In this one-day Workshop, Dave Snowden, the creator of the Cynefin framework and famous in the agile community as an inspiring and sometimes controversial speaker, will address agility from the point of view of complexity. Participants will be exposed to a realistic approach that puts context before dogma and shows a future for Agile that goes beyond fighting over methods and towards a sophisticated application of agility in organizations.

This class will offer an introduction to the Cynefin framework by its creator: the Cynefin framework is a transformational idea that uses a situation-specific approach to making sense of the world in order to act in it, and ensures effective work, decision making, and management even in complex and uncertain environments. For Agile practitioners, this framework supports effectively tailoring methods and practices to different situations. Cynefin-informed methods and practices help Agile organizations harness change and turn complex situations into a competitive advantage for customers and the business.

While it is true to say that people’s attitudes and beliefs are key to implementing an agile project, or Agile in itself, much of the use of the term ‘mindset’ implies a mental model that can be defined and engineered. In this presentation, we will look at how we can measure attitudes within an organization and use multiple small actions to trigger the rapid evolution of organizational culture, so that it can sustain agile developments. Mindset and the alignment-based ideas of some on the Agile movement too often imply creating homogeneous beliefs and values that will lead to full alignment. In practice, this damages resilience and can be dangerous. This presentation will introduce the idea of coherence instead of alignment - the celebration of cognitive and behavioral differences that can align if needed to support the delivery of sustainable solutions.

In order to successful scale any method or practice, it has to have some basis in theory. This presentation will use insights from complex adaptive systems theory and the cognitive sciences to lay a foundation for that theory. Seeing software development as a problem of knowledge management, the theory will elaborate a understanding of applications as the emergent property of a co-evolutionary interactions between technology capability and unarticulated user requirements.

Having established a basic theory a range of methods and tools will be elaborated. These include:

- Narrative based approaches to requirements capture (not to be confused with Story telling or story boarding) which gather thousands of fragmented self-signified anecdotes relating to real and imagined needs within a user community and allow interpretation and integration into project planning.

- Approaches to project planning and implementation that focus on the creation of self-organising teams of specialists and users to create novel approaches, supported by evidence to previously intractable problems. This is particularly relevant to the 5-10% of any major project which creates 95-90% of the grief.

- The integration of tools such as blogs, wiki's etc into the development environment. Too often corporate environments over-constrain those tools into over rigid structures which destroy their utility.

Make better decisions

Learn to engage with the unanticipated for strategic advantage. For leaders, consultants and project managers.

How to manage uncertainty in increasingly complex environments?

The ability to manage and navigate complexity is a key strategic advantage. However, many organizations are trapped in past practices and structures. Breaking through such inertia requires praxis - theory informed practice.

The Cynefin framework, and its application in managing complexity is at the heart of this training program.

The Academy of Management awarded the Harvard Business Review article, Cynefin & Leadership, the "Best Practitioner Paper". Their citation reads:

"This paper introduces an important new perspective that has enormous future value, and does so in a clear way that shows it can be used. The article makes several significant contributions. First, and most importantly, it introduces complexity science to guide managers’ thoughts and actions. Second, it applies this perspective to advance a typology of contexts to help leaders to sort out the wide variety of situations in which they must lead decisions. Third, it advises leaders concerning what actions they should take in response"

Cognitive Edge has developed a modular training program that allows participants to understand the theory of complexity and how to put it to practice.

Crucial new knowledge for:

• Project management
• Change management
• Innovation and development
• Risk and crisis management
• Shaping culture
• Safety management
• Knowledge management