Cognitive Design

The placebo effect is powerful and widespread in medicine. It involves patients getting better when they take a medication or therapy that has no clinical value or active ingredients.  Often used as a control to test the efficacy of other treatments, the impact of placebos demonstrates the power of perception and belief in creating change. Indeed,  the placebo effect is one reason I am high on cognitive design, a think-and-feel can have as much functional impact as a hammer and nail. It is the real thing not frosting on the design cake. It turns out we all have our placebos. 

Leveraging placebos outside of clinical trials involves deception and raises ethical issues. But do you have to deceive people for placebos to work? According to a recent study by the Harvard Medical School,  Placebos Work – Even Without Deception, the answer is no. They found that nearly twice the patients with irritable bowel syndrome that knowingly took placebos experienced symptom relief.  The control or comparion group took nothing.

It was very clear that placebos were being used:

“Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had ‘placebo’ printed on the bottle,” says Kaptchuk. “We told the patients that they didn’t have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills.”

If this effect can be reproduce in other contexts it signals an important development for cognitive designers.  It illustrates the importance of ritual (in this case the clinical ritual of taking medications) in creating change.  This may support arguments claiming prayer, teaching and leadership communication involve placebo-like effects.

It is the belief in positive outcomes amplified by the psychology of authority-led rituals that is doing the work not the science of the intervention!

How might leaders and mangers driving behavior and organizational change put this to use?  Can we label a change technique or management idea a placebo and generate results?

Nature has solved some exceptionally hard engineering and design problems in ways that are not only optimal but stunningly beautiful. This is one reason why biomimicry – or emulating nature’s design strategies and patterns – is catching fire.  Another reason is because of the excellent work of organizations such as the Biomimicry Institute. Check out their AskNature project and you will find a taxonomy of over 1200 of nature’s design patterns. Each pattern or strategy is summarized and examples of how it is or could be used are given, along with images and comments. You can even contribute new patterns.

This could be an important resource for cognitive designers. While there are likely no patterns that illustrate how to optimize functionality for psychological needs, there could be many that suggest new ways to organize, communicate and adapt that are useful for solving cognitive design problems.

Interested to hear from readers with ideas for how we can use biomimicry in cognitive design.

The scientific study of happiness is a recent but important trend in cognitive science.   It has changed our understanding of how minds work and is therefore very relevant for cognitive designers. So I am always on the lookout for new studies that offer designable insights.

For example, Harvard researchers have developed an iPhone app to do some citizen science studies on happiness. Not only are the results relevant for cognitive designers but the study design – crowdsourcing the data collection using smart phones – is also of interest. 

The general finding was:

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Some specific findings include:

*  We spend 47% of our time doing one thing and thinking about something else (mind wandering).

*  Our minds wander across all the things we do.

*  We are least happy when our minds wander. Indeed mind wandering is a better predictor of happiness than the activity we are doing.

*  Tasks that make us least happy are resting, working and using a home computer.

*  We are most happy when fully engaged in the moments as when was are having a conversation, making love or exercising.

 These findings were generated from some 250,000 data points that they collected from 2250 volunteers using an iPhone app. The app asks some general questions and then pings you periodically to find out what you are doing and how happy you are. For your trouble you get a personalized happiness report.  You also get a chance to contribute data to a scientific study at Harvard.  You can still sign up. Go citizen scientist, go!

Everybody is talking about innovation these days but how do successful companies do it?Do they outspend competitors on R&D, use special methods or what? According to Booz Allen Hamilton’s recent report, Global Innovation 1000: How Top Innovator Keep Winning, the success factors are:

1. Build focused innovation capabilities (ideation, project selection, product development and commercialization) around one of three strategies – need seekers, market readers or technology drivers

2. Align innovation strategy with overall corporate strategy and management effectiveness otherwise your innovation premiums get canceled out by misalignment or weakness in other aspects of the business system

3.  Globalize the effort by conducting innovation activities in key markets in countries in which the company is not headquartered

You need to make an investment but outspending your competitors is not the driver of innovation success.  Check out the variation in R&D spending in the chart below:

The key is focused capabilities:

“What matters instead is the particular combination of talent, knowledge, team structures, tools, and processes — the capabilities — that successful companies put together to enable their innovation efforts, and thus create products and services they can successfully take to market.”

Distinctive skills within the capabilities that are important for all three innovation strategies include (and I quote):

* General understanding of emerging technologies

* Broad consumer and customer insights

* Customer engagement

* Product platform management

* Pilots and controlled roll outs

Working with customers, doing prototypes and pilots and striving for authentic insights into how to best use emerging technologies should be no surprise to design thinkers. This is how companies such as Google, 3M, GE, IBM and Samsung do it.

For more detail on how and why successful innovators are going global check out Beyond Borders.

The new view in cognitive science claims we operate in two mental modes – deliberate and automatic. In automatic mode we are unconsciously reacting to the environment around us.  This is not simple stimulus to response. We still “think” in between and even make complex decisions but we do so very fast using whatever information is immediately available exercising no conscious control.  The so-called blink.  In deliberate mode we consciously observe, plan, analyze and control our thoughts, emotions and behaviors.   We are reflective. Operating in deliberate mode is HIGH load  because it requires tremendous mental energy whereas operating in automatic mode is LOW load because it requires little mental energy.  For example, experienced drivers operate vehicles  in LOW or automatic mode and a student driver is in HIGH or deliberate mode. One is skilled the other is reflective.

The bi-modal trait of mind has big implications for cognitive designers so I am always on the look-out for scientific studies that offer a refined view. For example, check out this National Science Foundation press release on research from Vanderbilt University that demonstrates we still exert conscious control during automatic or LOW mode processing.

They studied how errors were processed during typing. Some errors were natural others secretly introduced by the researchers.  Some errors were corrected secretly, some were not.  They looked for a decrease in typing speed and verbal reports to signal errors.

Here is what they found:

* No decrease in typing speed when subjects verbally reported making an error that was secretly introduced by researchers

* A decrease in typing speed when subjects made a real error if the researchers corrected it or not.

Researchers could fool the conscious process but not the automatic one. My fingers know the error had been made even when I was tricked into believing or consciously thinking otherwise. They called this the illusion of authorship.

“What’s cool about our research is that we show there are two error detection processes: an outer loop that supports conscious reports and an inner loop process that slows keystrokes after errors,” said Logan. “Typing slows down after corrected errors just like it slows down after actual errors. It maintains the same speed after inserted errors as after correct responses, as if nothing was wrong.”

These circumstance are strange – false errors and secret corrections being made by experimenters but keep in mind they are trying to see if there are two processes or one at work. Normally the inner loop (automatic) and outer loop (conscious) are using different sources of information to work together. This is what allows us to achieve such outlandish levels of speed and accuracy. However, it is not fully automatic. We are still running with a thin line of conscious control even though we are not thinking about the actions we are taking.  Perhaps this some form of embodied conscious control.

Every year Bain & Company, a leading management consulting firm, surveys and analyzes what tools are being used by managers around the world. The most recent results are  Management Tools 2009: An Executive’s Guide. They provide a general overview, a 16-page summary and a 130-slide detailed analysis.  You can see the top 10 tools and more by usage and satisfaction in this slide provided by Bain:

                   [Click on image for larger view]

Cognitive design, design thinking or innovating for how minds work did not make the list. Of course I would argue that doing good cognitive design is essential for applying nearly all of the management tools successfully.  Of interest to cognitive designer is this key finding:

Innovation continues to be very important – and difficult

- Eight of ten executives agree that “Innovation is more important than cost reduction for long-term success”, six of ten believe they could dramatically boost innovation by collaborating with other companies” and half say “their entire organization is actively engaged in improving innovation”

- Collaborative Innovation and Voice of the Customer Innovation are two of the five tools that show the largest likely increase in usage from 2008 to 2009

from page 10 of the slide deck.  Cognition-heavy tools are on the list including knowledge management (#15), voice of customer innovation (#21), online communities (#22) and collaborative innovation (#23).

When creating designs optimized for how minds work it is important to recognize that any solution can include five types of minds – individual, extended, group, emergent and machine.  An emergent mind includes any group of minds where collective intelligence develops. But is there really any such things as collective intelligence that makes emergent minds functionally different than just a group of people working together?  Recent examples such as prediction markets and various crowdsourcing models clearly imply the answer is yes but no one has demonstrated collective intelligence scientifically – until now.

A recent article in Science, Evidence of Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, not only demonstrates a general collective intelligence for groups (much like we have already demonstrated a general intelligence for individuals) but the results have strong implications for cognitive design.   You can get a good overview of the work from an MIT press release.

“We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks,” says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “Our hypothesis was confirmed,” continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author and Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in many situations.”  

Further they found that the strength or amount of collective intelligence:

*  did not correlate strongly to the individual intelligence found in the group

*  correlates strongly to the average ability of group members to recognize emotional states (social sensitivity) and how well the opportunity to make conversation was shared amongst group members.

There should be no surprise that groups that work better together will have a higher collective intelligence. What is useful is the empirical evidence that suggest to get that effect you need higher individual emotional intelligence on average and a mechanism that promotes a broad distribution of conversational turn-taking. This is very different than other architectures that support collective intelligence such as prediction markets and certain types of  crowdsourcing.

Emotional intelligence is our ability to spot, understand and manage emotional states in ourselves and others.  It has been a topic of increasing importance to leaders but has yet to have a game-changing impact on workforce management.

Our level of emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), can be measured and has been found to correlate strongly to high performance in some domains.  An interesting recent study by the University of Haifa looked at 809 employees in four companies and found:

“Meisler says the study indicates employees with a high level of emotional intelligence were more satisfied with their jobs and were more committed to their organizations. They also had fewer undesirable work attitudes — such as burnout, intention to leave and negligent behavior.”

This suggests that measuring EQ may be a useful tool for general workforce management. For the cognitive designer it implies that EQ measurements may provide insight into the unique cognitive needs and characteristics of employees.

Very interested to hear from designers that use EQ measurements as way to uncover cognitive needs.

Check out the blog, What Makes Them Tick.  It is focused on applying psychology to how people think, work and relate. It has some interesting insights for cognitive designers.  The blog is documenting 100 Things You Should Know About People and does a nice job of delivering information that is actionable for designers. For example, consider #42 we will spend more money if you don’t mention it, #38 even the illusion of progress is motivating and #4  you imagine things from above and tilted.  Many of the items on the list have been covered in the cognitive design blog but it is useful to have them all pulled together.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk runs the blog and offers a free newsletter, has a book (Neuro Web Design which I plan on reading) and does seminars. She also has 58 more posts to go on the 100 things list!

The body is the mind’s interface to the world. The body mediates every input the mind gets as well as every action taken. Body and mind co-mingle not in some mystical sense but in a way cognitive neuroscience is starting to map out. If we are to optimize our designs for how minds work, we must account for the  embodied nature of cognition in every single application.

One way to do this is to understand how the mind represents the body as an internal image,  model or schema. The mental model or internal representation we have of our body shapes all aspects of cognitive life – perception, memory, learning, decision making, creativity, self-regulation and so on. Understanding the specifics of how this works could be a treasure drove of insights for cognitive designers.

So I am always on the lookout for scientific work on body representations. Take for example the exciting new article in Psychological Science on, Rapid Assimilation of External Objects in Body Schema.  Here is what the researchers found:

Our body sense (mental model of our own bodies) is plastic and can be extended to quickly integrate any object we are touching.

The finding is robust but is limited to objects we are in direct contact with versus those the touched object may be in contact with and extending further into the environment.   This gives the tools we use and objects we hold special cognitive status. They are in fact part of us.