Cognitive Design

Cognitive designers envision products and services that enhance the thinking, emotions and other mental states of customers. They do the same for employees. That is, cognitive designers envision HR/employee programs, management policies, processes, workspaces, teams and other “organizational artifacts” that win the hearts, minds and mental states of employees.  

So you can do cognitive design outside the firewall or inside the firewall. A good example of cognitive design inside the firewall (focus on employee cognition for the purposes of organizational improvement) can be found in a recent article on Leading Clever People. The authors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, two business school professors, point out that clever (smart and creative) people are essential for success in today’s economy but they don’t respond well to the traditional leadership model. So they conducted interviews to find out why.  

“What they learned is that the psychological relationships effective leaders have with their clever people are very different from the ones they have with traditional followers.” 

Furthermore, they found that clever people have specific cognitive needs (or characteristics) that include: 

Bore easily, value intellectual over positional status, understand their worth is based on tacit skills, expect instant access to top management as confirmation of the value of their work, ignore hierarchy, will gravitate to where their work is most appreciated and generously funded.   

To support this type of employee cognition they offer the following design: 

 “The trick is to act like a benevolent guardian: to grant them the respect and recognition they demand, protect them from organizational rules and politics, and give them room to pursue private efforts and even to fail. The payoff will be a flourishing crop of creative minds that will enrich your whole organization.”  

Some would argue that this is catering to an elite but it applies equally well to all type of employees it is just that “the trick” will be different.  In Northwestern’s Master’s Program in Learning and Organization Change, we hit this point hard arguing that one of the main things that makes cognitive design important today is that talented employees demand a workplace that reflects it.   It is up to managers and leaders to understand the cognitive needs of employees and design HR/employee programs and management practices to meet them. Professors Goffee and Jones gave us a great example of how to do that. One that illustrates that understanding the cognitive needs of employees is not rocket science. They did not have to do a brain scanning study or do cognitive task analysis. All they did was look and ask.