Dave Snowden is an impressive speaker. I fell for his thinking and critical trouble making sense of humour. His talks are worth mining, and I am certainly motivated to read more detailed writing. Not since first viewing Century of Self have I viewed a thinker who feels so at home and familiar.
There is great excitement and some sadness when you find or hear someone for the first time who speaks the language of your thoughts. As with my reading of Dave Snowdens work, you can also feel uncomfortable - perhaps like the experience of looking in the mirror, startled to see some sort of reflexion of yourself that you are not used to seeing outside in the world.
Is it the sign of a great thinker that she can express your thoughts with clarity and power, or is it the sign of a great orator? Is it important? Perhaps. The sense I get from the humour, speed, and apparent depth of detail and focus is that this is original work, but the overpowering sentiment is to ask why it takes so long, and is so hard for people and institutions to understand this type of thought and methodology.
In my reading, I have little interest in is status - or at least I pretend to myself that is true. I do focus on the combination of detailed lived example, theoretical richness, absence of cliche, and the willingness to throw in weak or controversial ideas stated with clarity and strength. Finally humour the ability to understand the audience - which is a signal of an empathy - especially if improvised.
Tick to all of these. I can certainly use sound bites and audiovisual clips to illustrate ideas and arguments with a splattering of eminence. And this after all seems to be what is mostly needed.
The ideas, people and understanding are readily available - as is the finance. But the agreement and understanding of individuals and institutions is missing. Worse the lack of process to evolve these and thee presence of processes to suppress and avoid such change keeps us standing still.
It feels time for a little eminence and teamwork introduced into the governance space. Dave Snowden makes me thing that this is possible.
# To do - [ ] I'm keen to find something I disagree with, something alien and new in this work.