Deep Dive: The untapped power of human cognition

In an increasingly digital world, can B2B innovators avoid outsourcing our ability to think and get back to nurturing human-centric experiences?

Once again, I’ve stumbled on a podcast discussion that isn’t at all about B2B innovation, not on the surface anyway. As I listened to Annie Murphy Paul talk with Jeremy Goldman about how our minds work on the FUTUREPROOF podcast, I sat up straight. I’ve long believed that the power of digital technology, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation will diminish the role passion, empathy, and individuality play in business. I don’t think machines will replace humans; we are and will remain their masters. But as we adopt digital tools, we forget human skills. Armed with my smartphone, I can’t remember more than two or three phone numbers. I struggle to use a real-world map if I can find one. I never select radio stations; I let my music platform suggest the songs it “knows” I want to hear. All of this is a massive danger for B2B innovators because it diminishes our cognitive power. We must improve our ability to do business as humans for humans. If we outsource our thinking to digital tools and fail to strengthen our human cognition, we will fail.

Get your head in the game

I’ve discovered several “truths” as I’ve explored the art and science of innovation and worked to help real-world businesses become masters. First, mindsets matter. You cannot innovate without foresight, and foresight is a learnable skill—for individuals and organizations. Companies that innovate and don’t tell their stories suffer from the tree-falling syndrome: Did they really innovate if nobody noticed? Second, real-world businesses won’t go far by going it alone—that is, a well-tended ecosystem is essential for adding ideas, capabilities, funding, and execution. And perhaps most importantly, innovation happens slowly, then quickly. This last truth is about being obsessively patient and impatient at the same time, and above all, persistent. Innovators spend years pushing their boulder up the hill before, at last, it comes tumbling down, gathering momentum, and crushing the status quo.

Listening to Annie Murphy Paul, acclaimed science writer and author of The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, on the FUTUREPROOF podcast, I have added a new truth to my growing list: Carefully constructed human-centric cognition is of the utmost importance if real-world businesses are to survive, thrive, and perhaps dominate the future of business. As digital transformation crashes forward, killing off the old ways as it goes, our thought processes are being augmented, amplified, and ultimately replaced by the unrelenting non-human rationality of data, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation. This is a massive problem because the ultimate purpose of business is to help us live our lives and do our work as humans. Real-world companies must master the virtual world, but they must operate, compete, and create value for people in the real world. They must do business as humans for humans.

B2B innovators must pay close attention to how they think, defining and mastering a cognitive process that is human-centric. If innovators’ ideas and solutions begin and end with data, we lose. If innovators go further and outsource their thinking through data-driven automated processes, we lose. If innovators do not set human needs and human opportunities as the North Star for leveraging data and deploying technology, we lose. To win, B2B innovators must accept the challenge of defining, adopting, and optimizing human-centric cognition—a process of knowing that achieves awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment that puts humans first.

Develop a holistic approach to thinking

I’ve written about the need for human-centric innovation many times (see here and here), but before I learned about Paul’s writing, I had hit a wall. It was easy to communicate the idea of human-centric innovation, but I didn’t have a way to help B2B innovators act on the idea. As strategists, humans often look for hyper-rational solutions, or we fall victim to confirmation bias—the tendency to look for, interpret, and remember information that supports what we want to be true. As Paul points out, there are many reasons why humans fail to think effectively. Western cultures tend to value rational, data-driven thought and dismiss non-neural inputs. We are brain-bound, meaning that humans consider solutions that come from our brains, ignoring things that we otherwise sense. (The term “brain-bound” was coined by Andy Clark. Click here for more of his ideas about the interaction of digital tools and human thinking.)

My “aha moment” was the realization that if B2B innovators are to innovate for humans, we must think as humans, which means moving beyond rational, data-driven thought to become more inclusive in our approach. This is where the concept of the “extended mind” comes into play.  From Paul, I learned that the central idea of the extended mind is that we don’t just think with our brains, we also think with the sensations and movements of our bodies. Moreover, our thinking is influenced by the physical spaces in which we work, and the minds of other people we know. It turns out, thinking is a full-body activity. When asked how humans can make better decisions, Paul answers:

I would advise people to adapt, which is to stop thinking about mustering resources from within and instead think about regulating yourself from the outside in; it's actually much more effective, much more efficient, much easier. … We have this ethos in our culture that it's got to start from within and power through … my focus is instead on changing the context or changing the environment in which we're doing our thinking. ... It could also have to do with how you arrange working and learning spaces; they can support our identity as thinkers and workers and students if we display for ourselves what psychologists call “use of identity” signs of who we are in that place that helps to prime our brains in the way that we would like, to pay attention to and remember things.

Later, there is an exchange that goes to my contention that an overreliance on data, AI, and automated processes may diminish our cognitive skills, and, as a result, the human-centric nature of business. Goldman asks:

Why is it so crucial for us to understand the brain and human nature in general in order to understand where we're going as a society? I think a lot of people focus on technology and innovation. But I think it's also important to talk to people like you to better understand how we think, because technology alone doesn't matter if you don't understand how humans are going to interact with these things.

And Paul explains,

I think it's really important that we understand what kinds of creatures we are and that a rather profound question to me is what the extended mind is all about. It's saying, no, we're not machines, our brains aren't muscles that get better with exercise … Obviously, the brain is still at the heart of all the thinking that we do. I'm not saying that the brain isn't important, but it's the role that we expect the brain to play that I think could be usefully different. And if we think of it not as a workhorse that we just have to keep lashing, keep pushing to make it work harder and harder to lesser and lesser effect. If we think of it instead like an orchestra conductor that's bringing in, skillfully, all these different external resources and the right one at the right time, then thinking becomes this kind of beautiful collage that is so much richer than anything that could happen just inside the dark spaces, inside our skull.

There are many more actionable insights in the podcast discussion and in Paul’s book. Paul is not writing for B2B innovators, but her work is useful for our cause. By drawing attention to how our brains work, Paul provides tools we can use to make our brains work better. And by incorporating her ideas into our cognitive processes as B2B innovators, we can make sure the awesome power of digital technologies is used in the service of doing business as humans for humans, rather than as a replacement. There’s more work to be done, but Annie Murphy Paul’s new book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, does more than point the way. Much more.

Ideas for innovating B2B

My brain was buzzing during the entire podcast, which I listened to several times. Based on what I learned, I would offer five steps to enrich our B2B innovations by better leveraging the power of human cognition:

• Stop talking. If you are talking, you cannot listen. As you listen, make sure that you have walked away from working on your computer (which stresses your brain) and if possible, take a walk outside (which relaxes your mind.) For best results, make sure that you listen to humans interacting with other humans among a group with diverse experiences, life histories, and personal thinking styles.

• Come back better. If workers are to return to work in physical spaces as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, we can work to make the at-work experience better than before. As spaces are reconfigured for hoteling and shared workspaces, facility planners can leave room for personalization and avoid creating sterile environments. In our passages and common areas, we can add images and objects that indicate or signal who we are, who we work with, and who we serve. As working alone at home provides flexibility and reduces unproductive commuting, working together in our offices must affirm our purpose and enable better thinking. 

• Don’t let your thinkers think alone. More than just providing a personal workspace, it’s important to intentionally organize well-designed “group thinks.” Invite your teams to work together in a space that surrounds them with reminders of purpose and service. Let everyone speak. Set a standard that the goal of the group conversation is to get as close to the truth as possible.

• Create groupiness. It turns out “groupiness” is an actual term used by psychologists. I love that. As Paul explains, “Groupiness is what you feel when a collection of individuals has established its own identity as a group; you have a shared spirit or a sense of belonging to this group together.” That’s super hard to create when communicating on screen, making it part of coming back better.

• Keep a diary. All B2B innovators have much work to do to adopt the practice of thinking with the extended mind, avoiding brain-bound environments, and ultimately, creating human-centric innovations that reflect the rich and complex reality of living our lives and doing our work. I suggest that we take notes along the way. As you improve your own cognitive skills, and your team’s, use your diary to capture what works. By doing so, you may improve your company’s innovation processes and the competitive advantage gained through them. Your company will become a better place to work, offering a reason for new people to want to come and work with you.

Join the journey

By thinking better as humans, B2B innovators can improve the experiences we create for our customers, our partners, and our employees. I will share stories as I find them and encourage you to do the same. As always, I invite you to join our quest. Don’t be a stranger. Share your thoughts in the comments section below. If you prefer, reach out directly at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.