Dave Snowden

Dave Snowden

Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd, United Kingdom

Keynote: Moving away from a manufacturing metaphor in software development

Much of the language of the Agile community is drawn from manufacturing in which a product is produced to specification. Simply doing that faster or in shorter cycles does not change the linear nature of the process something we see all too often in the typical sprint. This presentation will introduce some key concepts from natural science and seek to apply them to the next generation of Agile thinking. This will include

• Understanding the development environment as a complex adaptive system.

• Co-evolutionary approaches to user requirements capture and specification of requirements.

• The use of micro-narratives to understand unstated user needs.

• Reducing risk through safe-to-fail experimentation before you start a sprint.

• Continuous feedback during development through whole of community engagement.

The presentation will include the Cynefin framework recently identified by the Gartner Group as one of the key models of IT operations and which is extensively used within the Agile community.

Target audience: CEO, management, product management, project management, software architect, scrum teams

Presentation to be downloaded: PDF (12,20 MB)

About Dave Snowden

Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organizational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organizations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He holds visiting Chairs at the Universities of Pretoria and Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as a visiting fellowship at the University of Warwick. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore. His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management aware for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge management. He is a editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in the field of knowledge management and is an Editor in Chief of E:CO. In 2006 he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research program on emergence and in 2007 was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.

He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity; during that period he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a world wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector.

His company Cognitive Edge exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organizations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organizations, NGOs and Independent Consultants. He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management.

Workshop: How to use Cynefin framework for user requirements capture