Click here to go straight to Dave Snowden presentation and discussion or click on image above

We are interested in citizens being able to act creatively and confidently in the entangled, crisis-ridden world of the early 21st century. To do that well, we think they should have the same understanding of the systems that they live in, as those in the political, corporate or otherwise governing classes do. Part of our aspirations for CANs (citizen action networks) is that they are an opportunity for communities to connect their immediate needs and resources with world forces and trends - cosmo-local is our shorthand for that.

So in that spirit, we occasionally like to bring to the Daily Alternative some big-picture thinkers that are able to communicate their work, in a way that could make sense to citizens and non-experts. Above is the link to a recent presentation by Dave Snowden, made to the recent Complexity Weekend. Dave is an organisational consultant who helps everyone from government ministers to nurses, the armed forces to sectarian combatants.

Dave wants these actors to understand the “complexity” of their situations - meaning how many interconnected factors can give rise to unexpected results (the unexpectedness is what makes complex different from complicated), His presentation above explains this admirably - Dave likes to illustrate with practical examples, which helps.

In addition, Snowden has just recently brought out a “field guide” to his thinking, in concert with the European Commission. From that comes an intriguing guide - below, which the paper explains in greater depth - to the ways that any leaders of a community, organisation or government might respond to a chaotic situation (and the example given throughout is Covid and the pandemic).

[Note: “Exapt” refers to the evolutionary concept of “exaptation”, which means the repurposing of one feature for a function different that the original one (eg, birds’ feathers starting out as mating decoration, and then being found to be useful as an instrument for flight)].

In a world where it often seems that individual humanity gets lost when systems are mapped, or algorithms are given prominence in predicting behaviour, we are intrigued by Dave’s invention of something called “anthro-complexity”, which is:

the study of the human aspect of complex adaptive systems. Our approach argues that human beings and societies are radically different than insects, birds, or chemical reactions and therefore cannot be modelled in the same way.

At the same time, we can make sense of the world we live in and take action in it, even in conditions of uncertainty, by following complexity-appropriate methods and letting natural science define the outer limits of our practice.

This anthro-complexity perspective is made possible by a kind of story-gathering and processing tool called Sensemaker, which Snowden explains as:

The first and original distributed ethnographic approach to sense-making, SenseMaker allows for large-scale capture into a quantitative framework where the ‘subject’ becomes their own ethnographer. SenseMaker combines the scale of numbers with the explanatory power of narrative.

By enabling self-signification – allowing respondents to give meaning to their own experience – SenseMaker provides an approach that avoids the epistemic injustice of third-party or algorithmic interpretation.

Sophisticated visualisations of patterns, ideas, outliers, tendencies, threats, or opportunities are intuitively readable to anyone without the need for a background in statistics. No barriers. No pre-requisite expertise required. Just curiosity.

SenseMaker allows the powerful combination of vast amounts of data, with the rich context of narrative, based on the anecdotes of real people going about their real lives. Very importantly, SenseMaker places the voices and interpretations of people at the centre, instead of privileging those in power.

We have been observing for a while how the Pol.is software has been used to gather rich, subtle patterns of opinion and values from communities and populations - helping people to understand Brexit, or climate change, or immigration, in ways that opens up the complex spaces between polarised position. Seems that Snowden’s work aims to do the same.

And in terms of a politics of self-determination, we are struck by the fact that Snowden is also a proud member of Plaid Cymru, the party supporting Welsh independence.

A fascinating talk from Dave Snowden on "managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis"