Cognitive footprint matters

Charles F. Munat — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:35:22 +0000

The thinner you spread yourself, the harder to win

Cognitive “footprint” is the total cognitive effort required to sustain an enterprise. In short, it is all the thinking, reasoning, learning, remembering, etc. necessary for success.

The larger an organization’s cognitive footprint, the greater the cost to maintain it. If you can achieve the same outcome with a smaller footprint, you’ll save time and money — freeing up resources for other priorities.

To minimize cognitive footprint, making your organization leaner and more competitive, you’ll first need to recognize it and interrogate it.

Contributors to cognitive footprint

The difficulty of processes: if two processes achieve the same outcome, but one is more difficult, then the more difficult process increases the cognitive footprint without benefit.
The scale of the skills and knowledge required to keep the business running: the greater the number of skills needed or the more complex those skills, the greater the cognitive footprint.
The difficulty to acquire and maintain the necessary skills and knowledge required to run the business: slow to learn means a bigger cognitive footprint.
The cognitive load carried by the work force: cognitive load translates directly to cognitive footprint, which could be considered the sum of cognitive load over time.

If you’re not aware of and attentive to your organization’s cognitive footprint, then odds are it is much bigger than it needs to be. An oversized footprint wastes resources — including time and money — and hurts agility and competitiveness.

Why compete in clown shoes when you can wear a pair of Mizuno Wave Riders?

How to minimize cognitive footprint

The first trick to minimizing cognitive footprint is to recognize it in your organization. Begin by cataloguing everything that contributes to it. There are many things to consider:

How much knowledge do new employees need to learn to be able to come up to speed in their jobs? Is that information well documented? Well indexed for rapid access? Easy to understand? Tightly focused on exactly what they’ll need rather than an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach?
Look for duplicated effort. Do different divisions use different applications, frameworks, libraries to accomplish the same tasks? Why maintain incompatible stacks unnecessarily?
Perhaps you keep it lean, but do you apply that to learning as well? Do your workers employ just-in-time learning or are they regularly acquiring knowledge and skills that they don’t truly need and may never use? And are you paying for it under the assumption that all learning is useful?

There is much more to recognizing, measuring, and minimizing cognitive footprint. I’ll address specific issues and techniques in upcoming essays.

The future is just in time

Charles F. Munat — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 20:13:53 +0000

In a rapidly changing world, it’s the only effective way to learn

Almost three decades ago, I was running an industrial training program in a factory that was then implementing just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). It occurred to me that the principles of JIT — now called lean manufacturing — would apply to learning as easily.

Flash forward to 2013 and I’m teaching again, this time a 12-week “immersive” web development course for General Assembly. The pressures of the intense workload were stressing the students out considerably, and I again applied the principles of just-in-time learning, telling the students:

Never learn anything until you have to.

Put another way, learn only what you need to know exactly when you need to know it — no more, no less, no sooner, and definitely no later.

Unlearning how to learn

The most difficult part of teaching humans how to learn just-in-time is overcoming our deeply-instilled belief that we need to know everything.

To overcome this I often would ask how many of my students could drive a car. Invariably, every hand went up.

Then I’d ask one at random to come up and draw a diagram of an automatic transmission and explain how it worked. I’d ask another to explain the coefficient of friction and how different tire compounds affect it. To a third, I’d ask about fuel-air ratios and their relationship to barometric pressure.

Typically, none of the students could answer any of these questions. But they could all still drive (uh, more or less).

Knowing about transmissions, tire compounds, and fuel-air ratios might make them better drivers, but were they really trying to become expert drivers, or were they just trying to get somewhere quickly? If the latter, then the information I requested might have been fun to know, but it was utterly superfluous to the task at hand.

And still they struggled. The belief that we need to know everything is a powerful one, and not easily discarded.

Expertise is highly overrated

We’ve been taught from an early age to revere expertise, where expertise is generally assumed to mean knowing almost everything about a subject. But the truth is that in day-to-day life, we rarely need to know more than a small subset of that knowledge.

And in a world where knowledge goes obsolete almost as fast as we can learn it, trying to maintain skills and knowledge “just in case” is an expensive hobby. Don’t we all have better things to do?

Just in time, not just in case

One alternative to just-in-time learning is just-in-case learning. Just-in-case learning means learning skills or knowledge we don’t currently need just in case we might need them in the future.

But when we do need them, will we remember them? Will they be current enough? Will they ever be needed at all?

Worse, when we learn well ahead of time, then it’s difficult to guess exactly what we need to learn, whereas just-in-time learning means we know what’s required — we need it now — so we can learn most efficiently.

Just in time, not just too late

The other alternative is to wait too long and then not to have the necessary skill or knowledge at the moment it is needed. This causes unnecessary delays and can be quite expensive and even painful.

I often find that people are confused when I talk about just-in-time learning and assume that we don’t begin the learning until we need to use it. Hello! That’s just too late! Obviously, we need to anticipate our needs and plan our learning accordingly. And it’s a good idea to add in a fudge factor — a safety margin — to be cautious. This is not as easy as it sounds and takes practice.

But that’s not the same as learning everything right now, just in case. Yes, learning just in time is a skill, and like any skill it requires correct and regular practice. But it can be learned, and it will pay lifelong dividends if learned well.

Learning how to learn

There’s much more to say on this topic, so I’ll be posting more in coming weeks. I’m also writing a book on my full methodology for learning, of which just-in-time learning is merely one of many methods. Look for sample chapters as they become available.

Image source (CC BY 4.0)

Forem: Paperhat, Limited