conceptual foundation:
cognition and design
The Center is rooted in the area of cognition. The study of cognition
helps us understand how employees, customers, and other factors in the
marketplace perceive, think, learn, and use information. In order to
sustain agility and long-term behavior change, be it in individuals
or organizations, the people acting have to understand what they’re
doing and why they’re doing it. In the end organizations can become
more intelligent and build toward changing circumstances.
We are continually translating theory to practice. We look at how
people process information and create new knowledge, ideas, processes,
products, and services. We then apply the area of cognition across other
business disciplines such as strategy, marketing, operations, and product
development.
We believe that the role of a leader within an organization is that
of a designer. Leaders are most effective when applying systematic and
thorough approaches to understanding situations and solving problems.
A designer coming from the LOC approach begins with the end goals in
mind, involves users in building an understanding and also designing
a solution, assesses systemic impact along the way and iterates the
design as needed. This leads to a greater chance for successful adoption
and desired change results.
As the world changes at a more rapid pace, the need to come up with
new approaches and solutions continues to grow. It becomes necessary
to take into account the complexities involved in new innovations and
a global environment. By definition, cognition looks at growing intelligence
and taking into account complex environments. You have to teach organizations
and individuals how to think through these complex environments and
problem solve in the midst of ambiguity. Our cognitive approach teaches
people and organizations to generate new and different solutions for
improved results. By using cognitive skills more deliberately, one can
predict consequences of a decision. We look at not only the people in
an organization, but also how they interact with other people, tools,
technologies, and business processes around them. We look at how knowledge
and information is embedded within the whole system to determine how
to leverage it more intelligently in order to deliver on the desired
business results.
In order to sustain agility and long-term behavior change, people within
an organization have to understand what they’re doing and why
they’re doing it. If they’re simply changing their behavior,
they won’t be agile or flexible enough to adapt across situations.
Through applying cognition, we teach people how to think, not just how
to do. We go beyond the model of programming people in one particular
set of behaviors only to re-program them when conditions change. At
the Center, we go deeper than that to teach people how to think differently
from the very start.
Our
Distinction