Cognitive Design

A 2-person firm Supertoy Robotics is looking for 30K pounds on Kickstarter to build the world’s first natural talking teddy bear. They already have a pledge of more than 58K pounds with four days to go.  You can get more details on how it should work HERE.

The toy bear is supposed to go beyond Q&A and engage in continuous conversation, read stories and role play in a character. It even moves its mouth.

If the technology works and is affordable it will open up a wide range of interesting applications for cognitive designers and other innovators.

The M-prize is a management innovation contest run on the MIX and sponsored by McKinsey & Co and the Harvard Business Review. It is actually a series of prizes aimed at reworking our management models and practices for the 21st century. I submitted some cognitive design work I did with knowledge cards for the leadership everywhere M-prize. It was picked as a finalist!

Here is the entry:

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders

Please take a moment and check it out.  

Any likes, shares or comments it receives should help in the final leg of the competition which ends August 30th. You can like or share with a click but leaving a comment requires registering with the site.

Read about the other finalists on the Harvard Business Review site:

What does post-bureaucratic leadership look like?

Cognitive design has a big role to play in the management models for the 21st century. You can see aspects of it at work in many of the entries.

The Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX) is hosting an open innovation challenge to identify radical ideas (hacks) and success stories that illustrate  how to dramatically expand the leadership capacity of an organization.  Called the Leaders Everywhere Challenge they believe the key is to redistribute power so more individuals can participate in leadership and to equip and motivate emergent leaders to be effective without formal authority.

My entry is titled Using Micro-learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders.  It demonstrates with a success story how you can use cognitive design to do interesting things in leadership development. Check it out and please leave your comments. I’ve copied an extend summary below.

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A recent episode of Through the Wormhole explored that question.  They examined how experts can ask questions and read eye blinks to figure out which playing card was drawn  from a deck, use an fMRI machine to build up a dictionary that maps brain states to the things we see in the world and use a neurofeedback device to help us achieve peak performance and learn new skills 230% faster.

The work on neurofeedback for peak performance is being done by Advanced Brain Monitoring.  In the show they demonstrate how their neurofeeback device can be used to help amateurs mimic the brains states of an expert archer to accelerate skill development in using a bow and arrow.  The device is shown to the right. Note the clip at the neck line. For learners, it sends a haptic signal to let them  know when they have achieved the expert/flow brain state.

They are also using the device in number of other domains including improving teamwork in complex settings.

Definitely not an off the shelf solution but it is ready made for research oriented cognitive designers.

EdX is hosting a free on-line course, Behavioral Economics in Action, starting October 13, 2013. The course has been created by experts from the University of Toronto and will include guest discussions from industry leaders.  Despite its academic origin the course promises to have an applied focus:

“…we go beyond the theoretical foundations of the observed phenomena, and develop a framework that allows the students to critique, design and interpret experiments; and to learn a process of designing choice environments to nudge behaviours. In short, this isn’t simply a course that exposes you to Behavioural Economics, it gets you to think and act like one!”

There is even a final project where you will develop a solution (nudge) to a specific decision-making problem.

The course runs for six weeks and takes 4-5 hours a week in effort. Well worth it to polish your nudge design skills. I am taking the class and hope to see readers of the Cognitive Design blog there.

The Global Women’s Leadership Network  has joined forces with others to launch a major effort in developing women and girl leaders around the world.  They posted an open innovation challenge and are looking for fresh thinking on how to quickly build leadership capacity in women and girls.   Their stretch goal  is to develop 5 million women change agents improving our world in 5 years.

This is an important effort for many reasons. As they point out in the preamble to the challenge:

“There is a growing recognition that there can be no peace, security, or sustainable economic development without women’s equal participation in all spheres of society.”

You need to register with Innocentive and electronically sign an agreement to see the details of the challenge.  I signed up as a solver and suggested an approach (copied below) based on knowledge cards and NewHabits.

I hope you too will take up the challenge.

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Innocentive has four open challenges that have a strong cognitive design component.

There is a call for a crowd-funded project to reduce tobacco consumption worldwide. P&G  has requested proposals for disruptive new products in multiple categories.  There is $2000 prize for the best idea on how to use data about the state of your house (from utilities, devices and sensors, etc.) to create useful and exciting consumer services. And another $2000 prize for figuring out how the PC should evolve in the next 3-5 years.  Entries are due late in May.

Focusing on design concepts that are optimized for how our minds naturally work (as cognitive designers do) will lead to strong entries in each of these areas. I hope you are up for the challenge!

One way we democratize something is to make it available to a very large group, preferably everyone. Publishing your ideas on the Internet was democratized by blogging and trading stocks was democratized by on-line brokers.  These functions, once held by highly trained experts are now open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection.

Now attention is turning to the democratization of leadership. Scholars have long recognized two general types of leaders. We have the formal or assigned leader such as the CEO or VP that carries the title, power and budget of leadership.  But we also have the informal or emergent leader that wields influence and is driven by passion to change how things work.  The question is, how do we develop and unleash these informal or emergent leaders? 

If you have a good answer, you might want to submit it as a story or hack (disruptive idea) to the Leadership Everywhere Challenge. This is the latest M-prize being sponsored by the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Consulting.   A snapshot:

“In the future, a company that strives to build a leadership advantage will need an organizational model that gives everyone the chance to lead if they’re capable; and a talent development model that helps everyone to become capable.”

In my teaching at Northwestern University I have been fortunate enough  to work with emergent leaders from across the US. They are driven to lead without formal authority because they have an authentic insight into how to make things better and the natural influence skills to get others to act on their ideas.  The skills and habits that make up informal leadership talent are developed very differently from those of formal leaders.   They are developed through a micro or day-to-day learning from experience rather than elaborate and macro leadership development programs.

I’ve captured this micro approach to developing emergent leaders in a free mobile learning app called NewHabits. Check out the modules or decks on innovation. They teach you how to find a cause, think flexibly, experiment and get others to act on your ideas.  While the modules are focused on innovation these are just the skills and habits that drive emergent leaders. Best of all they can be practiced daily without formal authority, a training budget or the need to change your organization.

A good way to democratize leadership? Give the App a try and let me know what you think.

The NeuroGaming Conference and Expo runs May 1-3, 2013 in San Francisco.  In neurogames technology is used to more directly link game play to your brain, nervous system and body.   Examples include touch stimulation, augmented reality and gesture-based interfaces, brain-controlled games, emotional dynamics and even the direct electrical stimulation of the brain to improve performance. 

The conference will cover games, therapeutic games, investing and trends. In addition, eye tracking, brain monitoring and others tools that provide a robust but cost effective way of measuring mental states are covered.   For example, Advanced Brain Monitoring will be at the conference. They offer a wireless medical grade EEG monitoring unit (shown directly above) that should be useful for all sorts of cognitive design studies.  Check out a short video on how it is being used to help uncover the neuro-correlates of strong leadership. 

Best of all you can directly experience the games and tools on the expo floor.

I hope readers that attend the conference will share their impressions and photos. I am especially interested to hear if you believe neurogames offer a 10x improvement in the gaming experience.

Thanks to the advent of MOOCs (massive open online courses) you can now learn with the best professors from around the world. These are free online courses that often award a certificate or statement of achievement but no college credits.  Some upcoming MOOCs of interest to cognitive designers include:

1. Gamification
2.  Design – creation of artifacts in society 
3. A crash course on creativity- Stanford Venture Lab

Check out the list at Open Culture for other MOOCs that might complement projects (e.g. global health) you are working on.