colliver's blog

I came across Dave Snowden's work at the tail end of my close involvement in knowledge management. He was amongst that pack of people talking about knowledge as a social process, but he made alot more sense that most. Snowden argues that the way knowledge is developed and used depends on the complexity in the system. Operating in complex systems is different to operating in simple systems – it requires collegial structures, not professional or bureaucratic structures.Snowden articulates critical differences between systems in four different states, along with implications for working with knowledge each state:[i]

I got involved in facilitating inquiry by practitioners pretty soon into my career, without really intending it. The first project was in 1985, the Classroom Relationships Project, which Trish Williams, an innovative teacher and like myself a sociodramatist. The sponsor's goal was to support development of schools, by building a collegial and self-reflective culture that considered relationships. Trish and I used Kemmis' ideas and Morano's idea of enacting interactions in order to understand them and generate new optison for yourself and others. We taught teachers to observe action in the classroom and entertain hunches about what was going on, and taught them to support reflection into practice. Then we paired them up, and required them to observe each other in the classroom, and then talk about what they had observed and what (on the teacher's end of things) they had been thinking, feeling and deciding. It was challenging for teachers, it changed them, and it was (in a way) easy to do. I just hung onto Trish's coattails and picked it up as I went along. A few years after this, I took pretty much the same approach in a national R&D project on professional development for teachers, with another group of facilitators and an educational academic, but it wasn't as much fun as working with Trish.