In classical cognitive science, it is assumed that peripheral sensors of your body perceive the signals and then, those signals are transferred to your brain through your nerves. After the transfer, your brain symbolizes the signals received, processes and stores the symbolic information in order to make decisions, solve problems, manage memory operations and trigger actions in an organized fashion. It is a very central way of explaining human cognition. All the intellect is sourced in the head.
To me, how we design our organizations and information systems is very similar to the classical account of cognition. We collect the information at the edge. Sometimes a sensor reads the data, sometimes a sales team enters data to their tablet computers, sometimes your branches are there for receiving information from your related parties. Edges are connected to the center. You may call it head quarter, head office, mainframe, data center etc. In the center, stored data is processed by "intelligent" systems and "intelligent" professionals. Central decisions are made and the actions are pushed to the edge units. Perception-cognition-action.
The familiar story of the organizations. It is proven to get the job done. However, it would be better for us to explore the flipside. We model information systems and expect collected symbolic data to fit in the models designed. If there is a mismatch, central system rejects the data sent... Very similar to blood-brain barrier. Time passes and you come up with mountains of stored data in your "very well modelled" central data structures. Now it is time to do necessary analytics so that you can build your decisions and organize related actions. What is missing here?
In the center, almost always, you don't know the field. All the interactions with your customers, partners, thousands of non-deterministic and emotional clues, wins and losses. There is a huge amount of information in the dynamics of the field. And for sure, our field units are not able to encode all of the live information and send it to pre-modelled central structures. Tacit knowledge is missed. The gap between tacit knowledge and the symbolic knowledge is like the qualitative difference between the experience of talking to a person face-to-face and reading an e-mail from the same person. Former is always real, latter is always incomplete.
Therefore, in central analytics and information processing model, we only do static analysis. It is reductionism. It is like reading as many facts as you can on two basketball teams and trying to predict the winner in an accurate way. The players, all the statistics, past performance of the coach, anything you can read about the teams. But you never know all the governing dynamics to make correct decision. In the dynamics of the basketball match, coaches and players are managing millions of parameters... Some are tactical, some are intuitive, some are relative to the state of the opponent at a given time, some are highly related to the hormon levels of the moment, so on and on. It is similar in warfare too. With the stored information on the map, you cannot win the battle.
To make the story short, I can say that being present in the field during the action is crucial for success. Do you remember impulse and momentum from the physics class? This is the equation:
M . ∆V = F . ∆ t
Where M is mass, F is force, ∆V is change in velocity and ∆ t is change in time.
In our organizations, we want to create momentum and/or make an impulse for being in relatively advantageous positions in the market. When we do just static analysis by using symbolic central information, we can just know the amount of mass and the force. On the other hand, in the field, velocity of the mass and timing for applying the force heavily affect the impulse and momentum. In the battlefield, victor is the one who masters the mass, the power, timing and speed at the same time. History is full of supporting anectodes.
As you can see, physics gives a clue for success. Also, cognitive science has another explanation called embodied cognition. According to embodied cognition approach, it is said that we process information by using our whole body, not just our central nervous system. We probe the environment with our body, sense our situation in immersive environments, use our full nervous system to make multiple mental simulations and act as a result. So in contrast to the classical cognitive model, embodied cognition is not that sterile. It considers distributed cognition, action orientedness and situatedness. There are many real life practices supporting embodied cognition. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and analytical philosophy. The position of your body affects how you give meaning to the world such that if you put a pencil between your teeth, which gives you a forced smile, and a friend tells a joke to you; you find the joke more fun compared to the case you don't smile. Similarly, positional up is better than down position. We use our body for cognitive offloading as well. Remember the times you use your fingers for counting or how you use your hands and mimics while you are talking. We also translate some mental states into bodily forms during solving problems. Assume that you are given a task to mentally rotate a cube on your computer screen 60 degrees. You may find yourself with your head turned 60 degrees instead of rotating the cube in your mind.
The question is whether we can use the notion of embodied cognition for enhancing the way we organize our corporations and come up with better designed information systems.
I think the answer is yes.
It requires to be present in the field with all the central capabilities of the company. Doing the analytics at the edge. Enriching the symbolic knowledge with muscle memory. Putting human in the center. Being action oriented. You can translate it as being result oriented. It sounds like a usual term in the business jargon. However, how you interpret it can make the difference.
For example, take the analytics as it is today. By definition, it is reactive and it tries to predict relying on simplified static data accumulated. Trying to predict the future is painful and does not guarantee the success all the time. What if you accept that you are living in a complex world where is (1) unknown, (2) unpredictable and (3) constantly changing? How can you win in such a complex world? What decision making process should you execute?
Just act in a bodily way! Do not try to predict but build your muscles to define the future. You can define the future by being the first mover in the context so that you take the initiative and create a situation. If your body is agile and alive to optimize mass, force, speed and timing, it is possible for you to define, at least, near future. Winning is relative to your rivals. War is a series of temporary conditions. As you can see, action orientedness might be a viable way forward. The key is being able to act first at low costs compared to your challengers. And this ability is heavily depending on your information system architecture. Rapid application development, easy deployment, high availability, enabling users in the field, capturing dynamic information are the key concepts of being action/result oriented.
While I am coming to the end, I'd like to say that creating concepts and following ruling heuristics in a vigilant manner are necessary qualities for the organizations. If we visit cognitive science again, it is called metacognition. Metacognition is the ability of monitoring and executing your cognitive processes. In other words, self-awareness!
We need eyes wide open for winning.
