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'LAS Conference 2013 - Keynote Dave Snowden - Making Sense of Complexity'
[Dave Snowden]
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A chaotic system is one in which there are no constraints, which means every agent of whatever nature is independent of every other agent.
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The line which goes through the middle is called the line of coherence. If we’re on that line it’s okay.
We really don’t want to have excessive proof but not have [?] - if we do that we get heretics and mavericks. This is where a small group of people know they’re right, but nobody else believes them. Their solution to this problem is to explain to people why they’re right, and when that doesn’t work they explain to the people why they’re wrong. Then they wonder why they get [burned as heretics].
You need heretics in an organisation because they think differently.
There are two strategies from a management perspective. One is coaching: this is finding people that can interpret them to the wider community. What you’re doing is pulling them back onto the coherence line. One of the big roles of coaches is to reinterpret material because the people with the bright new ideas are very poor at explaining them, in the main. The other alternative is hide it until it can prove itself.
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