Demystifying the Cognitive Dimension

If you are familiar with Gary Klein’s work and naturalistic decision-making (NDM) concepts, you may have already heard of the term “cognitive dimension.” But, if you’re new to NDM, there’s a pretty good chance you start to hear Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice drowning everything else out when you hear the term. You are not alone! Jargony terms can be a deterrent for those not familiar with a particular area of study, minimizing the perceived value of the concept before you even have a solid understanding of it. At ShadowBox, we use this term quite often. We want to distill it into understandable and, more importantly, relatable terms so that you can see why we value the cognitive dimension. 

Imagine you are a manager with over ten years of experience working in high-volume restaurants. You are training a new manager who has worked in the industry but not in a management capacity. Currently, you are preparing for the busiest sales weekend of the year. Increased sales means increased customers, higher product levels, more employees needed on the schedule, and greater opportunities for things to go wrong. You’ve been through this year after year, so you aren’t nervous. But your trainee is sweating bullets because this will be their first time experiencing this kind of volume. 

As you mentally shift into preparation mode, you reflect on previous experiences and relive some of the challenging situations you’ve had to navigate during busy periods of the year. There was a time when the line of customers was out the door, and a customer passed out in the middle of the chaos. Another time, your order of 300 cases of product didn’t show up. What about when your assistant manager quit without notice ten minutes before the start of their shift? Or the time the ovens stopped working in the middle of a busy Saturday. Or the time you smelled smoke and realized you were seconds away from having an electrical fire occur, again… with a line of hungry customers out the door.  

None of these situations occurred in isolation – other things were going on that required your attention. And the existing training programs, focused on rules and procedures, do not teach you how to handle these situations. They were cognitively complex situations that were rapidly occurring and required swift actions to mitigate larger issues; some even had a safety component to them. Each situation required a level of expertise to navigate. Without having experienced those situations, it is difficult to truly gain an appreciation for the cognitive skills needed to adapt and change course to address the issues. 

Finding a solution in each of the above situations, although you didn’t know it, required you to actively engage with the cognitive dimension, which, at its core, consists of how you:

• Make sense of complex and ambiguous situations (often with high stakes, incomplete information, time pressure, and uncertainty).
• Recognize cues, patterns, and anomalies.
• Recover from mistakes and adapt.
• Manage tradeoffs and competing demands.
• Anticipate and detect potential problems. 
• Make decisions (again, often in high-stakes situations with incomplete information, time pressure, and uncertainty).
• Develop richer mental models and mindsets from past experiences.

The cognitive dimension embodies the thinking behind the decisions you make and the actions you take. It includes your tacit knowledge, which is often challenging to articulate and is frequently ignored, underappreciated, and left out of traditional training programs. In 2019, Gary wrote a Psychology Today blog about the tendency for existing training programs to neglect the cognitive dimension. 

Sharing these stories with newer employees is essential to their growth and development, even if done informally. However, we think a crucial component of being more attuned to the cognitive dimension and improving cognitive skills is allowing trainees to experience the situation themselves through simulated scenario-based training. Through repeated experience, we strengthen critical and creative thinking, enhance mental models, and develop the ability to adopt less rigid mindsets, all of which allow for greater appreciation of the cognitive dimension and expedited expertise. 

The cognitive dimension opens up an important opportunity to promote expertise by helping students and trainees acquire the tacit knowledge that is essential for mastering a job.

– Gary Klein, Snapshots of the Mind

The cognitive dimension is paramount to our work at ShadowBox. Our scenario-based training approach is specifically designed to account for and address the cognitive dimension.  Because we think this is an important topic, our next featured course in the ShadowBox Learning Center will be about the cognitive dimension. We will share more details about launch dates as we get closer to the time. 

Click the button below to learn more about the cognitive dimension and the services we provide to improve critical cognitive skills.