Still at the i3 conference in Aberdeen, I am listening to a keynote from David Snowden entitled Complexity, coherence, constraint cognition and context. He’s intending to put the slides up as a podcast here. His theme is “Naturalising sense-making” (making sense of the world so we can act in it). He positioned himself as nearer Dervin’s interpretation of sense-making than Weick’s. He challenges “hard” systems thinking, which is interested in relationships rather than rigid categorisation. Thus for him a system is “any network that has coherence” which “may be fuzzy, it may or may or may not have a purpose”. An agent “is anything whch acts within the system” (may be a person, an idea etc.) Thus he identifies 3 types of system: ordered (agents constrained); chaotic (agents all over the place); complex (interaction between the system and the agents).I’ll put in here, that in terms of, for example, planning for collaboration to education for information literacy, I would say that sometimes people talk about universities as if they were ordered (which is true only up to a point – but not necessarily in terms of nitty gritty curriculum development), or chaotic (with academics as erractic, but possible of being pinned down through individual study), but rather they should be treated as (at the curriculum development level) complex. At least, in some ways it may be most productive to treat the situation as complex, since then you would be looking at the whole situation, the “agents” and their academic context, and you would be thinking it as a situation that needs ongoing management and attention.At the moment Snowden is talking about setting “flexible negotiable boundaries” in complex systems. You then set “attractors” (e.g. …

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