Policy Making for Complexity and Resilience

Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity. His work is in- ternational in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, or- ganisational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisa- tions drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and pas- sionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style

He is a visiting Professor at the University of Hull and has previously held similar Universities of Bangor, Hong Kong PolyU, Warwick, Pretoria and Stellenbosch. He held the position of senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period in Nanyang

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 aware 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. I n 2006 he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and in 2007 was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.

He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity; during that period he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a world wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector and was a of the founding members of the DSDM consortium, one of the three feeds into the Agile Manifesto.

The Cynefin co exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants. He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management,strategic foresight and risk management.

Brenton Caffin is Executive Director of Strategy and Policy in the South Australian Department of the Premier and Cabinet.

He has twenty-five years of experience at the intersection of public policy, innovation and reform, during which time he has advised governments and multilateral institutions in over twenty countries on ways to strengthen their innovation capabilities.

Brenton was the founding Executive Director of States of Change, a global learning collective of public innovation practitioners, and the founding CEO of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. He was an Executive Director at the UK Innovation Foundation Nesta from 2013-19.

He began his career as a graduate in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Brenton holds degrees in Public Administration, Economics and International Relations.

Dr Ariella Helfgott is the Director of Strategic Foresight in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, of the Government of South Australia.

She has almost 20 years of Strategic Foresight experience, having been the Director of Scenarios with the World Energy Council, a member of the Shell Scenario Team, Director of Collaborative Futures, Senior Fellow at the Universities of Oxford, Utrecht, Wageningen and Adelaide, and Strategic Analyst with the Australian Department of Defence.

She has worked across 26 countries in 8 global regions on collaborative systemic change processes that enable the co-creation of better futures.

Emily is the CEO and co-founder of Wicked Lab, a social enterprise supporting organisations and communities to create systems change for wicked problems.

Wicked Lab has developed a systems change framework that is underpinned by complexity science. This framework is what underpins Wicked Lab’s capacity building programs and Online Tool for Systemic Change.

Emily will share Wicked Lab’s experience in supporting the South Australian Fire and Emergency Management Commission (SAFECOM) to take a complexity-informed approach to strengthening disaster resilience in South Australia. Wicked Lab’s Tool for Systemic Change is being used by SAFECOM to measure and monitor the portfolio of initiatives that are strategically aligned to the South Australian Disaster Resilience Strategy and which are funded through South Australia's Disaster Resilience Grants.

Emily is a South Australian 40 under 40 award winner and was recently showcased in Hitachi’s Global Experts Series on systems transition. She holds a Masters of Science and Technology Commercialisation (University of Adelaide), a Graduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship (University of Adelaide) and a Bachelor of Social Science (University of Adelaide).