For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual.

The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular.

Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of them are old. Some of them are business leaders, some thought leaders, some sportsmen and some coaches. Some of them are artists and some spiritual leaders.

However, if we look deeply, all of them are like you and me, ordinary people who’ve had an extra-ordinary impact on me and potentially a lot of others. And once you get to know them, may be they will have a similar impact on you as well or maybe not, only time will tell.

The reason I am putting together this list and share what I have learnt from them, to thank them publicly for being a teacher and teaching me important lessons in life and in the hope that some of you might be inspired by their company and they can impact you and your life as they have impacted mine.

So, let’s get started.

16. Dave Snowden

We live and work in a complex world. So, in order to be effective in this complex world, we need to not only understand complexity but also learn how to best deal with it. It is in this context that I started thinking and trying to learn everything that I could about making sense of this complex world and I stumbled upon complexity science and the most famous work of Dave Snowden – The Cynefin Framework for sense-making and as a result decision making.

Here is the framework from his original HBR article titled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”

Like all models or frameworks, this framework helps classify systems into 4 types so that we can locate where we are and then offers strategies to deal with the system based on where we land. I have time and again come back to this framework to make sense of the situation I find myself in and once I can locate the situation in the framework, I know how to deal with the same.

Here is an updated version of A Leader’s Guide to make sense and decide based on the framework that Dave shared recently through a LinkedIn post comment.

I have spent countless hours watching keynotes delivered by him, his interviews and his explanation of the sense-making world. His thinking and contributions to sense-making is recognised as one of the 5 recognised schools of sense making by Oxford.

I have been thinking deeply about leadership in current context for the past few years and I have come to the conclusion that one of the most fundamental activity of a leader in the current context is his/her ability to make sense of the world that they were operating on. Everything thing else follows from there onwards. Leaders who can do this well are the one’s that will find themselves thriving.

So, anything or anyone who can help leaders figure this out and make sense of the world that they operate in are worth their weight in gold. It is in this context that Dave’s work has had an outsized influence on my thinking and my ability to make sense of the world I operate in.

I would like to invite you to explore his thinking and get to know his framework. I am sure that this will be time well spent. You can start with the videos that I have found to be most interesting and informative.

In this short video, Dave explains the Cynefin Framework. You should start your exploration here.

You can watch his conversation explaining sense making and many other things here.

You can watch him share insights from his most recent white paper for the European Union titled “Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis” that he shared in Australia recently.