Cognitive Design

While there is no rocket science to making behavior change, small changes in your approach can make a big difference. So I am always on the lookout for evidence-based practices that may hold small but important insights into how we can make lasting behavior change.

For example. a new article in the Psychological Bulletin  reviews 138 studies that examine the effects of monitoring your progress towards a goal to achieving that goal. While the connection may seem to be common sense, the real issue is how to I do it to maximize the effect. Said directly, is there a way to monitor progress to maximize its impact on goal attainment?

According to the evidence the answer is yes - make it frequent, public and recorded.  To quote the meta study:

“Furthermore, changes in the frequency of progress monitoring mediated the effect of the interventions on goal attainment. Moderation tests revealed that progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded. Taken together, the findings suggest that monitoring goal progress is an effective self-regulation strategy, and that interventions that increase the frequency of progress monitoring are likely to promote behavior change.”

The daily huddles that characterize successful SCRUM coding teams and lean daily improvement efforts are examples of how well this results holds up in practice.

Many of us have seen the sit-down stations in drug stores that have you put an arm in a sleeve and give you a blood pressure and pulse reading.  The folks at Higi have gone further to create a interactive health kiosk that captures blood pressure, pulse, weight, body fat and BMI and uses it to compute an overall health score called the Higi Score.

You create an account, provide some basic information such as height and age and your progress is tracked.  You can access your info from the station, a computer or an app.

There are levels, awards and even a way to create a winner-take-all challenge with a group of like minded Higi users.

They have nearly 10,000 stations across the US and some evidence that the Higi can reduce blood pressure in people that are hypertensive.

The evidence comes from a 3-year study involving 159,000 hypertensive users that was presented at an American Heart Association Meeting:

“Nearly half lowered their systolic blood pressure to below 140 mmHg, the cut-off for high blood pressure according to AHA. Both men and women across all age brackets saw lowered blood pressure over the course of the study.”

From a cognitive design standpoint interesting features and functions include the gamification and the way relatively complex health data (weight, BP, pulse and BMI) is rolled up into one score.

If designed correctly, this composite score can give me something that provides a signal that supports how I learn from feedback better than any of the individual measures.

The Weight Watchers program attempts to do this with a point system for foods.

Add in some gamification or socialization features that make it feel good to try and change the score and you may be able to get some lasting health behavior change.

Anyone up for a Higi challenge?

In cognitive design we seek insights into how minds work so that we can create features and functions that motivate, inspire, inform, entertain and otherwise deliver positive mental performances.

 A systematic approach to cognitive design usually takes one of three forms: Look at what the science tells us, study design patterns that dazzle our brains or explore the implications of mind-intense philosophies or belief systems.   My work has been focused on the first two approaches.  After all, scientific insights into how minds actually work and products/services that push our emotional and intellectual buttons have proliferated wildly over the last 30 years.   Behavioral economics, emotional design, serious games, neuromarketing and other areas have emerged as a result.

Over the years I have been challenged (usually by one of my students at Northwestern), to consider the third approach and explore how a particular mind-intense philosophy or belief system can inform cognitive design practices. Examples include Yoga, martial arts and religion.  Such domains offer unique insights into cognition and promise powerful psychological experiences – for example alignment, clarity and faith – that are sought by millions.

Perhaps these ancient practices and sources of wisdom are just as rich of source of insights for cognitive designers as our modern sciences and marketing phenoms such as Harry Potter are.

Take Yoga for example.  Yoga offers insight into the nature of specific types of mental states, how to achieve them and why they are important. This raises a number of interesting questions for cognitive designers:

 How can yoga wisdom inspire the design of our products and services? Can it be used to inform employee and leadership development? How about the design of our workspaces and grounds? How does yoga fit in with your business ethics program?

 A quick Google reveals clothes, jewelry, pottery, room interiors and other products and services that claim to be Yoga-inspired. And Yoga has clearly made some inroads into corporate wellness programs and retreats. But I suspect we have yet to really tap the design potential of Yoga to deliver unique think-and-feel experiences and improved cognitive performances into the mass market.

 This belief was reinforced by a project I recently completed with Jamie and Maren Showkier to summarize their excellent book Yoga Wisdom at Work into a deck of NewHabits cards for the iPhone.  The project gave me a small personal taste of the design potential Yoga wisdom holds. As the authors explain:

“Many people already know that yoga stretches and meditation can benefit them at work. This app centers on helping people create habits based on other yoga practices that strengthen ethics, self-discipline, focus, self-awareness, productivity, contentment, and taking individual accountability for the good of the whole.”

Several colleagues that have experimented with the deck asked: How can we combine design thinking with Yoga Wisdom?  That is, how can we take a systematic yet creative approach to unleashing the insights Yoga has into the workings of our minds to reshape our products, services and organizations?

A question we will explore on the Cognitive Design Blog.

My free provocative ideas online webinar, use micro-learning techniques to change behaviors and improve performance  is scheduled to run January 15 at 1pm ET. I will talk about how knowledge cards can be used to structure a rapid and low-cost approach to creating social mobile content that changes behavior.

According to the host, Training Magazine, there are currently 684+ registered attendees. If you cannot make it, I will be moderating a discussion forum that will run after the webinar. It will include a recorded version of the event, additional background materials and an opportunity to share application ideas and even draft knowledge cards. You need to register to participate but it is free.

Hope you can join me in the event and participate in the discussion forum.

To make change stick you must over determine the outcome you want. That means applying many strategies and tools to the job rather than just one or a few. You need to find ways to tap intrinsic motivation, rewards, peer pressure and environmental factors if you want to change individual and group behaviors.

While this may seem like over kill to some, research supports the over determined approach to change.  For example, a Sloan Management Review article, How To Have Influence, found organizations that used 4 or more strategies to drive a change where 10x more likely to achieve the outcomes they wanted. For a more general argument about the need to over determine your change effort check out  Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change.

You see similar results in the personal behavior change space. For example, Baylor College of Medicine conducted a study that showed people that used more tools to lose weight achieved a greater loss.  It was not a 10X effect but it was a 5X effect varying from 4 pounds for zero tools (self directed) to 20 pounds for those using three tools (weight watchers program, apps, etc.).

So the questions is not so much what are you going to do to make your change work – but what 4 or 5 things working together will make you change stick?

Source of  Weight Loss Graph PR Newswire

The training magazine network is hosting a provocative ideas webinar that I am giving on using micro-learning techniques to change behavior and improve performance.  It will run for free on January 15 at 1 pm ET for an hour.  Hope to see you there.

Session Description:

Micro-learning is the tiny bursts of learning we do every day to solve problems, make decisions and improve performance. All training involves a micro-learning phase if the goal is behavior change and ROI. Trainers tend not to emphasize this last mile of learning because it is too personalized, short lived and entangled in work. Learn how new technologies and methodologies are changing that.

Discover a new method for including micro-learning in training which breaks learning content into its smallest relevant chunks called knowledge cards. Successful examples and demonstrations in leadership, innovation, teamwork and emotional intelligence will be presented.

“The entries came pouring in from every corner of the world—real-world case studies and bold hacks tackling the intersecting challenges of redistributing power and equipping and energizing people to lead even when they lack formal authority.”

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders

Changing behavior requires measurement and timely feedback. Getting accurate data and keeping track of your progress can take a lot of effort.  Sometimes that effort is enough to derail your behavior change effort.  To address that problem a number of companies are offering personal body sensors and software to help make measurement and tracking much easier. We have covered some of these in the Cognitive Design blog, for example, see Using Data to Change Behavior.

A reader recently sent me a note about BodyMedia.  It includes an armband with multiple sensors and associated software. The senors measure your motion, heat flux, galvanic skin response and skin temperature.  You get data to guide behavior change around weight, fitness and sleep management.   Data is collected and displayed in a dashboard called the activity manager.  You can access it from from a smart phone and other devices.

There is some research that supports the claim this system changes health behaviors.  You can get the armband and 3 months access to the software in the $100-$150 range. After that the activity manager (software) costs you $7 per month.

Very interested to hear from other readers that are using BodyMedia.  How easy was it to build into your daily life? Is it changing your behavior?

There is little doubt that creativity and innovation plays a  big role in the US economy.  Translating new ideas into better ways of working and market-busting products and services is a serious engine of value creation. Few debate that but many debate how well the US is doing with innovation.  Some argue we have a creativity crisis while others argue we are on the cusp of an innovation-driven economic revolution.

A recent column by  Geoff  Colvin in Fortune Magazine, A Mighty Culture of Innovation Cannot Be Taken For Granted, offers some interesting insight into the debate.  Quoting two global studies he  notes that the US scores high in innovation and that countries that do better tend to be much smaller.  The US is the best large and innovative economy by far.   Mr. Colvin also suggest that the reason for that is culture.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that by some measures it looks like the US’s culture of innovation is eroding.  For evidence he quotes the World Values Study that ranked the US 10th on placing importance on “thinking up new ideas and being creative”. More alarming is the finding that Torrance test scores have been declining since 1990.  The Torrance test has been used to measure the level of creativity in US students for over 50 years.

For a counter point check out Fast Company’s 10th Annual Innovation by Design Issue.  A major theme is how the US consumer is putting a premium on great experiences and products with high design content. Design thinking  both reflects an innovation culture and transforms an innovation-driven economy.

Of special interest to readers of the Cognitive Design Blog is the section outlining where is designing going next.  Margaret Rhodes points out:

“Thoughtful design doesn’t just enable our habits; it pushes us to improve behavior making us more economical, reflective and responsible”

Designs that offer us an opportunity to achieve lasting behavior change in areas such as health, ethics, personal savings and being green offer tremendous potential for creating social and economic value on a macro scale.   Delivering such changes requires a deep understand of how human minds actually work and puts cognitive design at the center of the innovation economy.

So what is the state of creativity in the US? Is it on the decline or swelling to new levels?

The Journal of Consumer Research is a excellent source of insights into how our minds work.  Why and how people buy things is the most studied forms of psychology on the planet.  Many of the insights go beyond the context of making a purchase and are therefore useful to cognitive designers working in all areas.

Take for example the recent article on how entering lotteries might undermine self-control:

“The author investigated why materialism leads to poor self-control and found that materialistic thoughts are specific and concrete, and that the more materialistic thoughts a consumer has, the more likely he or she is to demonstrate a lack of self-control. Prior research has shown that when people’s minds are occupied with concrete thoughts, they tend to seek immediate gratification.”

This has clear implications for cognitive designers working in behavior change.  You can access the entire article HERE.