Cognitive Design

Organizations are very interested in the ethical behaviors of leaders, employees, customers, suppliers and everyone in the value chain.  Significant time and money is spent on ethics training and programs designed to enhance compliance – often without achieving the desired results.

Clients and students ask, how can we use cognitive design to enhance the effectiveness of ethics training and programs?

The key is to approach it as a behavior change challenge and understand the underlying moral cognition that drives it.

For example, consider the research just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science by the University of Toronto on the Cognition of Moral Behavior.  

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I am often asked by clients and students how cognitive design can be used to improve the effectiveness of coaching.  Or more specifically, what findings from cognitive science can help us coach employees in the workplace, patients in healthcare and students in the classroom more effectively?

These are important questions as coaching programs have sprung up everywhere, are deeply entangled in cognitive needs (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) and don’t always produce the outcomes we want.

So I am always on the look out for good scientific studies that have designable insights for improving the coaching process. Take for example, the work at Case Western Reserve University that clearly demonstrates Coaching with Compassion can Light up Human Thoughts.  Researchers are using brain scanning to study the neural signatures of different coaching styles and their impacts on outcomes.  A key finding:

 ”Boyatzis, a faculty member at Weatherhead School of Management, and Jack, director of the university’s Brain, Mind and Consciousness Lab, say coaches should seek to arouse a Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA), which causes positive emotion and arouses neuroendocrine systems that stimulate better cognitive functioning and increased perceptual accuracy and openness in the person being coached, taught or advised. Emphasizing weaknesses, flaws, or other shortcomings, or even trying to “fix” the problem for the coached person, has an opposite effect.”

Perhaps not so surprising to folks that are good at coaching.  But the fact is we normally coach using a Negative Emotional Attractor by focusing on what is wrong and trying to “fix” the person.

Coaching, according to this study, tends to produce the best outcomes when the person being coached feels inspired and compassion flowing from the person doing the coaching.

“By spending 30 minutes talking about a person’s desired, personal vision, we could light up (activate) the parts of the brain 5-7 days later that are associated with cognitive, perceptual and emotional openness and better functioning,” Boyatzis said. 

You still provide corrective suggestions as a coach but you must do so from a genuine sense of compassion versus critical judgement.  Coaching is framed in terms of making changes to achieve the individual’s dreams and ambitions. It is grounded in a caring, empathetic and emotional intelligent interaction between parties. It is not technical compliance with the duties of some formally specified coaching process.

Our minds open to influence in the presence of an informed, caring voice that has our best interests at heart.   Compassionate coaches, just like compassionate leaders, doctors or teachers, will be the most effective in changing how we feel, think and behave.

To tackle coaching from a cognitive design perspective we must first discover, cultivate and unleash compassion for helping others. Without that, what follows will fail to light up our brains.

The design community should be on fire. 

As part of the Affordable Care Act (health care reform bill), a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has been established to create more effective ways of delivering healthcare services in the US. The idea is to  improve the patient experience, clinical outcomes and radically lower cost or “bend the cost curve”.  This will include improving patient safety. The center has $5B in start up funds and is promised another $10B over the next 10 years.

The economic claims in the Affordable Care Act depend critically on the CMMI’s success.   Failing disruptive innovation, US healthcare costs will spiral out of control even faster.

We need new service delivery models.  Old ideas and improvement methods won’t work. For example, it takes 7 years for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to do a demonstration project.  It needs to happen in seven months.  Ideas already in the pipeline (e.g. improved care coordination, alignment of incentives, etc.) while important are far from sufficient.

What is needed is our best effort in service, experience and cognitive design for health, wellness and the delivery of ambulatory and acute care services.

Fortunately, design thinking has started to take hold in healthcare (see for example Transform) but the CMMI opportunity affords an entirely new level of involvement.

The CMMI is doing a conference call on November 29th to provide an overview and get input. I urge readers to participate and make it clear that design thinking is a key enabler for creating the new health care service delivery models we need in the US.

I am also interested in hearing form readers that have ideas on how to mobilized the design community to work with the CMMI.

Nature has solved some exceptionally hard engineering and design problems in ways that are not only optimal but stunningly beautiful. This is one reason why biomimicry – or emulating nature’s design strategies and patterns – is catching fire.  Another reason is because of the excellent work of organizations such as the Biomimicry Institute. Check out their AskNature project and you will find a taxonomy of over 1200 of nature’s design patterns. Each pattern or strategy is summarized and examples of how it is or could be used are given, along with images and comments. You can even contribute new patterns.

This could be an important resource for cognitive designers. While there are likely no patterns that illustrate how to optimize functionality for psychological needs, there could be many that suggest new ways to organize, communicate and adapt that are useful for solving cognitive design problems.

Interested to hear from readers with ideas for how we can use biomimicry in cognitive design.

Scams targeting older adults come in many shapes and sizes.  Unfortunately, they work amazing well and often go unreported out of fear and shame. Many assume that senior scams work because older adults have experienced some form of cognitive decline. Senior scams are designed to exploit the impaired decision-making, reading and memory skills of older adults.

Recent research paints a more complex picture. One with strong implications for those designing solutions to defeat the scamers.  For an excellent summary see the article in Scientific American on the Psychology Behind Seniors’  Susceptibility to Scams. They point out that it is not just cognitive decline that is being exploited but shifting cognitive needs. It turns out that older adults worry less about losing money because:

“As people age and begin to feel that their time is limited, some researchers suggest, they seek out emotional fulfillment. This tendency to focus on the positive changes the decisions older people make.”

This has been confirmed with controlled studies and brain scans:

“When expecting a loss, however, younger and older adults responded differently. Younger adults reported being more upset and showed higher blood flow in the insula, a part of the brain implicated in negative emotions. As the amount of money at stake increased, so did negative feelings and insula activation. The older adults, on the other hand, didn’t feel as bad as younger adults did, and showed less activation in the insula.”

Senior scams are working because they exploit this positivity effect. This is not a form of cognitive decline but signals a shift in cognitive need as we age. And there are likely others. For example, in my cognitive design workshop several teams have observed that reading the mail can become a ritualized and high-meaning event for seniors. 

As with all applications of cognitive design, we need to understand the underlying cognitive processes and psychological needs (intellectual, affective, motivational, volitional) to create solutions that move hearts and minds.  So far the scammers have figured this out better than those that would prevent them.

The challenge is to create a tweet, story, essay, poster, public art, Guerrilla marketing effort, video or some other communication artifact to show the world:

“… that the lack of basic sanitation is one of the most critical issues facing the developing world today.”

Entries to the Sanitation is Sexy contest are due November 21st.

The scientific study of happiness is a recent but important trend in cognitive science.   It has changed our understanding of how minds work and is therefore very relevant for cognitive designers. So I am always on the lookout for new studies that offer designable insights.

For example, Harvard researchers have developed an iPhone app to do some citizen science studies on happiness. Not only are the results relevant for cognitive designers but the study design – crowdsourcing the data collection using smart phones – is also of interest. 

The general finding was:

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Some specific findings include:

*  We spend 47% of our time doing one thing and thinking about something else (mind wandering).

*  Our minds wander across all the things we do.

*  We are least happy when our minds wander. Indeed mind wandering is a better predictor of happiness than the activity we are doing.

*  Tasks that make us least happy are resting, working and using a home computer.

*  We are most happy when fully engaged in the moments as when was are having a conversation, making love or exercising.

 These findings were generated from some 250,000 data points that they collected from 2250 volunteers using an iPhone app. The app asks some general questions and then pings you periodically to find out what you are doing and how happy you are. For your trouble you get a personalized happiness report.  You also get a chance to contribute data to a scientific study at Harvard.  You can still sign up. Go citizen scientist, go!

Everybody is talking about innovation these days but how do successful companies do it?Do they outspend competitors on R&D, use special methods or what? According to Booz Allen Hamilton’s recent report, Global Innovation 1000: How Top Innovator Keep Winning, the success factors are:

1. Build focused innovation capabilities (ideation, project selection, product development and commercialization) around one of three strategies – need seekers, market readers or technology drivers

2. Align innovation strategy with overall corporate strategy and management effectiveness otherwise your innovation premiums get canceled out by misalignment or weakness in other aspects of the business system

3.  Globalize the effort by conducting innovation activities in key markets in countries in which the company is not headquartered

You need to make an investment but outspending your competitors is not the driver of innovation success.  Check out the variation in R&D spending in the chart below:

The key is focused capabilities:

“What matters instead is the particular combination of talent, knowledge, team structures, tools, and processes — the capabilities — that successful companies put together to enable their innovation efforts, and thus create products and services they can successfully take to market.”

Distinctive skills within the capabilities that are important for all three innovation strategies include (and I quote):

* General understanding of emerging technologies

* Broad consumer and customer insights

* Customer engagement

* Product platform management

* Pilots and controlled roll outs

Working with customers, doing prototypes and pilots and striving for authentic insights into how to best use emerging technologies should be no surprise to design thinkers. This is how companies such as Google, 3M, GE, IBM and Samsung do it.

For more detail on how and why successful innovators are going global check out Beyond Borders.

Doing cognitive design for employees is an excellent way to approach workplace effectiveness.  The key is to understand how employees think-and-feel about work. What psychological (intellectual, affective, motivational and volitional) needs do employees have in the workplace?  How do your HR and management services and policies satisfy these needs better than competitors? These questions are intensely important when it comes to talent management.

There is not likely one answer for most firms. Indeed, how employees think-feel-and-do work seems to differ along generational lines. Most large corporations have intergenerational workforces. So I am always on the look out for generational workforce studies that provide scientific insights into the cognitive needs of employees. For example, a new study just published in the Journal of Management, Generational Differences in Work Values, provides several designable insights.  They analyze the intrinsic and extrinsic values that three generations attach to work. Generations include Boomers (1946- 1964), GenX (1965 – 1981) and GenMe (1982 -1999).  

Big shifts are in the works.  Most notable is the decline in the intrinsic value of work and the rise in importance of leisure time.

Boomers live to work and GenMe works to live.

This graph summarizes some of the details of the shift nicely: 

On an HR blog I also found an interesting contrast of the motivational differences between generations. While the time frame on the cohorts are slightly different and GenMe = GenY the two studies paint a similar picture.  

I do see important differences. For example, is the best reward for GenMe leisure time or meaningful work? Also, I suspect text messaging is the key communication mode for GenY.

Interested to hear from readers that have seen other empirical studies that shed light on the shifting psychographics of work.

Fresh from the Association of Psychological Science comes the claim that Anger Makes People Want Things More. Here is the experimental setup:

“For the study, each participant watched a computer screen while images of common objects, like a mug or a pen, appeared on the screen. What they didn’t realize was that immediately before each object appeared, the screen flashed either a neutral face, an angry face, or a fearful face. This subliminal image tied an emotion to each object. At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked how much they wanted each object.”

Subjects picked the objects with the angry face prime over the neutral and fearful face prime. They did not report feeling anger towards the more desirable objects only that they liked them.