Dave is a busy fellow. Dave is also a very smart and very practical fellow.
The most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) carries an article by he and co-author Mary Boone titled "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making". One of the most interesting things about the framework to which the title refers is that is based upon and derived from complexity science.
Notwithstanding any speculation about the need for leaders that folks like me and Dave Pollard get up to, I am quite certain that we humans will keep using leaders as a fundamental part of how we make decisions and take actions for a while yet. So providing leaders with a framework based on science rather than, say, gut feel seems (to me at least) like something worth investigating.
Given it’s likely that we won’t collectively jettison the placement of leaders at the head of our collective or organizational decision-making processes in the next short while, I am glad that Dave Snowden and Mary Boone’s framework is getting wider exposure. It was developed over the past decade or so with help from some of his colleagues – I don’t know the full story of it’s development.
I took a three-day intense (!) course titled "Complexity, Narrative and Sensemaking" last February to become a certified Cognitive Edge practitioner. The course, along with the significant volume of pre-course reading, outlined the theory, the methods and the application of the Cynefin Framework for sensemaking.
I have told any number of people that for me this framework has pulled together more than 20 years of pretty deep exploration and study of strategy, organizational development, cultural anthropology and organizational change theory and methods.
It simply was one of the two best courses about core organizational and business issues that I have ever attended. The other was a three-day master class with 10 other people in London in 1992, led by Charles Handy. Dave is in good company there.
The excerpt below is from HBR’s editor’s review / introduction to the article, which is available here behind the HBR paywall. Thomas Stewart has a pretty good grounding in these and related issues himself, having written the book "Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations" a decade or so ago.
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[ Snip … ]
What they have learned, and what this article shows, is that often people respond to issues almost reflexively, like the proverbial man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Smart leaders choose their tools according to their sense of the kind of decision they face. Simple situations are best met with simple tools, like rules: "Don’t stick your finger into an electrical outlet," for instance. Other situations — for example, complicated problems with many different parts that nevertheless have a right answer — call for the services of an expert: If your wiring is bad, better call an electrician rather than try to fix it yourself. Still other cases are so chaotic, so senseless, that a leader should simply step in and do something, like a teacher wading in to stop a school yard squabble.
The situations leaders encounter most fall into none of these classes but rather into a fourth: circumstances that are complex, where the truth is not immediately evident even to an expert but emerges over time, where cause-and-effect relationships are not well established, where positive results come from offering incentives rather than issuing commands, and where, consequently, the tools of influence and decision making are subtle and ill-defined. Most leaders are told that it is important to be (or appear to be) decisive.
Fair enough — but how is one to reconcile the imperative of decisiveness with the reality of ambiguity? There’s a growing body of academic research about decision making under uncertainty. (If you Google the term, you will get — or I did — 284,000 hits.) Not much of this research has worked its way into practical frameworks for managers. To me, one of the great values of "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making" is that it lives up to its title. In so doing, it connects sense-making to action in ways that are both wise and practical.
Thomas A. Stewart
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Tags: Dave Snowden, Mary Boone, HBR, complexity science, leadership, decision making
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