For years now I've wanted to speak with Dave Snowden because he has helped me understand complexity and how to navigate a complex world better than perhaps any other thinker. At the same time, it's intimidating to interview someone who draws so widely from all schools of thought and can be so coherent on a topic as immense and complicated as sensemaking.

Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking. He's the developer of the Cynefin Framework--a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making across any context.

It is Dave's ability to weave seamlessly across fields of anthropology, ecology, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, engineering, and complex adaptive systems theory, pulling together a coherent, inspiring, and actionable fabric of thought that has always drawn me to his work.

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Katy Börner is one of the great mappers of our age. Her maps tell the history of science, trace how communication has evolved from the stone age to modern day, and reveal the connections across our society. In her work, all of these things become visual and interactive. That is to say she is the perfect person to talk to in this age when complexity lurks behind the most intractable issues facing our society and demands new ways of witnessing them.

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Cecilia Conrad reimagines what it means to ‘empower,’ embracing the idea throughout her life and transcending it to radically change the world as the steward of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grants and 100&Change Program. She offers guidance about how to think about empowerment to bring change to our own lives and to connect us with change in the world.

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Dr. and professor Jessica Flack has been a dream guest for Origins since the beginning - the kind of generous intellect and polymath whose words and work expand everyone around her. She also might be the person we can place our trust in to help us learn how to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

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JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer. But the music she writes is more than mere notes. Her 'music' is both song and her research into new modes of immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation, finding new frontiers at the intersection of science, engineering, art, and design. Through art as with science, her work seeks to create as she says, "an exponential rise in consciousness."

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I have trouble wrapping any adequate labels around this episode’s guest, Paco Nathan. Paco is a technologist, data scientist and an evangelist of a brighter data and technology future. He has an uncommon ability to synthesize the gaps and trends in this complex and evolving space, and gives me hope that we can create a more flourishing future within it.

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Caitlin McShea is that special kind of curious that you cannot help but be inspired by, and she has the intellect to spread that curiosity over any domain. For the past ten years in roles varying from director of art galleries, curator and coordinator of exhibits, and now as a program manager at the Santa Fe Institute, she has been giving language, image, and concreteness to some of the most imaginative and futuristic thoughts of our age.

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Professor Anima Anandkumar is a meteor in the field of artificial intelligence or AI. Her rise in the space has been a phenomenon to behold and her voice is a refreshing and inviting one that might just alter the trajectory of AI and society.

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Dan Goods is a leader among the community of creatives at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so he's an imaginer among imaginers. A creator among creators. He's one of the most innovative minds I've come across, and someone who embodies selflessness and that most wonderful and contagious quality that is an insatiable curiosity.

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