Cognitive Design

In cognitive design we can frame business ethics as a behavior change challenge.  This means identifying target behaviors to stop, start and avoid starting and then designing changes to the environment that encourage or require the behaviors as well as one or more pathways to learn them from experience.

More specifically, some behaviors and decisions are ethical and others are not.  The challenge in many organizations is to have employees either stop or avoid starting unethical behaviors and start ethical ones.

Taking a cognitive design approach means we study actual business behaviors and the deeply felt psychological needs that drive them.   Only by understanding the underlying psychology can we hope to design an effective program to change unethical behavior or promote ethical ones.

This approach is gaining academic traction in the rapidly emerging field of behavioral business ethics.  According to a new book just edited by two leaders in the field:

“This book takes a look at how and why individuals display unethical behavior. It emphasizes the actual behavior of individuals rather than the specific business practices. It draws from work on psychology which is the scientific study of human behavior and thought processes. As Max Bazerman said, “efforts to improve ethical decision making are better aimed at understanding our psychological tendencies.”

For a shorter  introduction to what behavioral science can do for the practice of business ethics check out this inaugural address given at the Rotterdam School of Management.  Cognitive designers will be most interested in the discussion on the emergence of distrust.

The cognitive-behavioral approach promises to reframe our approach to business ethics in a way that leads to dramatic improvements.   We might make more progress treating ethics problems like we do eating or smoking problems.  After all, assuming people are greedy and corrupt leads nowhere. Perhaps the key is to understand why they cannot control their impulses in a particular environment and how deeply felt psychological needs can be met in a more ethical manner.

Changing behaviors takes considerable time and mental energy. Often we need help. Someone to guide or advise us through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience in a way that makes them stick. A guide provides motivation, helps us break through rationalizations and faulty beliefs, suggests new techniques when the ones we are using fail and provides perspective on progress and goals.  Guides take many forms – a formal sponsor in a change program, friend, family member, therapist, community pharmacist, teacher, mentor at work, life coach or just someone else who has made it through the change and wants to help.

Without guides most of us (approximately 70%) will not be able to achieve lasting changes to our health, financial, relationship and other essential personal an professional behaviors. Technology can be a guide too.  Indeed, technology is amplifying and redesigning how human behavior-change guides do their work. Smart phones, social networks, special purpose web sites, virtual humans, video games and simulations all promise to revolutionize how we change behaviors.

Technology-enabled behavior change has grown explosively over the last 10 years and is emerging as a new academic discipline. Conferences, journals, rigorously research books and interdisciplinary centers are sprouting up.  For example,  I received two emails just today on the topic. One announced a new book from Psychology Press, The Social Cure, that argues ” A growing body of evidence shows that social networks and identities have a profound impact on mental and physical health.”   The second announced a new interdisciplinary research and education center being launched at Northwestern University dedicated to becoming a world leader in behavioral intervention technology (BIT).

They are looking at how a range of technologies from the web to the smart phone and virtual humans can enable preventative medicine, cognitive behavioral therapy, psychotherapy and other science-based behavior change interventions.  Of special interest is purple, a platform the Center developed for building BIT applications. Purple is a tool for building new BIT applications faster, better and cheaper.

Clearly technology-enabled behavior change is hot.

To be successful such technology efforts will have to maintain a laser-like focus on what they are trying to enable, namely the social cognitive psychology of how humans make lasting behavior change.

Now, how does that work again?

Every successful innovator or leader I have met is always trying very hard to figure something out. Asking questions, learning, testing concepts and talking with others about new ideas.  That simple observation is at the heart of two new books on innovation.

The Innovator’s DNA focuses on five skills of disruptive innovators including asking questions, observing, networking with people for new ideas, making associations and experimenting to uncover insights. Of course you need a the traditional willingness to take risks and challenge the status quo. Likewise in yet to be released book, The Lean Startup,  sees successful entrepreneurs are those that systematically experiment with all aspects of their vision – product, distribution, business model – and quickly figure out how to build a sustainable business.

Fuzzy notions of creativity are replaced by crisper notions and even disciplined methods (e.g. validated learning) for figuring things out. Readers of the cognitive design blog will see at the core of both books the psychology of  the experiential learning loop where we take action, reflect on the action, conceptualize or build up an understanding of what might be going on, take another action to test that understanding and repeat until you give up or have figured things out.

Moving through the loop, fast, cheap and deep requires considerable skill and motivation but nothing mysterious.   Much like a diet or other forms of self improvement, innovation does not involve rocket science just the hard but enjoyable work of figuring things out.

What are you trying hard to figure out? How fast, cheap and deep are you moving through the experiential learning loop to do it?

Organizations and individuals around the world are interested in increasing their capacity to innovate. New methods for innovation (or innovating innovation) abound and include for example, translational science, open innovation marketplaces, design thinking applied to business, citizen science and new financing mechanisms such as crowdfunding.

Our interest in innovation is long standing. One can see that by looking at the impressive history of best selling books with innovation in the title and by doing a Google trend search on the word innovation.  Innovating is very much a cognitive design challenge. Our ability to do it turns on understanding and supporting the skills, mental models and deeply felt psychological needs of innovators. Interestingly, most studies of innovation, especially at the organizational level, fail to take that into account. So I am always our the look out for well researched exceptions.

Take for example, the outstanding book, The Innovator’s Way (MIT Press 2010).  The authors define innovation as the adoption of a value-creating practice by a community. They review and debunk many current models and propose an approach based on eight essential practices.  They derived these practices from a study of cases of innovation in a wide variety of contexts including technology, product, organizational and social. It is easy and instructive to compare your own personal approach to the eight practices.

What is best from a cognitive design standpoint is that they emphasize individual skills, attentional factors, and the key conversations and decisions that drive innovation in the trenches.

This offers a treasure trove of insights for the cognitive designer looking for ways to support and accelerate innovation.

On the cognitive design blog we usually talk about ways to create irresistible think-and-feel-experiences, facilitate behavior change, crank up knowledge-intensive performances or deliver mind moving communications.  But there is a darker side.  The lack of doing good cognitive design combined with the tremendous mental stresses of modern life contribute to many problems. These range from wasting mental energy to making poor decisions and failures to self-regulate behavior to more serious and clinical mental health issues.

How much of a design-related issue is mental health and how big is the problem?  To begin to understand the scale of the problem check out Richard McNally’s new book What is Mental Illness? In it he argues that mental illness is an epidemic:

 ”Nearly 50 percent of Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives, and more than a quarter have suffered from mental illness in the past twelve months. Madness, it seems, is rampant in America.”

The study behind this claim can be found here and reveals the nature of the problems including anxiety, mood, impulse-control and substance abuse disorders.  

While the foundation for addressing these challenges should rest on evidence-based practice from behavioral medicine, design has an important role to play.  We know this to be true from other healthcare examples. Medicine creates drugs and treatments to cure a wide range of problems but lack of compliance and adherence runs rampant because the way they are delivered is not designed for how the patient’s mind work.   My hypothesis is that the effectiveness of programs designed to maintain and restored mental health are even more sensitive to cognitive factors.

We hardly speak of mental health let alone design broad-scale programs to protect it. Interestingly, this is not the case when it comes to brain health or protecting our selves from age related cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.   For example, check out the CDC’s Healthy Brain Initiative.

Given the scale of the problem, there is a wealth of opportunity for cognitive designers interested in creating programs to protect and restore mental health. Prevention is a natural place to start.  As that will no doubt entail behavior change, it might be possible to make small adjustment to ”mental health proof” other behavior change and wellness programs. Now that would be good design.

Design thinking, like quality thinking, process thinking, systemic thinking, lean thinking and the other “think like this” movements before it, is knocking on business’s door. It promises everything from more insightful strategy, to higher levels of innovation, truly agile operations and planned organizational change that works.

Design thinking as an early-stage management innovation is in a state of disarray.  But that’s natural. Basic questions about definitions, methods and even if it works dominate the conversation.  And these are the questions that you must answer to get traction in business.  And they must be answered in just the right way.  What is it? How do I do it? How do I know it works?

Indeed, when you look at the history of management innovation there is a clear signature to those that get traction and those that don’t.  A manifesto is required that provides answers to the three questions that are powerful, simple and easy to retell. A compelling position that declutters the conversation and readies the management mind for action.  While there are many fine books on design thinking for business, none come close to being a manifesto.

Manifestos are of special interest to cognitive designers that study management innovation and social change. They have a design that moves the heart and extends the mind.  So I am always on the lookout for manifestos anxious to understand their content and deconstruct their design and figure out what makes them tick.

Take for example the fourth coming book -Designing for Growth: a design thinking tool kit for managers.  It shows some signs of being a manifesto. I base that on  reading the first two chapters and looking at the cover art. The authors are good at creating cognitive dissonance and then resolving it in creative synthesis. This changes thinking.

For example, in the section on: Design and Business: A Match Made in Heaven – or Hell, they present a contrast table:

Runs deep and to the point but does not overload.  They also present a 4-step method and 10 tools which they build up graphically over time with a grand finale of:

While too complex to share easily the wave form and some of the catch phrases (e.g. what WOWs) could vector.

Interested to hear from readers that are aware of manifestos on design thinking or have insights into the cognition of why they work.

I am spending time writing chapters for a new book on the Five Pathways to Lasting Behavior Change. A major theme is the living room or household entrepreneur. This is an individual that has learned from hard experience how to influence behavior change in themselves or those around them. Like garage entrepreneurs, they sometimes develop innovations that will scale and impact the lives of millions.  Good examples are the 12-steps programs and Weight Watchers. These behavior change programs were hatched by individuals working in their living rooms (a metaphor) not from a corporate R&D lab.

In my research I have found that nearly every case of lasting behavior change has involved some form of consumer innovation. That happens when consumers modify existing products or create new ones to meet their individual needs.   It made me wonder, if consumer innovation appears rampant in services designed to change behavior, how much does it happen in other cases?

A colleague sent me a link to Comparing Business and Household Innovation in the Consumer Sector.  You can download the full paper for free. The study was national in scale and was done in the UK. Key findings include:

* Over a 3 year period 2.9 million consumers in the UK (6.2% of the population) have innovated by making a change to an existing product or creating their own. On average they did so 8  times over the 3 years.

* Consumers invested twice what all the business in the UK did on innovation. More specifically, “In aggregate, consumers’ annual product development expenditures are 2.3 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the UK combined.”

* Males with a university degree and technically trained dominate the process, especially if they are college aged or 55 years old and not working.

The table below (taken directly from the article) gives examples of what counts as a household or consumer innovation.

For students and practitioners of innovation the key findings and examples provide important insights into what looks to be a major source of practical creativity. But this is just the beginning of the research.

I am interested to hear from readers that have their own examples of consumer innovation to share. I am considering a website dedicated to the topic and designed to collect, promote, diffuse and study consumer innovations big and small.

Instead of begging friends, chasing a grant, pitching a VC or making a presentation to the board for funding you can use crowdsourcing to get capital for your brilliant idea.  Crowdfunding uses a internet-based microfinancing approach to pitch the crowd collecting many small promises to fund.

Many crowdfunding sites have sprung up. Some focus on specific types of ideas, for example RocketHub funds projects in the creative arts, while others such as KickStarter are general purpose.  Some sites extract a fee for funded projects (5-7%) but otherwise there are no costs.  Amounts raised seem small but often happen quickly. For example, Diaspora raised $10K in 39 days.  The model is even being tested as a funding mechanism for scientific research – see FundScience.

From a cognitive design perspective the micro financiers  are getting a kick (intangible value or mental energy) from helping to fund an innovative idea.  You can select the projects to fund, monitor its progress and in many sites have to pay nothing unless it is fully funded.   For little to no financial investment you can have the pleasure and satisfaction of supporting dreams and make the world a better place through innovation. A good deal. But the effects go deeper. As Lawton and Marom point out in their book: The Crowdfunding Revolution:

 ”Even as exciting, is that crowdfunding links funding with the social dynamics and affinity groups which naturally surround efforts that resonate with our many motivations. That alone, is enough to cause a monumental shift in the way business and organizations operate.”

Interested to hear from readers that have used crowdfunding.

The psychological need to share is a powerful force, especially when it involves trust.   Cognitive designers that are able to create new ways of sharing or more shareable products, services and experiences are achieving success.  To see how this is working in some detail check out the new book and website, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.The book illustrates a mega shift from hyper consumption to collaborative consumption driven by peer-to-peer sharing networks enabled by the Internet. We can now efficiently share everything:

“From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa) and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume.

New marketplaces such as Swap.com, Zilok, Bartercard, AirBnb, and thredUP are enabling “peer-to-peer” to become the default way people exchange — whether it’s unused space, goods, skills, money, or services — and sites like these are appearing everyday, all over the world.”

We have looked at many of these sites on the Cognitive Design Blog before but not as an emerging design pattern.   Designing for shareability (collaborative consumption) not only satisfies deep cognitive needs it is a powerful way to tap underutilized capacity, dramatically lower costs, shift behavior patterns and bring people closer together.

Very interested to hear from readers that have insight into how we can transform traditional products and assets into something that is collaboratively consumable.

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.