Anything an algorithm can interpret an algorithm can create, social media is more the tyranny of the herd than the wisdom of the crowd. How do we manage essential and unavoidable uncertainty using human agents in a distributed network. Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, and founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at Bangor University in Wales. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry, looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations, drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. David is well-known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.

His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007, and also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on Knowledge Management. He is an editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in the field of knowledge management, and is an Editor in Chief of E:CO. In 2006, he served as Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and, in 2007, was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.

Blog: dave-snowden

Twitter: @snowded This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx