Cognitive Design

In cognitive design we focus on psychological moments of truth or those critical junctures of interaction where deep bonding or full-hearted rejection can occur. Every product, service or experience has them, and like first impressions, designers that ignore them often fail. Moments of truth are relatively small and can be very short in duration. All design challenges have at least three of them and some design problems can have more than a dozen.

For example, a product or service designed to change behavior and help us form new habits must be especially adept at handling psychological moments of truth. Motivating an initial attempt to change, helping us avoid self-regulation failures and springing back from a relapse must all be managed to create lasting behavior change.  A central variable in managing all of these moments of truth is mental energy. It takes energy to do work and behavior change requires a lot of mental work.

Recent research reported in the Journal of Consumer Research makes this very clear:

“When we feel fresh it’s relatively easy for us to focus on the primary features of a product, consider the outcome of a choice, and value the long-term benefits of an action,” the authors explain. “However when we feel depleted from exerting self-control, we start to attend to the non-central minor aspects, think about how feasible it is to engage in the choice, and sometimes emphasize short-term rewards.”

The idea of “feeling fresh” or the subjective experience of fatigue or energy, is one of the three components that make up mental energy.  The question is, how can we fail-safe the design of change programs against low mental energy events and circumstances?

In my leadership class at Northwestern we examine the latest thinking on how to leverage and manage corporate culture.   One stream of thought that works extremely well in practice is to focus on small but key behaviors first. Indeed, the idea is not to try and change culture at all but design experiences where people see, try, hear stories about or receive rewards for new behaviors.  If the new behaviors are cleverly linked to powerful outcomes then they will lead to a cascade of change, new mental models, attitudes and culture.  The key is to uncover these vital behaviors and use cognitive design to create experiences around them that move hearts and minds.

A new article in Strategy+Business, Stop Blaming Culture, provides an excellent overview of the theoretical foundation behind this approach.  The authors emphasize:

“… if you are seeking more accountability (for example), identify the types of ongoing behavior that embody that value. You might have to be specific: “I expect you to read, record, and respond to every customer complaint — and I will reward or penalize you accordingly.”

Being specific and behavioral is the key – read, record, respond to every… no ambiguity in that.  Habituating such behaviors leads to more interaction and empathy with the customer, new ways of dealing with or avoiding customer complaints,  up-selling,  improved retention and so on.  Over time, the new behaviors will generate a new culture if they are tied to key drivers of value in your business system.

What to change a culture? Find small new behaviors that drive big changes in value and design experiences that make it natural, fun, exciting and rewarding to try them out.

Probably not.

Emotional messaging, hard-hitting incentives and designed experiences all change behavior not information. For a case in point check out the article and interview:

Does Calorie-Labeling in Restaurants Lead to Healthier Eating?

Some details:

“In January 2009 King Country in Washington State, which includes Seattle and some of its suburbs, started requiring chains to make nutrition information available for all of its offerings, including visible calorie counts (which also needed to be on drive-through boards by August of that year). So researchers compared consumers’ food choices at several locations of the Mexican-style restaurant called Taco Time before and after calorie numbers were posted—as well as with Taco Times that were outside of the regulated area.”

A year of data showed zero change in eating habits.  Having calorie data does not change eating behavior because we are not making analytical data-driven decision about how we eat.

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?

There is a great post on the PsyBlog summarizing 20 principles for changing minds. While we have covered nearly all of the principles for persuasion in other posts, pulling a list like this together has some real value for cognitive designers.

Very interested to hear from readers on how best to implement some of these principles and which are the most powerful.

Social media provides unprecedented opportunity for patients to help other patients in the management of chronic diseases.  From a cognitive design perspective we need to understand what type of information sharing has the biggest impact on improved health behaviors as well as improved compliance with medication schedules and treatment plans.

Found an interesting recent study (sponsored by CVS Caremark and conducted by Harvard) of the 15 largest communities on Facebook that focus on diabetes. It  provides some insights for cognitive designers.  The total membership in all 15 communities was just over 9,000 and the researchers looked at 690 posting from 480 members and found:

- 66% of the posts described personal experiences with diabetes

- 29% included one patient providing emotional support to another

- 27% of the posts were product promotions or requests to complete surveys or participate in trials

- 24 % covered experiences that would likely not be shared with a healthcare professional

- 13% of the posts were responses to specific requests for information.

Sharing personal experiences and providing emotional support is what we expect social media to do.  Meaning and emotion can help immensely when it comes to self control and the regulation of behavior. The fact that some of the content would not normally be revealed to a health care professional (e.g. comments about alcohol consumption) is interesting.

It is not clear how this type of information sharing impacts outcomes but:

“To the best of our knowledge this is the first study to analyze in detail the quality of the information that people with diabetes are sharing with each other through Facebook,” said William H. Shrank, MD, MSHS, senior author of the study. “There are certainly public health benefits that can be garnered from these sites – but patients and doctors need to know it is really the Wild West out there.”

You can access the full article, Online Social Networking by Patients with Diabetes for free. There is definitely a need for more research. One surprise to me was that there is so few people on Facebook that are part of communities focused on diabetes.

Cigarettes have been characterized as a nicotine delivery system. There are over a billion people that smoke them worldwide.  It is increasing. The World Bank Group estimates that between 80,000 – 100,000 young people take up smoking cigarettes per day. According to the American Heart Association about 49 million adults in the US smoke them.

A new type of cigarette, called the electronic cigarette, e-cigarette or just the e-cig, has hit the market. It is smokeless. Instead of burning tobacco you use a battery to vaporize and inhale a nicotine solution.   It is unregulated. It can in theory be consumed where smoking is banned.

These new electronic nicotine delivery systems are just now being studied. I found some research on EurekAlert! that is sounding an alarm:

To address this question, researchers at the University of California, Riverside evaluated five e-cigarette brands and found design flaws, lack of adequate labeling, and several concerns about quality control and health issues. They conclude that e-cigarettes are potentially harmful and urge regulators to consider removing e-cigarettes from the market until their safety is adequately evaluated.”

There are more than five brands on the market. Although I could not find a formal market study, there are newspaper articles that claim the market is growing fast. Ironically, the high price of traditional cigarettes have made the e-cig technology affordable.

According to Smoke Power here is how they work:

 ”… the user inhales on the electronic cigarette, this causes an air flow sensor to signal to the inbuilt microprocessor, that in turn activates the atomizer. The atomizer converts the liquid nicotine in the cartridge into a vapour (by atomization), which is digested by the user. Simultaneously, a vapor is released from the glycol by the atomizer to resemble ‘smoke’. “

They include tobacco flavoring, look like a cigarette and produce vapor like smoke so they are trying to meet the cognitive needs of smokers with the design.

Interested to hear from readers that have used e-cigs or that have strong opinions about them.

Source of Image: Electronic Cigarette Comparison

I am just starting a small project focusing on students sending and receiving off-topic text messages during class. This came about in part because of the series of posts on the Cognitive Design Blog about the topic. 

MSNBC posted the results of recent 269 student survey that had some interesting findings:

- 90% of the students text during class

- 50% claim it is easy to do

- 10% do it during exams

- 3% use texting to cheat

Some professors have instituted a no-texting policy resulting in a “zero” if caught. At least  one professor leaves the room when he detects texting. In another approach instructors ask students to bring phones and use them as a polling technology during the lecture. The resulting text messages are displayed on a screen and used to faciltate discussion.   This may or may not minimize off-topic texting by the same student group.

There is an important related issue.  Working adults frequently text, email or IM during business meetings.

How can we use cognitive design to approach texting off-topic during class?

Organizations are very interested in the ethical behaviors of leaders, employees, customers, suppliers and everyone in the value chain.  Significant time and money is spent on ethics training and programs designed to enhance compliance – often without achieving the desired results.

Clients and students ask, how can we use cognitive design to enhance the effectiveness of ethics training and programs?

The key is to approach it as a behavior change challenge and understand the underlying moral cognition that drives it.

For example, consider the research just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science by the University of Toronto on the Cognition of Moral Behavior.  

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I am often asked by clients and students how cognitive design can be used to improve the effectiveness of coaching.  Or more specifically, what findings from cognitive science can help us coach employees in the workplace, patients in healthcare and students in the classroom more effectively?

These are important questions as coaching programs have sprung up everywhere, are deeply entangled in cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) and don’t always produce the outcomes we want.

So I am always on the look out for good scientific studies that have designable insights for improving the coaching process. Take for example, the work at Case Western Reserve University that clearly demonstrates Coaching with Compassion can Light up Human Thoughts.  Researchers are using brain scanning to study the neural signatures of different coaching styles and their impacts on outcomes.  A key finding:

 ”Boyatzis, a faculty member at Weatherhead School of Management, and Jack, director of the university’s Brain, Mind and Consciousness Lab, say coaches should seek to arouse a Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA), which causes positive emotion and arouses neuroendocrine systems that stimulate better cognitive functioning and increased perceptual accuracy and openness in the person being coached, taught or advised. Emphasizing weaknesses, flaws, or other shortcomings, or even trying to “fix” the problem for the coached person, has an opposite effect.”

Perhaps not so surprising to folks that are good at coaching.  But the fact is we normally coach using a Negative Emotional Attractor by focusing on what is wrong and trying to “fix” the person.

Coaching, according to this study, tends to produce the best outcomes when the person being coached feels inspired and compassion flowing from the person doing the coaching.

“By spending 30 minutes talking about a person’s desired, personal vision, we could light up (activate) the parts of the brain 5-7 days later that are associated with cognitive, perceptual and emotional openness and better functioning,” Boyatzis said. 

You still provide corrective suggestions as a coach but you must do so from a genuine sense of compassion versus critical judgement.  Coaching is framed in terms of making changes to achieve the individual’s dreams and ambitions. It is grounded in a caring, empathetic and emotional intelligent interaction between parties. It is not technical compliance with the duties of some formally specified coaching process.

Our minds open to influence in the presence of an informed, caring voice that has our best interests at heart.   Compassionate coaches, just like compassionate leaders, doctors or teachers, will be the most effective in changing how we feel, think and behave.

To tackle coaching from a cognitive design perspective we must first discover, cultivate and unleash compassion for helping others. Without that, what follows will fail to light up our brains.