Masterclass with Dave Snowden

Malmö, Sweden 10-11 Sept 2024

Rewilding organisations & leadership

Join us for a walk on the wild side with Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Co!

Rewilding is not about looking back

In recent years, many untouchable notions of leadership have been disrupted with a rising interest in rewilding and exploring a more complexity-appropriate approach to leadership. Extending beyond Dave Snowden’s well-known work around the theme of rewilding agile, the rewilding idea has a much wider consideration of a different way of thinking about, designing and managing an organization, a community or indeed, a society.

Rewilding can be thought of as a way of restoring balance of a system. How can we respect the ecological nature of our existence, shift away from the dominant engineering paradigm and at the same time uphold financially sustainable businesses?

Evolve with complexity on the wild side

In the Masterclass, you can expect a deeper understanding of some of the core Cynefin, and associated methods, for leading and taking action in complex contexts. You can also expect some disruptive thinking such as:

• No more “mental models” and “mindset engineering” – leaders need to take accountability for the starting conditions and stop individualising. problems. Interactions matter more in a complex system than individual pre-dispositions.
• Stop blaming individuals for the failure of change initiatives – it is more likely that the initiative was too idealistic and too far away from the realities of here and now.
• Post-therapeutic techniques have no ethical or appropriate place in leadership, OD or coaching practices.
• Drop the 5-year strategic planning process. Start journeys with a sense of direction rather than a fixed goal, then do the next right thing.

As an alternative, Dave suggests that we should look, pragmatically and realistically, at:

• What levels of agency should be given (ideally distributed, not delegated).
• What changes are needed to the affordances provided by the system.
• When, if at all, can we change the assemblages (meaning the patterns of narrative and experience which determine how people see the world).

These three questions focus on what we can change in the here and now and, focus into understanding the system as much as individual responses.

The setting of the Masterclass will be a diverse group of participants representing leadership of different parts of private and public business as well as civil society.

We look forward to seeing you in Malmö!

Want to know more?

If you want to read more on the background, take a look at the EU Field Guide for Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis (A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework).

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