How Minds Work – A Competitive Imperative
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?
There are many techniques:
1. Searching the literature (many published studies and models)
2. Asking (surveys, interviews, focus groups)
3. Looking (observations, site visits)
4. Immersion (embedding, ethnographic fieldwork)
5. Conducting a study (protocol, ZMET, experiment)
6. Building a computer program or simulation
7. Clinical evaluation (brain scan, physiological study)
Be wary of using surveys and focus groups. People can report even less about how they think-and-feel than they can on want they want. Asking people produces mixed or poor results.
Fortunately, for many organizational applications, doing some field work, a good literature search and perhaps a little light modeling is enough to surface insights that will improve performance. Of course you need to know what to look for but that can be learned fairly quickly.
The more advanced techniques (5-7 above) require the services of professional modelers and applied scientists but can lead to some proprietary knowledge and game changing insights.
More advanced techniques are typically used by clinicians or cognitive engineers. For example, NASA just announced a study on pilot cognition using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to probe the decision-making processes of pilots and develop new means of helping them realize when they are operating under dangerous levels of fatigue or stress.
What is interesting is the advanced techniques are becoming more popular in business. For example, there are corporations doing EEG and even fMRI studies to determine how customers really think and feel about products and brands. These applications are growing so fast that a new field, neuromarketing, has formed.
And it is not just brain scanning methods that are becoming popular but also deeper analytical methods such as Zaltman’s Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET). Hundreds of organizations have invested in a scientific-level study of the deep metaphors that shape the cognition of their customers. For a quick but informative introduction check out D2D Fund’s use of ZMET to probe the minds of low-income savers in the US.
What is happening is advanced techniques traditionally used by clinicians or cognitive engineers are moving downstream for more routine use in marketing, product development, quality, innovation departments, corporate R&D and perhaps soon even by human resources. This trend should accelerate especially as the techniques become easier to use and more reliable.
Seeing the workflow between the ears of employees and customers, in more traditional language, means understanding the hearts and minds of the people we serve. Doing it systematically and paternalistically converting the insights into improved products, processes and programs is what cognitive design is all about.
Many organizations are realizing that surveys are not enough to uncover the true workings of the heart and mind. Further thanks to the many best selling books on the nature of how we think from A Whole New Mind, Blink and Freaknomics to Gut, Kludge and How Doctors Think, many managers and leaders understand that simple rationalistic assumptions about how people think are dangerously misinformed. For these organizations the challenge is clear:
How are we going to invest in the basic and advanced techniques needed to understand how the minds of our employees and customers really work?
For these firms (and soon all firms), understanding how minds work is a new competitive imperative.
