Cognitive Design

McKinsey Quarterly recently published a summary of what neuroscience has to tell us about Sparking Creativity on Teams. While the findings won’t be news to readers of the Cognitive Design blog, having them summarized with references is useful. Key points include:

* Drop verbal persuasion and argument as a way to change thinking and use immersion by designing events where team members directly observe or experience new ideas. For example, send the team on best practice visits (including plenty of flexible interaction time) to successful organizations in other industries.

 * Use analogies and metaphors to force a comparison between seeming unrelated ideas or domains. For example, draw analogies between Amazon and your favorite lawn care service.

* Create artificial constraints to encourage reframing to generate insights. For example, what if we could only interact with our customers online?

Immersion, analogies and constraints when skillfully added into a problem solving process really do boost creativity because they take advantage of how our minds actually work.

Image Source: Success Rockets 

To do cognitive design we must first fathom how customers think and feel.  Recent cognitive science has given us many insights into the how the mind works in terms of structures and processes but often has little or nothing to say about the actual content or what is on people’s minds.   So I am also on the look out for empirical studies that pick out beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, moods or other mental states that make up the particulars of how a group of people think and feel.

For example,  take the recent study reported on EurekAlert! about the effectiveness of the three-wishes question used in the AMA’s guideline for adolescent preventative services.   The idea is that a physician examining 11-18 year old patients asks “If you could have three wishes, what would they be?”.   A study looking at the responses from 110 patients found:

* 41% wished for wealth and 31% wished for a material item

* Girls tended to wish for happiness while boys wished for success

* Only 8% made wishes about personal appearance (a surprise)

Furthermore:

“Results showed that 85 percent of adolescents had wishes for themselves, 32 percent had wishes for others, and 10 percent had a wish for both themselves and others. Boys were more likely than girls to wish for things only for themselves (73 percent vs. 46 percent), while girls were more likely than boys to wish for something for their families (26 percent vs. 9 percent).”

 As simple as it is, probing wishful thinking reveals psychological needs and cognitive differences at several levels.