Cognitive Design

McKinsey just released 2010 results of their global survey on innovation and commercialization. It is all good news for the cognitive designer.

First, 84% of the executives asked indicated that innovation was extremely or very important for their firm.  This should create strong demand for designers able to create new products, services and experiences that meet the cognitive needs of customers in simplified or unique ways.

Second, as firms turn towards innovation-based growth strategies they are facing the same organizational barriers that they have tried to overcome many times before. According to the survey:

Further, many of the challenges—finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, organizing the innovation process from beginning to end—are remarkably consistent. Indeed, surveys over the past few years suggest that the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, and companies have made little progress in surmounting them.

While the suggested improvements  in the article are strong - formalize the prioritization process and link innovation to strategic planning - they miss the mark. Past efforts to enable organizational innovation have failed because we have neglected the cognitive factors. From a cognitive design standpoint the key questions are:

How do the minds of organizational innovators really work? What psychological needs, work practices, cognitive biases and mental models make them tick?

We need to answer these questions for all the key stakeholder groups - executives overseeing innovation, employee innovators, customer co-innovators and supplier collaborators.

                       Image source: Innovation Playground 

Not having these answers will result in poorly designed innovation programs and processes. Take for example this survey finding:

 As in the past, executives have the most difficulty stopping ideas at the right time, with only 26 percent of respondents to this survey saying they do this well.

I can try to stop ideas at the right time by designing a formal approach to prioritization but that will have little impact if I don’t understand the cognitive biases at work in setting and following priorities especially when “pet ideas” are involved.

Innovation at both the individual and organizational level is an inherently cognitive-political process.  No matter what programs and processes we design to stimulate it, the cognitive (intellectual, emotional, volitional and motivational) needs and political realities of the key stakeholder groups must be well understood and satisfied. This puts the cognitive designer center stage.

Just organizations treat employees fairly. Generating feelings and thoughts of fairness in employees requires making decisions and taking actions that produce favorable outcomes and/or use processes that involve employees, create a level playing field and provide clear explanations of why.   To maintain a sense of fairness when everyone cannot receive a favorable outcome means using processes that are inclusive, consistent and clear.  Up to a point, high process fairness is very important for maintaining organizational justice at crunch time or when outcomes are very unfavorable - layoffs, budget cuts and work-life imbalances.

Crunch time in organizational justice presents many cognitive design challenges.   Such situations carry a strong emotional charge (guilt, sympathy, fear) and can have subtle cognitive side effects.  For example, you can accidentally and negatively impact employee self esteem or create survival guilt with high process fairness.

Further, bad news carries tremendous cognitive load. One that authorities delivering the news might not be able to handle well enough to maintain high process fairness.  There are several other cognitive factors inhibiting manager from following high process fairness including lack of belief that they will do much good and a natural reluctance to surrender power. These issues are covered well in the new book Contemporary Look at Organizational Justice: Multiply Insult Times Injury. It is a bit academic but the free chapter is on practical applications.

When outcomes are bad our brains go into overdrive on many levels. Not attending to the cognitive factors at crunch time strongly diminishes our ability to treat employees fairly and maintain a sense of organizational justice. This is especially the case if we design high-fairness processes that fail to account for how the mind of the managers naturally works. They won’t get implemented.  

The case for this is made fairly strongly in the book. Indeed, the author calls it the Paradox of Process Fairness.  It is a paradox because the business case for process fairness during crunch time is good yet the evidence suggests we don’t use it. We don’t use it because we have failed to design high fairness processes that meet the cognitive needs of managers. We create the conditions of fairness for employees - involvement, level playing field, clarity of explanation but leave managers with a sometime unbearable cognitive load, no response to their belief that it does not work, naive demand to share power and the like.

The challenge for cognitive designers working in the field of organizational justice is to create high process fairness that meets the psychological needs of both employees and managers.

Systems that remotely monitor the movements, weight, blood pressure, compliance with medication schedules and other daily behaviors of older adults are springing up. For children with older parents experiencing failing health such systems mean high-tech eldercare from afar. For the parents it means a chance to age in place.

Take for example, the BeClose system.

Add some smart software into the mix as they do in the QuietCare system and you can infer a lot about what is going on:

“Have they gotten out of bed in the morning?

Have they navigated the bathroom safely?

Have they eaten?

Have they taken their medicine?

What’s their overall activity level?

Are they sleeping well?”

But technology is only part of the story. Successful deployment and use requires close attention to human factors and good cognitive design.   A recent article in the New York Times brings this to a sharp point:

“Many of the systems are godsends for families. But, as with any parent-child relationship, all loving intentions can be tempered by issues of control, role-reversal, guilt and a little deception — enough loaded stuff to fill a psychology syllabus. For just as the current population of adults in their 30s and 40s have built a reputation for being a generation of hyper-involved, hovering parents to their own children, they now have the tools to micro-manage their aging mothers and fathers as well.”

The article makes the point that remote monitoring eldercare systems are meeting cognitive needs on both sides of the fence:

In addition to giving him peace of mind that his mother is fine, the system helps assuage that midlife sense of guilt. “I have a large amount of guilt,” Mr. Murdock admitted. “I’m really far away. I’m not helping to take care of her, to mow her lawn, to be a good son.”

The article does a good job of raising some of the key cognitive design issues but it is far from clear how they can be resolved.

MIT’s journal, Sloan Management Review, has an outstanding article that highlights why we must do cognitive design to get excellent customer service. The article, Designing for the Softer Side of Customer Service,  demonstrates how three psychological variables - trust, emotions and feelings of control shape the modern service experience.  They provide a good theoretical frame, new research and many specific suggestions such as:

“Service providers should categorize events based on the type of emotion and the source. When negative events are caused by the company, quick recovery is vital. When they are caused by external agents, the company can generate good will by either being supportive when the emotions are negative or celebrating with the customer when the emotions are positive”.

Interested to hear from readers that have implemented service innovations designed to leverage  trust, emotions or feelings of control.

Online or virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft are a new type of socio-technical system. They are technical platforms that provide computer-mediated social interactions of serious depth and breadth.   Literally millions of people participate many spending in excess of 20 hours per week online.  Users stay loyal for years. Some online worlds support virtual economies that spill over into real dollars. Over a billion real dollars have been spent on virtual goods, skills, experience points and level ups!

The opportunities for cognitive designers are vast.   Testing new designs in a virtual world and using online worlds to tackle hard cognitive design problems (lasting behaviors change, knowledge worker productivity, product/service innovation, enhancing brain function) are two major areas of opportunities.  Another is that online worlds have matured as socio-technical systems enough to offer some deep insights (design patterns) for cognitive designers.  To get a taste for that I suggest you spend sometime in country. Join a community and earn some experience points.  

Another approach is to look at the growing literature. One of my favorites is Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and Virtual.  Chapter eleven reveals an important design pattern:

“Most MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) attempt to foster interactions between their players by using a common template, which could be stereotyped as follows:

(1) the player creates a “level 1” character who enters the world with a limited set of abilities and equipment;

(2) the player is presented with “quests” (missions) to accomplish;

(3) successful completion of the objectives generates “experience points” (or any other similar reward), allowing the character to acquire more powerful abilities and/or equipment;

(4) (this is the most important design element) as a player gains in levels, quests become increasingly difficult to accomplish alone, reaching a point where a coordinated group of players is required to move further;

(5) the size of the group required, the length of the quests or dungeons, and the complexity of the encounters make it nearly impossible to succeed with an ad hoc group assembled on the spot, creating the need for more formal and persistent social structures: the guilds (or clans, teams, etc. in other game worlds).”

There are many ways a clever cognitive designer can put this to use even in the real world.

Interested to hear from readers with some significant virtual world time. What opportunities for cognitive designers do you see?

The Sekai Camera is a free smart phone App that locates, tags and provides information about the scene in your camera view. It also lets you “air tag” or provide descriptions and comments (text, pictures, icons, etc.) on the scene.  Additional features include a life-log.

A bit crude but it is an important first generation augmented reality application using the mobile web. One more example of how we are breaking down the barrier between the digital and physical worlds.

I invite cognitive designers to experiment with the Sekai Camera and suggest ideas for how it can be adapted to create lasting behavior change, improve organizational performance,  create a differentiated think-and-FEEL for existing products and services or enhance an individuals cognitive performance.

For some time over 70% of the GDP in the US (and 57% of global GDP) comes from services not products. About half of IBM’s revenue comes from services not computers or software. It turns out that creating, delivering and managing services is very different from doing the same for products. Yet our economic, management and innovation models are nearly all geared towards technology and products not services.  Little wonder IBM is championing the development of a new field they call Service Science, Management and Engineering or SSME.

IBM was instrumental in creating the field of computer science in the 1950s and that turn out to be a genius business move. They hope to repeat that move in the early 21st century but with SSME or service science not computer science.

Services are intangible, require the co-creation of value between the provider and the consumer and are driven by the application of knowledge and skills. This means cognition is a key factor in the “production of services” and cognitive design could play a key role in service system innovation.  More specifically, we should optimize the design of our service systems for how minds naturally work.

Unfortunately, the more traditional fields of management science, industrial engineering, computer science, operations research and the like are lining up to dominate the new discipline.  There is some attention being paid to the role of social sciences (see for example MIT’s Center For Engineering Fundamentals) but that might miss the mark. One exception I found was the chapter, The Psychology of Experience: The Missing Link in Service Science in the book (complete version online),  SSME: Education for the 21st Century (see page 35).  Hopefully there are others.

I am interested to hear from readers working in or considering the field of SSME and how cognitive design can play a role.

In the July 27th issue of Circulation, the American Heart Association made a 37 page scientific statement on interventions that produce enough activity and dietary changes in adults to lower their cardiovascular risk. One in three people in the US have cardiovascular disease and it is still our leading cause of death.

They looked at the results of 74 individual studies and essentially found that it requires a combination of cognitive strategies to produce lasting health-related behavior change including, counseling, goal setting, extended follow-up and self monitoring. Personalized strategies that use data and context relevant to the individual patient work best.

None of this will be a surprise to cognitive designers but it is good to have the force of a meta-study behind your approach. Plus they looked at the evidence for using specific techniques (e.g. motivational interviewing) and specific platforms (e.g. web. I am still working through the details on specific interventions and will share designable insights in later posts.

According to SapientNitro we have special and happy memories of eating ice cream.  To tap those memories they created the world’s first smile-activated machine that vends ice cream. The machine Share Happy, can sense your presence, lure your closer with sounds and graphics and then, with permission, take and analyze your picture. Those with great smiles are rewarded with an ice cream bar. Facial recognition software reads your smile and also infers your gender and age.  The goal? And I quote - “… to encourage people everywhere to share life’s small moments of happiness.”

The plan to to deploy Share Happy  in high traffic areas (e.g. malls) around the world over the next 18 months.  

You cannot achieve service excellence without meeting the cognitive (intellectual and emotional) needs of your employees and customers. For a great billion dollar example of this check on the new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.

If you want to get a free taste, read the excerpt provided by Strategy+Business  (registration required). Here is my favorite part:

“At Zappos, we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours long!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection (internally referred to as PEC) with the customer.”

From scripts, measurement of the “average handle time” and upsell to personal emotional connections.  That is a shift from meeting the cognitive needs of managers trying to control the service to the employees and customers that are experiencing the service. Bravo!