Cognitive Design

Designing a good metaphor can speed and deepen learning, decision-making and even stimulate creative breakthroughs.  They are a staple of cognitive design. In my cognitive design course at Northwestern we sometimes devote an entire module to metaphor engineering. They are really useful in managing organizational change efforts but tend to be ignored. Same for education.

I am always on the lookout for good examples of the cognitive power of metaphors, especially in domains outside of marketing and science where we have plenty of examples.  Recently came across a program (and book) for improving emotional self-regulation in young students and children that uses the metaphor of an engine. The Alert Program, asks How Does Your Engine Run? using the metaphor to help children understand and convey their inner mental state:

“The Alert Program uses an engine analogy because many children can relate and learn quickly about self-regulation when talking about their “engine” going into high, low, or just right gears. “

Other metaphors are made to animals or characters such as those in the Winnie the Pooh story. The program appears well researched and evidence based. It provides a good example of how to use metaphors to support behavior control and emotional self regulation.

In the last presidential election we saw how important the use of social media was.  In the 2012 election we may see how the web can be used to level the playing field for third party candidates.  Checkout Americans Elect 2012. They literally reinvent the nomination process by allowing you to prioritize the issues, nominate someone, become a candidate and select the candidate that best meets your interests.  Here is the most impressive part:

The winner of this on-line nomination process will be on the ballot in all 50 states. 

And yes there will be a convention:

“In our secure online convention next June, American voters will choose our first directly-nominated presidential ticket. Your voice, your choice.”

This could transform our political decision-making process, opening the way to less  partisan thinking and more solutions-based thinking.

Outstanding cognitive design. They are meeting deeply felt and long neglected psychological (cognitive, emotional, motivational and volitional) needs many American’s have concerning the political decision making process.

The process and site is still under development but they are real. They have 1.7M signatures towards getting on the state ballots and some 5.5M answers to questions about national priorities.

Hunger is a powerful biological and psychological state.  And we can “hunger” for things other than food. As the saying goes,  some people  hunger for power and possessions.

Recent research at  Northwestern University tested what we can hunger for in the broader sense by measuring salivation.  The idea is when we are really hungry for food we salivate so we might also drool when we hunger for other things. And we do!

“Results of an experiment show that individuals salivate to money when induced to feel a low power state but not when induced to feel a high power states.  A second experiment showed that men salivate to sports cars when primed with a mating goal but not a control condition.”

Designers interested in creating “objects of desire” should pay special attention to the role of  priming in the experiments. Priming means stimulating subjects to create a specific frame of mind before presenting the test stimulus.  Money by itself won’t cause me to salivate but if I am primed to perceive it as a way to increase power it might. Likewise a sports car by itself will not cause me to salivate unless I am primed to see it as a means to mate.

As a adviser I often work with leaders or other professionals that are struggling to make sense of what seems to be crazy, counter productive and even irrational behavior in their organizations.  This “crazy behavior” messes with everything from making good decisions and implementing change to treating customers well. Cognitive designers can play an important role in such situations by bring models of how minds work to bear on the problem, identifying the type of dysfunctional thinking in the context, determining root causes and implementing intervention that mitigate or leverage it.

Sounds a bit like therapy and it is. Indeed, some of the best tools for tackling this challenge come from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). In CBT the therapist assumes the patient’s unwanted behavior is being generated by faulty or counter productive beliefs or thinking patterns. The therapist work to surface and change the counter productive thinking pattern in order to end or modify the unwanted behavior.  CBT has be very successful over the last 20 years on everything from depression to obsessive compulsive disorder to anxiety, grief and even procrastination.

CBT is no silver bullet but it does offer the cognitive designer many field tested frameworks and tools for understanding how minds are working.   For example, cognitive distortions or the thinking patterns that are often at the root cause of counter productive behaviors is an extremely value tool. For an introduction check out, 15 common Cognitive Distortions, on the PsychCentral blog. The post gives you a quick definition of common distorts such as over generalizing, black-and-white thinking and the fallacy of fairness.  I often use this list when first introducing the idea to a client because they can immediate recognize them at work in their context.  Suddenly the crazy behavior begins to make a little sense.

Of course spotting cognitive distortions in action is one thing, figuring out how to mitigate or even leverage them is another.

Interested to hear from readers that use cognitive distortions in their consulting, teaching or innovation practices.

Smart phones are a new frontier for cognitive designers. Jobs, consulting and even R&D opportunities abound.  Figuring out how our minds work on mobile platforms and remaking services to better meet our cognitive, emotional, motivational and volitional needs is big business.  Using smart phones to learn, make more effective decisions, change unwanted behaviors and increase situational awareness are obvious opportunities for cognitive designers.   Less obvious are the challenges of figuring out psychological optimal ways of presenting ads (yikes!) and leveraging the unique properties of smart phones to act as sources of on-demand mental energy for managing stress (yea!).

I am always on the lookout for good research into the actual use and cognitive science of cell phones.  Take for example, a recent article in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing entitled, Habits Make Smart Phone Use More Pervasive.  The authors use designed-focused ethnographic techniques to peer into the lives of smart phone users.   They found people spending 2-2.5 hours on their phones each day in 90 second bursts (median time) exercising a checking habit and seeking information rewards.

“Checking habit: brief, repetitive inspection of dynamic content quickly accessible on the device”

Some interactions were even shorter (few seconds) as people turned on their phone’s screen to check notification icons or the time.

Just as we naturally scan the physical environment seeking interesting things to see, hear, touch, smell or taste we are now regularly checking cyberspace for interesting things to see and hear. A new innovation frontier for cognitive design is open wide!

From cute kittens to hideous centipedes animals of all types have big cognitive impact. People interacting with animals in positive and negative ways can amp up the impact. Take for example, a baby playing (safely) with a puppy.

And this effect runs deep. According to research done by CalTech and reported by NPR we have specific brain cells in our Amygdala (emotions center for the brain) that respond to the presence of animals but not other people, places or objects.  These cells remain active as we automatically track animals and can detect small changes in them from scene to scene as compared to our ability to detect small changes in objects.

More generally:

“The finding confirms earlier work suggesting that the human brain is particularly responsive to animals. Behavioral studies, for instance, have found that people pay more attention to animals and people than to things.”

Leveraging this hardwiring, cognitive designers can use animal-based features and functions to get and hold attention and invoke specific emotional responses.

Submission deadline December 9, 2011 

The Management Innovation eXchange or MIX aspires to revolutionize the theory and practice of management. The idea is that the world is changing faster than our management models and that we are now so badly out of step that nothing short of a revolution in the foundations of management is needed.  The world of work spins on services, networks, knowledge, intangible value and agility. Our management models are focused on products, hierarchy, information, tangible assets and control.

The exchange has done a good job of building community and sharing knowledge on hacks (disruptive ideas) and stories (inspiring examples) but has failed to deliver a revolution.  While their are many interesting ideas and examples on the site, we have yet to see new principles and frameworks emerge. Hopefully that will come with time.

MIX uses a prize-based open innovation model.    The current challenge is a Human Capital M-Prize on Leadership.  They are looking for hacks and stories that tell us how to develop the leadership talents of everyone not just those with formal position in the hierarchy of an organization.   To quote:

“We are looking for ideas and examples that can inspire and instruct talent professionals in their quest to build organizations that encourage and capture the leadership gifts of everyone, every day.” 

So-called informal, unassigned or emergent leaders represent a largely untapped opportunity.   How can we develop and unleash them?

Changing behaviors takes considerable time and mental energy. Often we need help. Someone to guide or advise us through the process of learning the new behaviors from experience in a way that makes them stick. A guide provides motivation, helps us break through rationalizations and faulty beliefs, suggests new techniques when the ones we are using fail and provides perspective on progress and goals.  Guides take many forms – a formal sponsor in a change program, friend, family member, therapist, community pharmacist, teacher, mentor at work, life coach or just someone else who has made it through the change and wants to help.

Without guides most of us (approximately 70%) will not be able to achieve lasting changes to our health, financial, relationship and other essential personal an professional behaviors. Technology can be a guide too.  Indeed, technology is amplifying and redesigning how human behavior-change guides do their work. Smart phones, social networks, special purpose web sites, virtual humans, video games and simulations all promise to revolutionize how we change behaviors.

Technology-enabled behavior change has grown explosively over the last 10 years and is emerging as a new academic discipline. Conferences, journals, rigorously research books and interdisciplinary centers are sprouting up.  For example,  I received two emails just today on the topic. One announced a new book from Psychology Press, The Social Cure, that argues ” A growing body of evidence shows that social networks and identities have a profound impact on mental and physical health.”   The second announced a new interdisciplinary research and education center being launched at Northwestern University dedicated to becoming a world leader in behavioral intervention technology (BIT).

They are looking at how a range of technologies from the web to the smart phone and virtual humans can enable preventative medicine, cognitive behavioral therapy, psychotherapy and other science-based behavior change interventions.  Of special interest is purple, a platform the Center developed for building BIT applications. Purple is a tool for building new BIT applications faster, better and cheaper.

Clearly technology-enabled behavior change is hot.

To be successful such technology efforts will have to maintain a laser-like focus on what they are trying to enable, namely the social cognitive psychology of how humans make lasting behavior change.

Now, how does that work again?

Cognitive designers spend a lot of energy understanding, leveraging and mitigating the mental biases that dominate our learning, thinking, decision-making and socializing. While cognitive biases or the rules that make-us-human have been extensively studied,  most innovators (except for magician and clinicians that use placebos) have not even scratched the surface of leveraging and mitigating them.

And new insights from research on cognitive biases arrive from various laboratories daily. Take for example, recent research reported by the Association for Psychological Science on the bias to rate ourselves above average. They studied 1600 subjects in 15 culturally diverse countries and found:

“Virtually everywhere, people rate themselves above average. But the more economically unequal the country, the greater was its participants’ self-enhancement.”

This means the self-enhancement bias is likely maximal in the US.

The key question for cognitive designers is: How can we use (leverage or mitigate)  this bias to improve a product, service, work process, customer experience, employee development program or other artifact?

Many types of behavior change programs end up relying on communication or messaging to do a lot of the work.  The right type of messaging can make all the difference.  In cognitive design we have long advocated change messaging that is short, just-in-time, emotionally positive and behavior-specific (tell me exactly what to do).  Knowledge cards, a small-step behavior change program, are designed to follow precisely that prescription.

Interesting new research from the University of Michigan supports and extends this idea. The study focused on the impact of text messages sent to mobile phones to help Teens manage their weight.  Not surprising they found that specific instructions from peers and sincere positive encouragement were preferred. They also found:

“Other negative response came from the mention of unhealthy food and behavior, even with references to healthier options; Teens began to crave unhealthy foods after being asked about them. Reflective questions, like “What does being healthy mean for you? How does screen time fit in with your goals? How could cutting back on it help improve your health? were also ineffective.”

It is not clear if the preferred messages will actually cause behavior change.  It is clear those that are not preferred or even disliked will not.  This is an important finding because we sometimes design communications in change programs to invoke comparative and reflective thinking. While that is critical for some applications it will clearly backfire for others.