Organize resources so it’s easy to understand. Reduce cognitive load by breaking information down into small, digestible chunks and arranging them into patterns that make sense to the individual. Always start by giving an overview so individuals know how all the smaller chunks fit together.
Use visuals. The brain has an incredible ability to remember visual images so you must exploit that as you look for ways to reinforce key learning points. Create tools that are primarily visual rather than word-based. Use images in place of text (or at least minimize the text). Use videos and animations to help people understand key concepts.
We can drive a lot of effectiveness into our processes by structuring information to make complex documents more transparent and accessible to their users. Visual cues can provide an ‘attention hierarchy’, making sure that what is most important is not overlooked. People tend to find more usable what they find beautiful, and a wall of text simply looks scary, cumbersome, and off-putting for most people. I am a strong advocate of beauty in system design, and I would love to see Quality departments better known for their aesthetic principles and for tying all our documents into good cognitive principles.
Cognitive Load Theory
Cognitive load theory (CLT) can help us understand why people struggle so much in reading and understanding contracts. Developed by John Sweller, while initially studying problem-solving, CLT postulates that learning happens best when information is presented in a way that takes into consideration human cognitive structures. Limited working memory capacity is one of the characteristic aspects of human cognition: thus, comprehension and learning can be facilitated by presenting information in ways minimizing working memory load.
Adapted from Atkinson, R.C. and Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). ‘Human memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes’. In Spence, K.W. and Spence, J.T. The psychology of learning and motivation, (Volume 2). New York: Academic Press. pp. 89–195
Structure and Display
Information structure (how the content is ordered and organized) and information display (how it is visually presented) play a key role in supporting comprehension and performance. A meaningful information structure helps readers preserve continuity, allowing the formation of a useful and easy-to-process mental model. Visual information display facilitates mental model creation by representing information structures and relationships more explicitly, so readers do not have to use cognitive resources to develop a mental model from scratch.
Leveraging in your process/procedure documents
Much of what is considered necessary SOP structure is not based on how people need to find and utilize information. Many of the parts of a document taken for granted (e.g. reference documents, definitions) are relics from paper-based systems. It is past time to reinvent the procedure.
The first four phases of knowledge management are all about identifying and creating meaning and then making that meaning usable. Knowledge management is a set of epistemic actions, creating knowledge through interaction. This interaction is a way of creating a partnership between what happens in the head with everything in the world – Work-as-Imagined and Work-as-Done.
There are really four themes to a set of epistemic actions:
Foraging: Locating resources that will lead to understanding
Tuning: Adjusting resources to align with desired understanding
Externalizing: Moving resources out of the head and into the world
Constructing: Forming new knowledge structures in the world
Four Themes Mapped to Firts 4 Phases of Knowledge Management
Theme
Epistemic Interaction
Means
Foraging
Locating resources that will lead to understanding
Searching
Searching happens when you need information and
believe it exists somewhere.
Searching depends on how we articulate or
information needs.
Probing
“Tell me more.” Probing happens when the information
you have isn’t quite enough. You are probing when you take the next step,
move to the next level, and obtain more salient specifics. Probing is about
drilling down and saying “show, explain, and reveal more about this.”
We can probe to reveal new patterns, structures and
relationships. It brings to light new information that helps us to reconsider
what we already know.
Animating
Animating is when we initiate and control motion in
an information source. It includes learning-by-doing.
Collecting
Collecting is how we gather foraged information and
tuck it away for future use.
Tuning
Adjusting resources to align with desired
understanding
Collecting
Cloning
Cloning lets us take information from one situation
and use it in another.
Cutting
Cutting is the way we say “this matters”, that “I
need this part, but not the rest.”
Filtering
Filtering reduces complexity by reducing clutter to
expose salient details.
Externalizing
Moving resources out of the head and into the world
Annotating
Annotating is how we add context to information. How
we adapt and modify the information to the needed context.
Linking
Connecting bits of information together. Forming
conceptual maps.
Generating
Introducing new knowledge into the world.
Chunking
Grouping idenpendent yet related information together.
Constructing
Forming new knowledge structures in the world
Chunking
Composing
Producing a new, separate structure from the
information that has its own meaning and purpose.
Fragmenting
Taking information and breaking it apart into usable
components.
Rearranging
The art of creating meaningful order.
Repicturing
Changing the way the information is represented to
create understanding.
The format is pivotal. The difficulties we have in quality are really not much different from elsewhere in society in that we are surrounded by confusing documentation and poorly presented explanations everywhere we look, that provide information but not understanding. Oftentimes we rely on canards of “this is what is expected,” “this is what works” – but rarely is that based on anything more than anecdotal. And as the high incidence of issues and the high cost of training shows, less than adequate.
There is a huge body-of-knowledge out there on cognitive-friendly design of visuals, including documentation. This is an area we as a quality profession need to get comfortable with. Most important, we need to give ourselves permission to adapt, modify and transform the information we need into a shape that aids understanding and makes everyone a better thinker.
Work-as-Prescribed (and work-as-instructed) is the creation of tools and technologies to help us think better, understand more and perform at our peak.
Locus of Understanding
Looking at the process at the right level is key. Think of Work-as-Prescribed as a lens. Sometimes you need a high-powered lens so that you can zoom in on a single task. Other times, you need to zoom out to see a set of tasks, a whole process, or how systems interact.
This is the locus of understanding, where understanding happens. When we take this position, we see how understanding is created. Adopting the locus of understanding means going to the right level for the problem at hand. When we apply it to Work-as-Prescribed we are applying the same principles as we do in problem-solving to developing the right tools to govern the work.
An important way to look is distributed cognitive resources, which means anything that contributes to the cognitive work being done. Adjusting the locus of understanding means that you can, and should, treat an SOP as a cognitive resource. Some of the memory is in your head and some is in the SOP. Work-as-prescribed is a cognitive resource that we distribute, routinely and casually across the brain and our quality system in the form of documents and other execution aids.
Other tools, like my favorite whiteboard, also serve as distributed cognitive resources.
So, as our documents and other tools are distributed cognitive resources it behooves us to ensure they are based on the best cognitive principles possible to drive the most benefit.
As an aside, there is a whole line of thought about why some physical objects are better at distributed cognitive resources than electronic. Movement actually matters.
Taking it even further (shifting the locus) we can see the entire quality system as a part of a single distributed cognitive system where cognitive work is performed via the cognitive functions of communicating, deciding, planning, and problem-solving. These cognitive functions are supported by cognitive processes such as perceiving, analyzing, exchanging, and manipulating.
Cognitive Activity in Work-As-Prescribed
The tools we develop to provide distributed cognitive activity strive to:
Provide short-term or long-term memory aids so that memory load can be reduced.
Provide information that can be directly perceived and used such that little effort is needed to interpret and formulate the information explicitly.
Provide knowledge and skills that are unavailable from internal representations.
Support perceptual operators that can recognize features easily and make inferences directly.
Anchor and structure cognitive behavior without conscious awareness.
Change the nature of a task by generating more efficient action sequences.
Stop time and support perceptual rehearsal to make invisible and transient information visible and sustainable.
Aid processibility by limiting abstraction.
Determine decision making strategies through accuracy maximization and effort minimization.
Driving Work-As Prescribed
As we build our requirements documents, our process and procedure, there are a few principles to keep in mind to better tap into distributed cognitive resources.
Plan for the flow of information: Think about paths, relationships, seams, edges and other hand-offs. Focus on the flow of information. Remember that we learn in a spiral, and the content needed for a novice is different from that of an expert and build our documents and the information flow accordingly. This principle is called Sequencing.
Break information down into pieces: Called, Chunking, the grouping together of information into ideally sized pieces. When building Work-As-Prescribed pay close attention to which of these chunks are reusable and build accordingly.
The deeply about context: How a tool is used drives what the tool should be.
Think deeply about information structures: Not all information is the same, not every example of Work-as-Prescribed should have the same structure.
Be conscientiousabout the digital and physical divide: Look for opportunities to integrate or connect these two worlds. Be honest of how enmeshed they are at any point in the system.
We are building our Work-as-Prescribed through leveraging our quality culture, our framework for coordinating work. Pay attention to:
Shared Standards – Ways we communicate
Invisible Environments – Ways we align, conceptually
When design process, procedure and task documentation leverage this principles by build blocks, or microcontent, that is:
about one primary idea, fact, or concept
easily scannable
labeled for clear identification and meaning, and
appropriately written and formatted for use anywhere and any time it is needed.
There is a common miscomprehension that simple means short. That just isn’t true. Simple means that it passes a test for the appropriateness of the size of a piece of content of providing sufficient details to answer a specific question for the targeted audience. The size of the content must effectively serve its intended purpose with efficiency, stripping off any unnecessary components.
We need to strive to apply cognitive thinking principles to our practice. The day of judging a requirements document by its page length is long over.
Constituents of cognitive thinking applied to Work-As-Prescribed
When developing training programs and cultural initiative sit is useful to break down what we really want people to know. I find it useful to think in terms of the following:
know-how: The technical skills to do the work
know-what: The ability to perform functional problem-solving, to adapt the process and innovate
know-who: networking and interpersonal skills, with social/emotional intelligence, for empathy or social network capacities
know-where: institutional and system knowledge of how the work fits into a larger ecosystem
know-who/how: strategic and leadership skills, for political ‘ nous’ in setting agendas, managing institutions, mobilizing resources;
know-why: creation of meaning, significance, identity, morality, with practical intuition for creative arts, sports, everyday social exchange.
To build all six elements requires a learning culture and a recognition that knowledge and awareness do not start and end at initial training on a process. We need to build the mechanisms to:
Communicate in a way to continually facilitate the assimilation of knowledge
Incorporate ongoing uses of tools such as coaching and mentoring in our processes and systems
ISO9001:2015 states “Top management shall review the organization’s quality management system, at planned intervals, to ensure its continuing suitability, adequacy, effectiveness and alignment with the strategic direction of the organization.”
Management review takes inputs of system performance and converts it to outputs that drive improvement.
Just about every standard and guidance aligns with the ISO9001:2015 structure.
The Use of PowerPoint in Management Review
Everyone makes fun of PowerPoint, and yet it is still with us. As a mechanism for formal communication it is the go-to form, and I do not believe that will change anytime soon.
One of the best pieces of research on PowerPoint and management review is Kaplan’s examination of PowerPoint slides used in a manufacturing firm. Kaplan found that generating slides was “embedded in the discursive practices of strategic knowledge production” and made up “part of the epistemic machinery that undergirds the know-ledge production culture.” Further, “the affordances of PowerPoint,” Kaplan pointed out, “enabled the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in an uncertain environment, creating spaces for discussion, making recombinations possible, [and] allowing for adjustments as ideas evolved”. She concluded that PowerPoint slide decks should be regarded not as merely effective or ineffective reports but rather as an essential part of strategic decision making.
Kaplan’s findings are not isolated, there is a broad wealth of relevant research in the fields of genre and composition studies as well as research on material objects that draw similar conclusions. Powerpoint, as a method of formal communication, can be effective.
Management Review as Formal Communication
Management review is a formal communication and by understanding how these formal communications participate in the fixed and emergent conditions of knowledge work as prescribed, being-composed, and materialized-texts-in-use, we can understand how to better structure our knowledge sharing.
Management review mediates between Work-As-Imagined and Work-As-Done.
The quality management reviews have “fixity” and bring a reliable structure to the knowledge-work process by specifying what needs to become known and by when, forming a step-by-step learning process.
As-Being-Composed
Quality management always starts with a plan for activities, but in the process of providing analysis through management review, the organization learns much more about the topic, discovers new ideas, and uncover inconsistencies in our thinking that cause us to step back, refine, and sometimes radically change our plan. By engaging in the writing of these presentations we make the tacit knowledge explicit.
A successful management review imagines the audience who needs the information, asks questions, raises objections, and brings to the presentation a body of experience and a perspective that differs from that of the party line. Management review should be a process of dialogue that draws inferences and constructs relationships between ideas, apply logic to build complex arguments, reformulate ideas, reflects on what is already known, and comes to understand the material in a new way.
As-Materialized
Management review is a textually mediated conversation that enables knowledge integration within and across groups in, and outside of, the organization. The records of management review are focal points around which users can discuss what they have learned, discover diverse understandings, and depersonalize debate. Management review records drive the process of incorporating the different domain specific knowledge of various decision makers and experts into some form of systemic group knowledge and applies that knowledge to decision making and action.
Sources
Alvesson, M. (2004). Knowledge work and knowledge-intensive firms. Oxford University Press.
Bazerman, C. (2003). What is not institutionally visible does not count: The problem of making activity assessable, accountable, and plannable. In C. Bazerman & D. Russell (Eds.), Writing selves/writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp. 428–482). WAC Clearinghouse
Edmondson, A. C. (2012). Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy. Jossey-Bass
Kaplan, S. (2015). Strategy and PowerPoint: An inquiry into the epistemic culture and machinery of strategy making. Organization Science, 22, 320–346.
Levitin, D. J. (2014). The organized mind: Thinking straight in the age of information overload. Penguin
Mengis, J. (2007). Integrating knowledge through communication: The case of experts and decision makers. In Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Capabilities (pp. 699–720). OLKC. Retrieved from https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/conf/olkc/archive/olkc2/papers/mengis.pdf
Investigations of a Dog 