Cognitive Design

Service failure is a serious affair. Approximately 15% of front line service workers report experiencing daily abuse from angry customers that feel the company has somehow failed them.   How well the organization recovers from service failures – from both the service worker and customer perspectives – can mean big bucks. Not surprising, effective service recovery is a matter of cognitive design requiring good insight into how the minds of employees and customers really work. So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies with designable insights.

Take for example, recent research from the University of Bath, Brands that Promise the World Make Consumers Feel Betrayed.   Researchers found that marketing that over promises can result in customers taking service failures as a personal affront. You tell someone they are special, like family or even a king and then don’t treat them that way when they arrive. This generates consumer conflict – angry, abusive and resentful behavior. Recovering from that is very different from what must be done with customers that frame service failure in a task-based way or as a matter of procedural failure not personal affront.

More specifically:

“Consumers who frame conflict in a task-based way are more focused on ensuring a practical outcome and less likely to become angry. They’re more receptive to genuine efforts by the company to restore the service and more likely to continue with the relationship…..

For consumers who frame conflict in a personal way offering compensation or restoring the service can actually make things worse. It’s more about admitting fault and going off script to acknowledge they’re in the wrong and apologise.”

This has clear implications for cognitive designers working on service recovery processes and training.

The Journal of Personality recently report significant research into the dimensions and underlying causes of preferences in media-based entertainment. A recent article, Listening, Watching and Reading,  reports on a study of 3000 people and their preferences for consuming different types of movies, books, music and other media-based entertainments.  Five factors of preference stood out empirically including communal, aesthetic, dark, thrilling and cerebral.

 ”Those who score highly on the Communal dimension tend to enjoy media that involve people and relationships, including: daytime chat shows, romantic films, pop music, and cook books.High scorers on the Aesthetic dimension enjoy creative, abstract material, including: poetry, opera, and foreign films.The Dark dimension relates to intense, edgy, hedonistic material, including: heavy metal, horror films and erotica.   The Thrilling Dimension is made up of adventure and fantasy material such as thrillers and sci fi.Finally, high scorers on the Cerebral dimension enjoy documentaries, news and current affairs.”

Preferences were the same across different media and were determined mostly by personality type not demographics.  The sample size and diversity of the study was good.

Such research, although preliminary, is the first I found that gives specific media consumption profiles based upon cognitive or personality needs.  It may have design implications for recommendation engines, media marketing strategies and services aimed at the 55% of our time we spending consuming entertainment media.

Can you drive a car and talk on your cell phone without reducing you ability to drive safely? Common sense and several actuarial studies say no way. However, a recent study in the Psychonomic Bulletin, Supertaskers: Profiles in extraordinary multitasking ability, claims that 2.5% of us might be able to. To quote the abstract:

“We tested 200 participants in a high-fidelity driving simulator in both single- and dual-task conditions. The dual task involved driving while performing a demanding auditory version of the operation span (OSPAN) task. Whereas the vast majority of participants showed significant performance decrements in dual-task conditions (compared with single-task conditions for either driving or OSPAN tasks), 2.5% of the sample showed absolutely no performance decrements with respect to performing single and dual tasks. “

It should be noted that the OSPAN task used has a lower cognitive load than your typical cell phone conversation.  Further, the supertaskers also scored in the top quartile when tested on the individual tasks. So they are super single taskers too. No matter, the results are striking. For the cognitive designer that has been following the literature, it demonstrates some form of deep multitasking is possible but it is very rare (3% of the population).

Having choice creates cognitive load. Making decisions can take a lot of mental energy. Having many options that are roughly similar or many that are wildly different can lead to choice overload.

As cognitive designers we need to understand how to engineer choice-making and more basically when offering a choice creates value.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that might help us understand when choice is important.  An upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, Why Making Our Own Choice is More Satisfying When Pleasure is The Goal, offers some designable insights:

“Results consistently show that the outcome of a self-made choice is more satisfying than the outcome of an externally made choice when the goal is hedonic, but when the goal is utilitarian there is no difference in satisfaction between choosers and non-choosers,” the authors write. “A lack of choice feels less like a deprivation of the capacity to determine one’s own fate when the goal choice is utilitarian than when it is hedonic.”

To over simplify, we get more value from choice when pleasure is involved. Having pleasurable choices gives us the opportunity to savior which offsets the energy required to do the mental work of making the choice.  

As is always the case, satisfaction or cognitive performance improves when the mental energy you get out of an interaction is more than you have to put into it.

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently published an interesting study, The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members From the Group. It is getting picked up in the blogsphere. For example, PsychCentral writes:

“Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.”

Some of the motivations for wanting to expel the unselfish include the complaints that they raise the bar for everyone, make you look bad and break the social rules of the group.   The research claims this is true even if the unselfish behavior is good for the group.

I agree with other commentators that this research may have important implications for management and leadership. It has distinct cognitive design implications. But we need to be careful in how we try and apply it.  There could be strong psychographic or group profile effects.

It is interesting to note that study participants were introductory psychology students. I am not sure you would find the same behavior in 20-year workplace veterans with considerable career success, a small team intensely focused on a new product launch or many other types of high-performance groups.  In such  groups stepping up (especially to do unpopular but necessary work) would be appreciated perhaps even respected not fuel for resentment.

What do you think? Are unselfish employees really resented?

To optimize a design for how minds work we must understand how mental energy is converted during interaction.  How is the mental effort I put into using something transformed into excitement, pleasure, pride, hope, warm memories, a sense of wonder or an instant insight into myself or the world around me?   Any artifact that delivers smoothly on its core functionality and generates mental energy by moving my heart-and-mind will be a winner in the marketplace or workplace.

Learning to see the mental energy signature of an artifact is a core skill for the cognitive designer.  

Laughter is one place to look. We laugh because something tickles the novelty center in our brain by catching us by surprise. A momentary instance of cognitive dissonance between the set-up and punch line creates a spike of mental energy we cannot contain so we laugh. We also laugh and try and make others laugh to relieve situational stress, worry or anxiety.  This is often the source of the inappropriate jokes or laughing at the wrong time.  The cognition is the same – a spike of mental energy, too much to handle, looking to go to ground.

So I am always on the look out for new scientific studies into the nature of laughter.  For example, a recent study conducted by North Carolina State took a unique empirical look at the role of laughter during jury deliberation. The news release, aptly titled No Laughing Matter, provides some potential insights into group dynamics. For instance:

“The researchers learned that laughter could be used as a tool, intentionally and strategically, to control communication and affect group dynamics. For example, one juror was very vocal and made it clear early in the case that she was opposed to the death penalty. In one instance, when that juror agreed with other jury members, one of the other members said “She’s so smart,” resulting in laughter from other members of the group. “That had the effect of further distancing her from the rest of the jury,” Keyton says.”

The article goes on to point out there is little research into the nature of laughter  in serious settings.  Fortunately, cognitive designers are well positioned to offer field observations.  When have you seen laughter in a serious setting and what did it reveal about the mental energy dynamics of the situation?

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.

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.

If you have not seen the video, Social Media Revolution 2, check it out. It  is a little over 4 minutes long, has uplifting music, draws on the new book Socialnomics and summarizes the factoids behind the revolution nicely.

Most forms of social media have exploded over the last several years because of the unique mental energy proposition they offer users. Never before have I been able to exert so little mental effort to get so much mental energy (meaning, emotion, ego boost, etc.)  in return. And the effect is even more intense in social games or online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

The 2010 IBM Global CEO Study, Capitalizing on Complexity,  is a must read for any designer that is working on leadership programs.  The study is unique and is based on 1500+  in person interviews with senior leaders in 60 countries and 33 industries.   It identifies the number one unmet cognitive need for this group – dealing with accelerating complexity – and identifies creativity as the number one leadership attribute. To quote:

“Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.”

Many of the leaders interviewed do no believe they are prepared to navigate the complexity ahead.  Creativity is not the only cognitive leadership attribute near the top of the list, global thinking was ranked number three.

In addition to creative leadership, the report identifies two other factors for successfully capitalizing on complexity:

“1. Reinventing customer relationships – with the Internet, new channels and globalising customers, organisations have to rethink approaches to better understand, interact with and serve their customers and citizens

2. Building operating dexterity – while rising complexity may sound threatening at first, reframing that initial reaction is fundamentally important. Successful CEOs refashion their organisations, making them faster, more flexible and capable of using complexity to their advantage.”

Developing creative global thinking leaders,  robust customer interactions and operating dexterity all require top shelf cognitive designs.

There is no way to tame and ultimately capitalize on complexity unless the systems and solutions we put in place are optimized for how minds naturally work.