Comfortable Control
I was invited to give a 2-hour workshop at the Design Research Conference 2009. I focused on designing for how minds really work. My pitch:
A dash of cognitive science + design thinking = innovation breakthrough!
The workshop started with a personal example on how to make it rain. A large insurance company had a few sales people that could really out produce (sell) the others. These were the rainmakers. The management of the insurance company wanted to create a “program” that could transfer the secret sauce of rainmaking to other sales professionals to increase their production.
A classic problem and many solutions were attempted – training, best practice databases, coaching, new incentive systems and so on. Not much happened.
Finally, we tried a dash of cognitive science in the form of talk-aloud protocol studies. These were awkward at first but did uncover the secret sauce.
The rainmakers were not selling products they were sniffing out their clients cognitive needs in terms of the mix of trust they were willing to give and control they wanted to maintain in the money management process. Once they figured that out they knew what types of products were needed and how to sell them. The protocol analysis revealed five levels of trust/control the different clients needed:
1. Complete trust no control – I want to outsource and forget my money management.
2. Same as one but with understanding. I want to outsource but not forget – I need to know (but not control) what is going on.
3. Some trust and some control. I want to make the major decisions (e.g. which type of funds) but not all the specific decisions.
4. Little trust and intellectual but not transactional control. I trust you to implement what I decide must be done.
5. Total control. I want to do this myself
Understanding what a client’s cognitive needs are in this case really improved sales. Dramatically so. Armed with this information we were able to create the “program” needed to transfer the secret sauce of rainmaking- or at least enough of it to see real impact.
In essence, rainmakers were selling the right level of “comfortable control” to clients.
Having control takes work and only clients that get energy out of such control would be comfortable with it. In effect the rainmakers were natural cognitive designers, managing the mental energy requirements of their clients.
Over the years, I have noticed comfortable control at work in many circumstances. For example, degree of autonomy for workers and amount of control for managers and consumers making other purchasing decisions. I use comfortable control as a design pattern in nearly all of my cognitive design work. After all, when interacting with a complex artifact (or social situation), don’t we all want comfortable control?
May 29th, 2011 at 10:03 pm
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