Thanks to National Radio for this interview

The following interview by Kim Hill with Dave Snowden is a fascinating look at brain patterning - both collective and individual, history, trauma, terrorism, September 11, creativity, amorality and other very interesting notions...Thanks to National Radio for this interview

The following interview by Kim Hill with Dave Snowden is a fascinating look at brain patterning - both collective and individual, history, trauma, terrorism, September 11, creativity, amorality and other very interesting notions...Presenter (Kim Hill): Organic Knowledge Management...What will they think of next? No, It's not a filing system for chemical-free agriculture. Organic Knowledge Management is one of the specialities of a Welshman who is a director of the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity in Wales. He's Dave Snowden and the centre focuses on using human networks to enable the emergence of new meaning in organisations and markets. Are you with me so far? No it's heavy stuff. I'm not even with me, but here's the thing; talking to Tariq Ali - you might have heard him earlier this morning, brought home yet again the fact that it's often completely impossible to walk in someone else's shoes, especially if they seem to be trying to blow you up. Now Dave Snowden, has done work with the Pentagon on how US Agencies are trying to understand the rest of the world's vision of US Foreign Policy. He's in New Zealand to work with IBM New Zealand. He joins me now. Good morning.

Dave Snowden (Director of the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity): Hi.

Presenter: I thought that would be quite a good place to start because I read out those two quotes earlier this morning in relation to Tariq Ali. Tariq Ali quoted them in his book, "The Clash of Fundamentalism". So you've got Madeline Albright saying I think that half a million dead children are worth what we need to do in Iraq and Osama Bin Laden saying the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies is an individual duty for every Muslim and you're going, oh you know there is no good guy here. What did you do with Americans to try to enable them to comprehend that they weren't necessarily the good guys and the other lot weren't necessarily the bad guys?

Snowden: We used a series of narrative techniques. We've spent about ten years researching narrative or story within organisations and within cultures and one of the things that we know is that people just don't see or understand something which is alien to their culture. So if you look at political difference you know I mean Tariq Ali and I were both in the UK in the 70s, where to be quite honest if you weren't a Marxist, you weren't anybody. The issue is what type of Marxist were you and if you didn't occupy the university at least once a year you weren't a real revolutionary and I now work with people in the US who work in a completely different environment. I can distinguish between 15 different types of Marxist. They can distinguish between 15 different types of a religious right, which for me is a mess, though we have the same genetic roots. So what actually happens is cultures build up patterns with the stories that we're told and those patterns lock into our mind. The human brain makes decisions based on patterns. So it's not a logical, analytical process. You can't just say to somebody, this is wrong, think about it rationally. You have to change the patterns in their brain before they'll see things in a different way. So the concept we used here it was a resonant concept.

Presenter: What do you mean by that, "resonant"?

Snowden: Resonance is, if you think about resonance in physics all right, one thing resonates with another, you get an amplified effect. So you have to something which looks similar enough to something that people can see things in a different way and we do a variety of things around here. We sometimes use actually alien environments. We use anthropologists working with science fiction writers. We also use history and alternative history and what we did in this case is this was only a matter of weeks after 911. So it was quite scary to get a sample group of policymakers to see things from an Islamic perspective and that's totally alien. You know it's - you're now into black and white; they're wrong, we're right, which is inevitable in that context. You can't -

Presenter: Who engaged you to do this though Dave?

Snowden: It is the American Defence Research Agency.

Presenter: okay.

Snowden: And they put the money in which created things like the internet and they - I like the Americans in this respect, they'll throw money at something on the basis it might produce it and the concept this bunch of Welsh consultants had this idea about using narrative and complexity, we would never get any traction in the UK, but we got traction in Washington, although I think we were about the only non-us people working there. And what we had to do was to find an event in American History, which was profound for the Americans, which would get them to see 9/11 from a different perspective. So we chose the war of 1812, because in the war of 1812 the Americans were the terrorists against the dominant arrogant imperial power of the day, Britain and we finally got irritated with minor acts of piracy. We didn't mind a few merchant ships being taken out, but when they destroyed British frigates, that went to the heart of the British Empire.

Presenter: As in the World Trade Centre.

Snowden: Got it. In fact if you look at the times in London, it's got the same trauma as the New York Times. It had that big an impact in London. So we got irritated and we sort of broke off from fighting the French, you know that thousand-year-old fight between the British and the French which has only recently been suspended, but recently resumed, and sent over a fleet of navy ships with battle-hardened troops from the French wars. Destroyed the entire American navy in one engagement apart from the USS Constitution, which ran back into Boston Harbour and hasn't come out again since. Now the battle-hardened troops in the French wars, took Washington, burnt the library of Congress and by the time we got to Baltimore with the Canadians coming in from the north, the commander of the force has died, it all became inconvenient, the French became troublesome again, so we negotiated a peace settlement and went back to fighting the French. So we took this group through a two hour process of alternative history's turning points, it's multiple abstractions, so people stopped thinking about what really happened and go to underlying patterns and at the end of that they end it with a series of linguistic filters which kind of only make sense to them because they come out of the process. And then they had to describe 9/11 through those filters and the effect was profound, because now they're seeing 9/11 from the perspective of an American whose wife and family have just been wiped out by British troops and rhyme and reason doesn't work because these guys have dominant military power and we had total silence and white faces around the table for about 20 minutes.

I'll never forget it. And as I say that work is now expanding. We're taking 50 events in world history like the fall of Constantinople and if you don't understand the different interpretation of that you just do not understand the Balkans. The expulsion of - (unclear) - Spain in 15th century, that's still talked about in Al Quaida literature. Boer War. Yeah? And then we're taking 200 universities around the world and getting their first year political science and history students to effectively go through the same process. So we have 200 biased accounts of each of those 50 events in world history and that gives us the capacity to create a multi-cultural understanding set of filters. So an American policymaker can look through the eyes of a Cairo student and see things in a different way.

Presenter: Somebody was quoting somebody the other day as saying that it's not history that repeats itself, it's historians who repeat one another.

Snowden: - (laughs) -

Presenter: Have you ever been to Northern Ireland?

Snowden: Yes.

Presenter: That would be a fruitful experience wouldn't it?

Snowden: Well, there were six counties.

Presenter: Mmm.

Snowden: Yeah, which you talk about, it actually indicates which background. Yeah, no I was on the streets of Belfast in the 70s in the civil rights marches and saw everything disintegrate and I think there you've got again a set of locking stories. I mean the interesting thing about that is we make these visible in places like the North of Ireland - we see it in the Middle East, but the same also applies in companies. You see the same sort of torch of differences based on different stories and different perspectives. Now what's been fascinated in the work is the stuff we've done for the US government, we've been able to apply in companies on for example merger and acquisition, or for governments in terms of their relationship with the people where you have these locking stories which prevent people seeing things in different ways.

Presenter: Mmm. Except that if you get a fully balanced vision of how everything is not good or bad, but depending on how you look at it as either good or bad, don't you become paralysed, don't you become immobile?

Snowden: I think if you tried to do that, yes you would and I don't think it's possible. I think the old liberal goal, you know that everybody would be fully objective and would see all sides of the world, is idealistic to the point where it's dangerous because attempts to achieve it are just not possible. You know within a context what we need to do is to get people to see things from the context of other people around the problem. But not to be completely neutral, because the human brain isn't designed to work that way. It's fascinating when you get into this.

Presenter: I mean this is very behavioural; it's also very amoral.

Snowden: Amoral I'd accept, but not immoral.

Presenter: No, amoral.

Snowden: We - I think one of the things we're starting to find out and this has come like over the last 20 to 30 years, is we've had several hundred years of believing in enlightenment science. You know there is a rational approach to everything, and I put "rational" in inverted commas. You know we can empirically evaluate things. We can be completely objective and that's kind of like 200 or 300 year old history in western thinking, less so in the east and we're now starting to realise that actually the human brain was never designed to work in that way. Faced with a problem we do a first-fit-pattern match with our previous experience.

Presenter: When you say "first fit pattern match", like an instinctive reaction?

Snowden: It's a quasi-instinctive reaction. If you look at the way the human eye works it is that we only keep less than 1% of our visual range in sharp focus and what we actually do is a series of spot observations and we fill in the gaps from previous experience.

Presenter: Okay. Is that what confabulation is - you know how, oh well never mind?

Snowden: Well, you can get confusion because what happens is something happens between the gaps.

Presenter: Yes.

Snowden: I get confused.

Presenter: Yes.

Snowden: Which is why you get these visual stimulations.

Presenter: Yes. Persistence of vision; that's how it is?

Snowden: All of those sort of things go with it. Yeah. The other thing which is interesting is cognitively we work the same way. So we very quickly take a few things in and they trigger a resonance with something that we previously experienced and we assume that and this is actually a survival instinct. You know if you see a skinhead running at you along the street, you know you want to run because your stories tell you you're going to get mugged. Right? You don't rashly assess the thing and make logical choices. So one of the big issues as we start to understand this, this and there's evidence for this as well for example London taxi drivers and I find these guys fascinating. They spend two years of their lives driving around London on motor scooters -

Presenter: Getting the knowledge?
Snowden: Getting the knowledge, which is what they call it. The part of their brain, which is undeveloped in most human beings, but is highly developed in homing pigeons, is more developed than other human beings. Same is true of Wall Street Traders. Successful Wall Street Traders' parts of their brains are patterned in different ways.

Presenter: Are you suggesting that the experience of being a Wall Street trader, or a taxi driver, makes that change happen, or that bit of the brain inclines then because it's -

Snowden: It's an interaction between the two; it's called emergence in complexity science. The brain and people and attitudes and interactions with other people; all of these things are interacting with each other and patterns emerge from that interaction, rather like a snowflake. You know a snowflake forms. It's beautiful and its patterned, but nobody can predict what the next snowflake will look like, because there's too many interactions. And that's what happens with humans individually and collectively. So if I do a job for a couple of years my brain repatterns itself around that job, which is why take another example, we're re-introducing medieval apprenticeship schemes into companies, for management, because you can't translate knowledge into written form and train people and tell people what to do; you have to change their patterns of their interactions with employees and markets, so that the patterns of the way that they work individually and collectively change. And this is a real revolution. We've had a hundred years of management science and consultancy practice focus entirely on mechanical approaches. You know we'll design the thing, we'll plan it, we'll say what it should be like. We'll be objective in all the wrong senses of the world and we're now taking science from biology and from chemistry, which is complexity and effectively doing what happened a hundred years ago with Newtonian science and completely reinventing management, discipline by discipline by discipline, based on this whole concept of patterns.

Presenter: And do people get this; do management get this?

Snowden: Yeah, most managers kind of like know it in their hearts of heart.

Presenter: Do they?

Snowden: They know that - they know that most of their decisions, their really good decisions are gut-feel. Most organisations, I mean IBM has got these in its history as well, missed opportunities because there are weak signals and they fall outside the patterns of previous success. You look at the length of time that most companies exist; they don't exist for long, because they've become successful, they've been growing to a pattern and then something comes left field and they don't see it. So managers know in their gut, yeah that this stuff is true and it's fascinating if you look at it. I'll give you an American example; a group of marines were once sent to the Stock Exchange, the mercantile stock exchange in New York as a training exercise and so they were taught how to deal, they competed with the dealers and the dealers won all the games, but that was okay because they expected that and they went back to Virginia and then the dealers phoned them up and said we had a lot of fun, can we come and play with your systems? And they thought this is cool, we'll get our own back. So they took then back, taught them electronic warfare, all of these mass assimilations and then the dealers won every war game -

Presenter: - (laughs) -

Snowden: - And it wasn't meant to work like that.

Presenter: No.

Snowden: And what the dealers were doing is what dealers do brilliantly, is spotting the potential for a pattern before anybody else and acting to enforce the positive ones and disrupt the negative ones and what the marines were doing was doing a rational assessment of the situation, deploying troops in a logical structured way and if they were competing with military people who thought like them they'd win, but against the dealers they always lost.

Presenter: There's another experiment isn't there where some army or military people were sent into a kindergarten to be teachers for a day -

Snowden: Yeah, it was worse than that, they were told to manage the playground and they were given a week to prepare for it, which was the cruel thing.

Presenter: - (laughs) - Okay.

Snowden: So they did this rational assessment. They actually did a psychometric and physical assessment of the pupil's capabilities and they deployed them to play according to their preconceived abilities. i.e. They planned the play, like a good manager is meant to plan and taught on all MBA programmes and they had total chaos and then when they saw what experienced teachers did is they let the children play for a bit and patterns they wanted reinforced, patterns they wanted disrupted and the way you manage complexity and it's very, very simple, we call it being simple, rather than simplistic, is you do boundaries and detractors. It's like you know I've just managed my 12 year old's birthday party and what you do with the boundary, you say there's a line in the sand here guys, all right, you cross that line and you die, and if you draw the line too closely they cross it all the time and you're authority is destroyed and then you do multiple attractors; here's a football, here's a videotape, you know here's a game and see where you can form beneficial patterns. Now that technique we're now applying at a strategic level in companies and markets; create boundaries, create attractors, respond to favourable ones and the ironic is it's a lot cheaper and easier because you're taking on organic as ecological approach rather than trying to impose a mechanical model on the way that people work.

Presenter: Hence the name, "organic knowledge management"?

Snowden: Yeah and also kind of like one of the dangers; there's an old joke at the moment, somebody says, do you expect computers to exceed humans in intelligence by 2020? The response is yes, because we're planning to meet them half way. And we're currently actually training people in management to think like computers in logical, structured processes, which actually destroys human intelligence. I mean I have a favourite line I'm running at the moment, which is we should get rid of calculators in schools and replace them with slide rules, because the people who grew up with slide rules, you move these things around and you got the answer right, but you had to know what power of ten the answer was to.

Presenter: Right.

Snowden: The calculator generation can be out by the ten to the power 15 and not realise they're wrong and if you look at this, what happens with the slide rule generation, and abacus is where research has been done in china, is people who grew up in that environment have an instinctive feel for whether something is right or wrong, where people who think in logical linear processes actually haven't developed that instinct at the right level.

Presenter: It's like childbirth isn't it, that now we've become so technologised that in the old days you had a person who understood the whole process of being pregnant and having babies who could tell by instinct and feel -

Snowden: Yes. Knowledge in the fingertips.

Presenter: - What was wrong, whereas now you give people a million scans and get worried about something that doesn't exist, or don't worry about something that does exist?

Snowden: That's a very good metaphor. In fact it's a very good description of a problem, but it's wider than that because we're destroying the generalist capacity in society. We're becoming overspecialised. You know if you look at it, people become more and more specialised in narrower and narrower disciplines and we've lost the capacity to see the big picture and one of the interesting things is this actually destroys innovation in companies. A specialist can always fire down a generalist within their area, so what happens is small companies set up entirely composed of generalists and destroy big companies. So some of the work we're doing is to make companies aware of where do they bound specialism in journalism? You know how do they actually create innovative complex spaces as opposed to ordered structures basis? But you still want to do the mechanical discipline work for payment systems, but you need to do the organic complex approach for people, motivation, market development, product innovation. And you get some crazy stuff actually. You get people who confuse creativity with innovation. They think if you run creativity programmes and you take people away and get them to act in plays and paint pictures that suddenly companies will innovate and it doesn't work, because creativity is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for innovation. It's a feature of innovative people, but the fact it's a feature of them doesn't mean that they're creative. The only necessary, but not sufficient conditions for innovation is starvation and pressure.

Presenter: - (laughs) -

Snowden: Yeah and you know once you start to realise that, you start to realise you can do very, very effective things like the playground teachers, by a few small interventions and a few more stimulus and sit back and watch and then respond. Very different management style.

Presenter: We have a reputation in New Zealand just finally for being innovative on account of the fact that we've had to be. You know number eight wire and because we are generalists rather than specialists. Have you any observations to make on that?

Snowden: Well, you share something with the Welsh and the Canadians. You have a large arrogant next door neighbour who thinks you're part of them and regrettably has become good at your national sport in recent years, right?
Presenter: Not that good -

Snowden: The Welsh have affinity - well you've got your own back now. We're trying to get our own back, right? I think what we found with the Cynefin Centre is we went around the world and tried the ideas out and we found it was small countries who got it. So we're working in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Wales, Denmark, Western Canada and that's where we're focusing because edge-cultures are better connected and they're more able to innovate. The danger is they will imitate the big countries, because that's what's respectable -

Presenter: Well that's right and you look and they say they're successful and we're not, so we should do what they're doing.

Snowden: Last thing people should do. You know there's a huge opportunity I think in places like New Zealand to do things differently and to use the connectiveness and also the multiculturalism. I mean New Zealand is there with Singapore and Western Canada. You know if you measure multiculturalism based on inter-racial marriage, those three countries are so much higher than everybody else. That's a huge opportunity to make an impact on the world, but imitating the US or the UK or Australia won't do it.

Presenter: Very nice to talk to you. Thank you.

Snowden: A real pleasure.

Presenter: David Snowden, who is director of
the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity.

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