between people and the planet, then actually the world, well, we die as a species. It's that simple. Well, I can't imagine a better place to cut off the opening part of our podcast and move into my closing questions and your project, Save Empathy around the World, which aligns with everything this podcast is all about. I thought that when I looked at your website. So I'm going to move into the questions that I ask everyone at the end of the podcast, Starting with, what's one leadership skill you think will become even more important in the future? Learning from failing. Interesting. And if you could wave a magic wand and immediately make things change, what would you do to make organizations more humanity centric? I'd move all leaders to crews. I break them. The individualism model. And you still have a pilot, but who the pilot is can change. Cool. Almost like. I know we don't want to talk about academics, but department heads shift periodically. It's not a fixed role. Being dean is a punishment, not a reward. You really want being the leader to be a punishment, not a reward? It makes it much more successful. Yeah. And what's one final piece of advice you'd like to leave with our listeners? Oh, I think take the family metaphor. Just every time you're going to work, think about, would this work at home with a bunch of teenage kids? If we want to work with a bunch of teenage kids, why the hell are you trying it? Great. And just finally, where can people follow your work or go deeper into the ideas that you've talked about? I blog. I mean, I'm not blogging as much as I should do because I'm busy, But if you search the blog post on the website, you'll find it. We run training programs. I'm deliberately making sure my successes are a group of people, not individuals. And I also know they'll do it differently because they tell me they don't believe that's good news. All right. It's the way it works. So go to the website, look at the blog. Yeah. Come on the train. So just tell us what the URL of the website is. We'll put it in the notes, too. Okay, so if you search Cynefin co, that will get you to the website. Cynefin IO is the open source wiki where all of our methods are located. Awesome. Well, Dave, thanks for joining me on the show. This has been fascinating. Real pleasure. Well, I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Dave Snowden. Now let's dive into the after show, a segment where I'll reflect on the key takeaways from this episode. Welcome to the after show. All right, this one is going to stick with me. Not because Dave gave us a deep framework and sent us on our way, but because he kept dropping images and lines that are hard to unhear. An Aboriginal activist killed on indigenous land in northern Australia. In the police response, it's only an Abu A CEO who can get a workforce swarming around a Decision in an hour. A leadership strategy borrowed from Frozen 2. All I can do is the next right thing. And that brutal but hilarious gut check, do your children have KPIs? Dave doesn't talk like most management thinkers. He talks like someone who has lived inside real systems, political, technological, organizational, and learned to see patterns that most of us miss. Here are five takeaways I'm holding onto. Takeaway number one. Your world gets bigger when you stop assuming your experience is the world. Dave's career didn't start in corporate strategy. It started in NGOs, indigenous land rights, and the slums of Rio. His point wasn't nostalgia. It was that leaders who only grew up inside polished institutions tend to lose contact with variety and how different people experience the same reality. And without that variety, leaders manage by rules and spreadsheets because it's all they can see. Takeaway number two is that sense making is a verb, and enough to act beats perfect to decide. He made a small linguistic point that carries a big leadership shift. He writes sense making with a hyphen because it's something you do, not something you have. And it comes with sufficiency. You will never know everything. The job is to understand enough to take the next step responsibly, minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity with what you actually know. Takeaway number three. Nature is a better leadership teacher than most business books. This was a classic, Dave. Formal hierarchies are like tree roots. Cut them and things die. But the fungal network underneath is resilient, adaptive, and redistributes resources when conditions get harsh. That's the informal organization. And his point wasn't poetic, it was practical. He described entangled trios, peering a new employee, someone about to retire, and someone on the fast track. So trust in knowledge. Move through the system fast. That's how you build a healthier substrate for uncertainty. Takeaway number four, in complexity, the strategy isn't the plan, it's the next right move. His Frozen 2 strategy made this unforgettable. Instead of a big vision statement, which he basically called platitudes complexity. Leadership is describe the present, find the adjacent possible, do the next right thing, then look again. He even used that great line about shaping the environment so the cost of virtue is less than the cost of sin. That's what real influence looks like when you can't control outcomes. And the final takeaway is that AI can accelerate sense making, but it can also quietly delete human capability. Dave drew a clean distinction. Humans think abductively. We can make novel connections without training data. AI is inductive. It repeats patterns from the past. Used well, AI can help leaders swarm an organization, surface consensus and outliers quickly. Used carelessly, it strips away apprenticeship and judgment, the very path that creates future leaders. His line about replacing middle managers was the kicker. If you automate the learning layers, where do senior leaders come from? So here's what I'm left thinking. Where in your own leadership are you still acting as if the goal is certainty when the real goal is learning your way forward? And if your organization is a living system, not a machine, what are you doing to strengthen the networks, stories and human judgment it will rely on when things get hard? That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed this episode and remember, you are the flame that can spark humanity at scale. One decision, one conversation, one moment at a time. Thanks for tuning in to humanity at Scale Scale Redefining Leadership Podcast Remember, true leadership isn't only about achieving short term results. It's about creating a lasting, positive impact on all of the people you touch. Join me next time as we uncover more insights and strategies for humanity. Centric leadership. Until then, I'm Bruce Temkin encouraging you to lead with purpose and empathy and to be the spark that elevates elevates humanity at scale.