Cognitive Design

Leading Organizations are Investing in Developing Sophisticated Models of Employee and Customer Cognition. 

When talking to process improvement experts, organizational designers or IT professionals about cognitive design I emphasize that the starting point is always the “workflow between your ears”.  The idea is to understand how people perceive, remember, think, feel, learn and interact with each other in order to do work. This is not the workflow that happens between departments but it is the invisible workflow that happens between the ears and amongst our heads and employees and customers.

Making an effort to model cognition or the workflow between the ears gives us the insight into how people really think and feel. This in turn supports the redesign of business models, work processes, information systems, management policies, incentives and other aspects of the work system in a way that supports, enhances or even creates employee and customer cognition. This means serivce innovation, higher productivity, fewer errors, less turnover, faster uptake, less burnout and all the other signs of happy and engaged knowledge workers.  

Remaking our processes and organizations (not to mention products and services) for how minds naturally work is a mega innovation opportunity for the 21st century.

So how do we see the workflow between the ears, how can we model cognition? 

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Patents are supposed to cover new inventions. But how do you know if they are something new? Ideally, you search what is called the prior art or all the world’s publicly available knowledge on the topic. But how do you do that in a timely and consistent way? 

One approach, used by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is to hire and train a small army of patent examiners and give them the best search tools and content money can buy.

Another approach is to crowdsource it.  If prior art exist someone out there already knows about it so the trick is to get them to share this knowledge with the patent examiner. There are a couple of groups trying to take this approach. The most recent is Article One Partners. They offer $50K to contributors (called advisors) that are first to provide prior art that invalidates a patent study. Each patent study includes one or more patents or patent applications. Further you can earn points in various ways (including providing feedback on the beta site) that qualifies you for profit sharing.