Dave Snowden

Dave Snowden is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co. and Director of the Cynefin Centre for Applied Complexity. His international work covers government and industry, looking at complex strategic, organisational, and decision-making issues. He has pioneered a science-based approach, drawing on anthropology, the cognitive sciences, and complex adaptive systems theory. This approach, known as naturalising sense-making, has been acknowledged as one of five distinct schools of sensemaking/sense-making.

He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on various subjects and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He is a passionate advocate for recognising the value of human capabilities in decision-making, particularly the differences between the embodied, extended, and enacted capabilities of human communities to make sense of the world and the inference models used by machine processing.