Dick Sblog

I’ve just spent most of the day in the company of Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge and my head’s spinning a bit… Cognitive Edge is a really interesting company, not the least because they take an open-source approach to the development of consultancy methods: in itself, that’s pretty unusual and highly refreshing. Even more refreshing is that they are developing an approach to research based on participation and discovery rather than normative methods and they are developing software tools to support this approach, leveraging themes of narrative, complexity and networks for impact.

OK, that probably all sounds like more consultant-speak – what does it mean? Well, to this ex-zoologist, it makes real sense because they acknowledge and embrace the recognition that human beings think, behave and interact in complex ways within complex environments. The approach is influenced by insights from the cognitive sciences and the science of complex adaptive systems, along with anthropology and philosophy, rather than the assumptions of successive consultant fashionistas. There just isn’t space here – take a look at their website and read what they say about themselves.

I was with Dave at a seminar organised by DNA Wales and at a subsequent meeting to discuss the implementation of a knowledge management programme. [One of the things we agreed was not to call it a KM programme!] The discussion was a fascinating exchange juxtaposing the client’s desire to achieve effective and sustainable change, the cultural and other constraints in which they operate and the potential of a variety of relatively simple, free tools to seed the development of an organisational ecology in which individuals record fragments of information that others can access and reassemble to meet their own needs.

What’s this got to do with the OLPC? Well, not a lot directly but over lunch I had a conversation with Dave about the muddle headed approach we take to resourcing our schools with expensive gear and the fact that an alternative approach is rapidly becoming possible. I’ve just written a guest article about this on Seb Schmoller’s fortnightly mailing.