Cognitive Design

Designing for how minds really work is about discovering unarticulated cognitive needs in the workplace or the market and creating an artifact (product, business model, management approach, etc.) to meet them.

When it comes to motivating employees, especially high performance knowledge workers, it is now broadly recognized that meaningfulness in the workplace is key. Creating meaning is the chief cognitive need of employees in knowledge intensive organizations.

But how do we do that, or how do you design for that?             

[Source:  The McKinsey Quarterly, a journal of McKinsey & Company.]  

Tim Brown, the CEO of the design/innovation machine known as IDEO gave a recent interview in the McKinsey Quarterly on Lessons from Innovation’s Front Lines (free registration required) that provides some insights:

“I think organizations have a hugely unfair advantage when it comes to innovation and incentives: people want to put things out in the world to leave their mark; they want to be creative. I think it’s a basic trait of human nature—if you give people the chance to do things that have an impact in the world, that is inherently motivating to them. Time and time again, I hear people say that putting something out in the world that didn’t exist before was a life-changing experience. ” 

 We have a fundamental and pressing cognitive need to put something new in the world and thereby change it and transform ourselves.

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Making meaning – how do customers and employees do it and how can we design artifacts that support the creation and experience of it? 

An artifact or natural object becomes meaningful when I classify it or put it in a category.  For example, I look at (and perhaps even smell) something moving in a field and pattern recognize it as a cow. The “something” now categorized as a cow has considerable meaning because I believe, feel, value and perhaps even know a lot about cows. I was able to categorize it because I perceived that it had a form, specific features (or properties) and behaved (or functioned) in a particular way. These 3Fs – form, features and functions matched my category, schema or mental model of a cow.   That is general or public meaning.

There is also personal meaning that is created when the category is one that is particularly important to me because it reflects my values or meets a cognitive (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) need that I have. Continuing with the cow example,  we have seen a consumer crazy with cow toys, stuff animals, collectibles, pottery, pictures,  gifts, t-shirts and the like appearing. For marketing fans there is also the famous “Purple Cow” created by Seth Godin by his book by that title.  

Why the consumer fascination with cows? What personalized meaning is being created? What previously unmet cognitive need is being satisfied?  

I raised these questions last year with a group I was training in a large corporation in the food industry.  They went out and analyzed cow artifacts and developed psychographic profiles for people that were consuming them. The psychographic profiles are like socio-economic profiles only instead of focusing of where you live and how much you make they focus on how you think, learn, make decisions, emotionally react and other key aspects of your cognition.

I cannot share the specifics of what they found but in general terms they found cow symbols creating personalized meaning because, for example, cows are big but lovable, a part of the great American west, the subject of many jokes, stories and a focus of concern for humane treatment.

The Purple Cow was understood as a juxtaposition effect creating novelty and surprise – after all cows are not purple.   Point being that if we are going to design artifacts (experiences, products, corporate events, etc.) that create or enhance personalized meaning for customers and employees we need to understand the underlying psychographic profile we are trying to meet.  

In cognitive design, psychographics goes beyond values (what the user holds to be important) to include how they reason (e.g. are specific biases involved), how they structure the mental content (e.g. metaphors, archetypes, gestalts), what core beliefs or mental models are involved (especially if they are faulty), what types of emotional and other visceral responses are they prone to and a host of other factors. 

I contrast psychographics to a values-based approach to open the window a bit and get additional insight to guide the design process. For example, check out the 15 meanings (general profiles) that Steve Diller and his colleagues have documented from their research into meaningful customer experiences.

 The profiles include, for example, duty, freedom, truth, enlightenment, justice and oneness.  All value-based categories and if I know which of these are operating in my target market I have valuable insights for design.

Now imagine I can go a step further and determine that not only is “Justice”a key meaning maker for my users but that they understand it in terms of two core metaphors – journey and control (see my earlier post on Zaltman’s new book on deep metaphors). This provides even more design information to help me shape the 3Fs (form, features and functions) of the artifact to fit how the minds of my consumers or employees work.   

“Justice”  defined by Diller as a type of meaning is “The assurance of equitable and unbiased treatment”.  To be most effective in designing experiences based on this form of meaning we need to understand how user reason about justice – what is their calculus of equitable and unbiased?  I demonstrate the importance of this in an earlier post (designing for trust) that discusses service recovery.  Over compensation during service recovery can lead to consumer guilt, under compensation can lead to anger.

Meaning, especially personal meaning is created by a complex cognitive process that includes, values, emotions, metaphors, images, mental models, reasoning rules and the like.  To enhance or create meaningful experience for employees and customers we need to understand not only what values transform public meaning into private meaning but the mechanics of how that is done.

When designing a behavior change program or product it is important to know what level of self-regulatory ability your target market has. How good are they at managing their own thoughts, emotions and behaviors when it comes to reaching a goal? In short, how much self-control do they have?  

Self regulatory ability or strength is used when you try to avoid existing behaviors such as over eating, smoking, drinking, spending too much money or when you initiate new behaviors such as saving money, exercising or following a new safety procedure at work. There is a moment of truth when you either pass or fail in avoiding/initiating the old/new behavior.   As designers we want to be sure that our artifacts don’t assume users have more self regulatory strength (self control) than they do.  Such artifacts will lead to self-regulatory failures and agitate users. But how do we know what level of self regulation users are operating on?  

A promising new tool, the Elaboration on Potential Outcomes (EPO) scale was published in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. First introduced in a Ph.D thesis,  by Gergana Yordanova, the scale uses 13-questions to determine a consumer’s tendency to reflect on and evaluate the potential outcomes of future actions. This in turn is correlated to their ability to self-regulate.   This result may seem like common sense – people who think and care about future consequences will tend to have behavioral self control, but the EPO scale gives us a simple way to measure it in people and populations.  

The questions are asked in three general categories, and quoted directly are: 

“Generation/evaluation dimension: 

1. Before I act I consider what I will gain or lose in the future as a result of my actions

2. I try to anticipate as many consequences of my actions as I can

3. Before I make a decision I consider all possible outcomes

4. I always try to assess how important the potential consequences of my decisions might be  

5. I try hard to predict how likely different consequences are

6. Usually I carefully estimate the risk of various outcomes occurring 

Positive outcome focus dimension: 

7. I keep a positive attitude that things always turn out all right

8. I prefer to think about the good things that can happen rather than the bad

9. When thinking over my decisions I focus more on their positive end results 

Negative outcome focus dimension: 

10. I tend to think a lot about the negative outcomes that might occur as a result of my actions

11. I am often afraid that things might turn out badly

12. When thinking over my decisions I focus more on their negative end results

13. I often worry about what could go wrong as a result of my decisions” 

Yes answers indicate higher EPO and a greater chance that the consumer will have self-regulatory success when faced with a choice. 

The challenge is how can we as cognitive designers put the EPO scale to use to help make more effective change programs and products?

At the very least, it may be possible to factor in the 13-questions to any modeling we do to build a psychographic profile of the target group we are designing for. 

Other blog post on EPO can be found as Look Before you Leap: new study examine self control on Science Daily and intellectual vanities.

Every talented employee has a set of cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional), that can be discovered and documented in a psychographic profile. Just as we segment customers by psychographic profiles we can segment employees and make sure we design benefit programs, policies, work environments, management practices and change programs to meet those needs.

  More strategically, employee psychographic profiles can be used to clarify the intangible aspects of your firm’s employee value proposition and compete more effectively in the war for talent.

  The question is how do we define psychographic profiles for employees?  In my cognitive design class I teach profiling techniques for both customers and employees. To start the discussion for employees we look at an older HBR article that describes the cognitive needs of front-line workers and talks about how meeting those needs is the key to Firing them up! The profiles include:

   In cognitive design we want artifacts that are tuned to support, enhance or even create a particular frame of mind (thoughts + emotions).  One push back I get on this is everybody thinks and feels differently so how can you design for more than one person? This is where the cognitive science comes in – there is a lot of common ground in the way we think and feel and that can be used to build up psychographic profiles that segment a market or define target groups.  Psychographic profiles define groups of people that are operating on a shared mental model, cognitive bias, metaphor, decision heuristic, learning style, emotional trigger or other combination cognitive psychological characteristics that have enough discriminating power to generate meaningful classification.  The work of cognitive design is to link the psychographic profile to behaviors and ultimately to product features and functions.  

  There are not well developed out-of-the-box psychographic profiles.  Investing in developing accurate psychographic profiles for your markets is well worth the effort because it provides the insights needed to drive waves of innovation and possibly competitive advantage.

  Take mental models for example. Mental models (long the focus of cognitive scientists) define how we think and feel about a particular thing/event/agent in the world. So I have a mental model about families, trees, cars, mountains, bosses and the like. Mental models are grounded in my experience and values. They include attitudes which can generate emotions. For example, my mental model of snakes includes attitudes that invoke the emotion of fear.  Understanding a group in terms of the mental models they share – especially as they relate to products and services, can be a powerful foundation for psychographics. So the question becomes, how do we discover shared mental models?

  Most techniques start by eliciting the individuals’ mental model and then aggregating those using a technique for measuring similarity to define the common or shared mental model.  The end result is a “concept map” that defines the thought/feelings that make up the model and how they related to each other. Some example techniques:

1. The ACSMM method that measures similarity based on the number of nodes and links that the individual mental models have in common  

2. The ZMET technique that uses images and metaphors to elicit individual and discover shared mental models

3. Pathfinder networks that use a statistical analysis of pair-wise comparisons by individuals to establish a graphic theoretic measure of similarity to discover the shared model  

  For a brief comparative overview of many of the major techniques see the study by Johnson and others.  For the most part, these are research-based techniques and represent the “big gun” in psychographics.  They are not commonly used by marketing and product development groups. My bet is that they (or more streamlined versions of them) will be.   Just as you drive business decisions based on demographics today, you will drive business decision based on psychographics in the future.