Dave Snowden is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co. and Director of the Cynefin Centre for Applied Complexity.  His international work spans government and industry, examining complex strategic, organisational, and decision-making issues.  He has pioneered a science-based approach, drawing on anthropology, the cognitive sciences, and complex adaptive systems theory.   This approach, known as naturalising sense-making, has been acknowledged as one of five distinct schools of sensemaking/sense-making.

He is the principal author of a joint publication between the Cynefin Centre and the Future Systems Directorate of the European Union: ' Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis—a field guide for decision-makers.  A review by Durham University identified him as one of the leaders in applying complexity science to organizations.

He is a visiting Professor at the University of Hull and has previously held similar posts at the University 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 Technological University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period at Nanyang Technological University.   

He has created many methods and frameworks, including the Cynefin Framework.  His paper with Boone on Cynefin and Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007. He also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He had previously won a special award from the Academy for his original work in knowledge management. He is an editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in knowledge management.  He was the Editor-in-Chief of E:CO, one of the first journals to cover applied complexity science. In 2006, he served as Director of the EPSRC (UK) research program on emergence, and in 2007, he was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research.  In 2023, he received an award from Hull University for his "Outstanding Contribution to Systems Thinking".

He is the principal designer of SenseMaker®, the world's first distributed ethnography software, and led the application of this technology to create a radically new approach to capturing data from patients, work that was acknowledged in a report by the CMO as one of the few examples of authentic patient engagement. The work is now developing into integrated health care, measuring the placebo effect, and creating new approaches to distributed decision-making to reduce bureaucracy and increase clinical engagement - work that has broader implications outside the health sector.