The Complexity Workshop, December 12 2018

Sonja Blignaut, a longtime partner of Dave Snowden and experienced practitioner in Dave´s work, will facilitate a practical workshop directly after Dave´s Masterclass to build a bridge between Dave’s new ideas and practical applications.  The Cynefin framework and SenseMaker® offer many ways to deal with complex challenges and we believe this practical workshop will maximize the benefit from your time investment in Dave Snowden December “What´s next for Agile?” Masterclass (or at an earlier time).

There is a growing awareness that the organizations we work in are more like unpredictable and interconnected ecosystems than predictable machines. In these complex ecosystems, most of our models and “best practices” are no longer effective and managers and decision makers often find that they are not equipped for this new world of work as the prevailing management paradigms are based on assumptions of linearity, predictability, and certainty.

The Agile movement has introduced new ways of work that promise a faster, more adaptive response, but it often doesn’t reach its full potential as organizational governing structures and strategies are mostly still rooted in the mechanistic control paradigm. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that organizations that want to become strategically agile and responsive will need to fundamentally shift not only work practices but also how they think, strategize and organize.

In this session, we will explore the nature of complex adaptive systems, the implications of seeing our organizations as such and also answer the practical “so what?” questions in terms of what this means for our work practices. Objectives of the workshop include:

• Time to make sense of, and integrate the new ideas with your own knowledge and unique context.
• A model for navigating and working in complex systems, integrating a lot of Daves work.
• Helping you find suitable contexts and problems in your working environment where you can immediately apply the new thinking.
• Finding your own language, metaphors, and stories to communicate the ideas effectively to decision-makers.
• A brief introduction to existing products/processes that might be used as low-risk pilots to introduce the ideas to your organization.

Who Should Attend the Course? This training is designed for all practitioners and complex thinkers (Agile practitioners, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Product Managers, Agile coaches, project managers, people managers, architects, designers, developers, DevOps, HR, OD & L&D and anyone else that works in constantly-evolving and dynamic situations) who has done at least one class with Dave Snowden or is well familiar with Dave’s work and Cynefin. This one-day practical and experimental workshop is ideal for anyone who wants to apply Snowden’s thinking in their teams or their clients in a variety of different ways.