Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems

Dr. Jeffrey Conklin
About Us
CogNexus Institute offers tools and skills for groups dealing with complex and ill-structured situations. The Institute's mission is creating organizational coherence in the service of world peace and healing. We specialize in teaching the Dialogue Mapping technique, facilitation and consulting using Dialogue Mapping, and research on collaborative technologies for complex problem solving and design situations.

Dr. Jeffrey Conklin, Director, has over two decades of experience and an international reputation in the fields of hypertext and collaborative technology research, and years of professional experience as a facilitator, consultant, and teacher. He is fascinated with the interplay between technology and social systems. Dr. Conklin is perhaps best known for his work with the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) method and extensions of it, such as research tools ("gIBIS") and commercial products ("CM/1™", "QuestMap™") that support IBIS. He is advisor to the Compendium Institute, which distributes the open source Compendium mapping tool.

Dr. Conklin also developed the Dialogue Mapping facilitation technique, a radically inclusive approach to knowledge management that allows groups to capture and make sense of unstructured knowledge during project meetings. Dr. Conklin has taught Dialogue Mapping to hundreds and hundreds of people all over the world. He has facilitated thousands of meetings, with such clients as the World Bank, the United Nations, the US House of Representatives, the City of Washington DC, NASA, FAA, the General Services Administration (GSA), as well as Southern California Edison, AOL, Verizon, AOPA, Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap Alliance, BP, the California Public Utilities Commission, and other organizations.

Dr. Conklin's research on collaborative and facilitation technologies has been published in numerous academic journals and conferences. His book about this work, Dialogue Mapping: Creating Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, was published in 2006 by John Wiley and Sons.

His current research is on the construction of web-based tools for sustainability policy discussion that foster the creation of issue-based knowledge "meta-maps" that are broadly inclusive yet coherent.

CogNexus Institute is located in Napa, California, about 1 hour north of San Francisco. Jeffrey Conklin is a pilot, a sailor, a husband, and the father of one extraordinary little girl.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
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