Cognitive Design

Every year Bain & Company, a leading management consulting firm, surveys and analyzes what tools are being used by managers around the world. The most recent results are  Management Tools 2009: An Executive’s Guide. They provide a general overview, a 16-page summary and a 130-slide detailed analysis.  You can see the top 10 tools and more by usage and satisfaction in this slide provided by Bain:

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Cognitive design, design thinking or innovating for how minds work did not make the list. Of course I would argue that doing good cognitive design is essential for applying nearly all of the management tools successfully.  Of interest to cognitive designer is this key finding:

Innovation continues to be very important – and difficult

- Eight of ten executives agree that “Innovation is more important than cost reduction for long-term success”, six of ten believe they could dramatically boost innovation by collaborating with other companies” and half say “their entire organization is actively engaged in improving innovation”

- Collaborative Innovation and Voice of the Customer Innovation are two of the five tools that show the largest likely increase in usage from 2008 to 2009

from page 10 of the slide deck.  Cognition-heavy tools are on the list including knowledge management (#15), voice of customer innovation (#21), online communities (#22) and collaborative innovation (#23).