From risk to strategy and back: complexity science for turbulent industries

Masterclass

From risk to strategy and back: complexity science for turbulent industries

About

The tech industry is facing meteoric change – practices, strategies, the way organisations are put together, function, and make decisions need to adapt to as-yet-unknown changes. Some they see coming, some they see hints of, and others are here before they know it. Under these conditions, how do we keep strategy responsive, yet consistent and coherent? How do we manage and mitigate risk? And how do we address both challenges, strategy and risk, at the same time?

Dave Snowden draws from the science of complex adaptive systems, natural science, and the fields that study how humans tick and think to create a set of practical, actionable tools and frameworks that give us ways to respond to those challenges without predetermining what the solution should look like; evidence based and applicability brought together for a volatile environment.

The skills, methods, and knowledge we will cover have a wide range of applications, from larger scale strategy to immediate daily practice, whether it is project planning, software architecture, or even working in teams. The course will combine presentation elements with active, animated discussions and hands-on opportunities to try methods and exercises out and experience them in the session.

In a world of increasing need to manage risk, resource constraints that force tough decisions, and pressure from all sides we need to respond accordingly and avoid the risk of paralysis in the face of complexity. This session will guide attendees to not just navigate a changing landscape, but do our own part in changing it to our advantage.

The following outline is provided as an indication, and all these contents will be included, but depending on the needs emerging in the session, additional material may be added.

Course contents

How complex systems work

Why “best practice” doesn’t always guide us correctly (and what to do when it doesn’t)
Understanding a complex system in terms of its rich, local interactions and working with it
Principles for resilience

Principles for managing complexity

Understanding emergence
Using the system’s tendencies and orientations
Placing the past in its proper place without expecting it will determine the future
The PAGODA acronym (a mnemonic for how we act in a complex system) as a practical guide for remembering and applying the key principles

Vector theory of change

Understanding what we can track and measure when we want to achieve change – and why
Supplementing KPIs

Risks and pitfalls to avoid

How to reduce costly failures and why do they happen
Identifying some key, repeatable ways things tend to go wrong and their warning signs

Estuarine mapping and the Estuarine Framework

The Estuarine Framework is a complexity framework that helps us identify where we are, how to map our territory, and what we can (and can’t) do about it, and here we will understand what it is and how it works
Opportunity to try out different elements of the mapping process in practice
How to define and implement strategy using the Estuarine Framework

Human sensor networks and the role of monitoring in complex systems

Proactive management and identification of weak signals of danger or opportunity – how might we spot them?
The role of story and narrative in human communication and how to combine it with quantitative data at scale
The conditions under which individual humans become a powerful monitoring network

Weaving risk and strategy together: a new framework

The newest framework (WRASSE) in our toolkit, with an active opportunity to explore its applications in practice in the session
WRASSE combines an exploration of an organisation’s, teams, or even individual’s portfolio of actions and practices to see where risk and strategic opportunities lie, and how we may counter the first and meet the second
Bringing together the elements of risk and strategy through a portfolio-oriented approach that contains multiple elements to address different environments, including managing when things are far from “business as usual”

Target audience and prerequisites

There are no prerequisites or advance study required for attending this course.

This is especially relevant for roles in the tech industry and organizational design, in its broader sense, from technical roles that want to better harness the multiple interactions and dependencies of their work to manager, leaders, and OD professionals.

6 May 2026