Dave Snowden is CSO & Founder of Cognitive Edge and Director of the Cynefin Centre. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He holds positions as extra-ordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch as well as visiting Professor at the University of Hull in the Centre for Systems Studies. He has held similar positions at several other Universities. 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. His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and 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 previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management; 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. He started in Industry, following a period overseas in Charity work, designing and building Decision Support Systems in the early days of computing. His company Cognitive Edge 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. The Centre for Applied Complexity was established to look at whole of citizen engagement in government and is running active programmes in Wales and elsewhere in areas such as social inclusion, self-organising communities and nudge economics together with a broad range of programmes in health. The Centre will establish Wales as a centre of excellence for the integration of academic and practitioner work in creating a science based approach to understanding society. Prof Snowden in the lead author of the recently published EU Guide to complexity and crisis management