cynics in the organization

Dave Snowden, says ..
"At a recent session with a few CEOs I has asked for my three ideas that would help them cope with uncertainty. I don't what they expected but I said:

Seek out those people in your organisations or advisory groups who everyone wants you to avoid and given them the time and space to say why. You will waste some time, but you will increase the range of options you scan.
If you involve experts in decision making when the field is in a state of fluctuation, always create dissent and contrariness.
Remember it's the cynics in the organisation who care about it, not the people who are just trying the say the right thing."

clocks and clouds

From Wired:

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.