Approach
Exploit the Cognitive Dimension for Better Results
When standard procedures aren't enough
Organizational training often emphasizes standard operating procedures and best practices, but at ShadowBox, we’re more interested in what isn’t in your training program – the cognitive skills that comprise the cognitive dimension. ShadowBox training focuses on improving cognitive skills such as sensemaking, decision-making, and problem detection, to empower new staff to make decisions like the experts.
What is the cognitive dimension?
We help organizations uncover the tacit knowledge your experts use to make tough decisions and good judgments when the stakes are high. Working with skilled performers as well as those just learning the ropes, we make invisible aspects of work visible so workers can learn from each other.
The cognitive dimension includes:
- Making sense of complex and ambiguous situations.
- Recognizing cues, patterns, and signals – things your newer staff might miss!
- Recovering from mistakes and quickly adapt and change course as needed.
- Managing tradeoffs and competing demands.
- Developing richer mental models and mindsets from past experiences.
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
Five barriers to cognitive performance
Many organizations are insensitive to the cognitive dimension, inadvertently creating barriers to achieving better performance. Below are five common barriers to cognitive performance we see in organizations in a variety of industries.
The Problem: Bringing new team members up to speed quickly and efficiently, often in the absence of more skilled colleagues, can be a challenging and daunting process.
Our Solution: We create engaging learning content and customizable training programs based on real-world situations, designed to accelerate the expertise of less experienced employees, getting them up to speed faster without relying on the limited availability of experienced colleagues.
The Problem: Relying on inflexible standard operating procedures (SOPs) that neglect the cognitive dimension can hinder a team’s ability to make effective decisions.
Our Solution: We conduct in-depth cognitive interviews to help organizations take stock of what’s not in their SOPs – the cognitive skills required of their team and build scenario-based trainings to enhance those skills.
The Problem: Allowing uncertainty to lead to indecision, erode confidence, inadvertently foster over-analysis, and promote risk aversion, can impede decision making and reduce the growth of expertise.
Our Solution: We employ strategies to mitigate the effects of uncertainty that can lead to indecision, leading to improved individual and team confidence and overall decision making.
The Problem: Maintaining rigid and unhelpful mental models can derail adaptability, problem solving, prevent the development of new skills and expertise, and lead to poor decision making.
Our Solution: We explore individual and team mental models to encourage flexibility and appreciation for a range of perspectives, establishing the ability to adapt to new information, solve problems more efficiently, and make more informed decisions.
The Problem: Losing experienced employees prevents organizations from retaining valuable tacit knowledge – knowledge that is difficult to articulate, capture, and share – leading to operational inefficiencies and potential skill gaps.
Our Solution: We work with organizations to embed the tacit knowledge of their expert team into scenario-based training programs to ensure that knowledge stays within the organization and can be passed to new employees.
Where can we help?
Our team has spent years researching, observing, developing, and implementing a variety of methods to address the barriers to cognitive performance. All of our work is done with a naturalistic decision making lens – meaning our work is done in real-world settings, with real clients, and real organizational constraints, not artificial experiments done in a controlled lab environment using college undergraduates as participants.
Here’s how we can help you combat the barriers to cognitive performance in your team.
Knowledge Elicitation & Management
Our tools and methods are designed with purpose – we document the expertise residing in the organization and deliberately embed it in our training scenarios to facilitate efficient and effective dissemination of knowledge throughout an organization.
Strengthen Existing Training Programs
Our evidence-based strategies can improve existing organizational training programs by accounting for and emphasizing the cognitive challenges neglected by traditional training and SOPs.
Leadership and Team Calibration
Our training exercises can reveal gaps in understanding between teams or between supervisors and their teams by highlighting how they approach challenging scenarios, their views on organizational limits, and the demands they juggle, which all affect teamwork and performance.
Improving cognitive skills
We provide our clients with the tools they need to discover and strengthen their cognitive skills – a process that will improve decision making and accelerate expertise in any organization.
We also offer a suite of more general naturalistic decision making resources in our Learning Center.
Two of our most notable tools are the Pre-Mortem and the ShadowBox Method.
Decision Making Training
The ShadowBox Method
Challenging and realsitic scenario-based training designed to accelerate and retain expertise in your organization.
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Risk Evaluation Training
The Pre-Mortem
A unique risk evaluation method to discover potential flaws, mitigate overconfidence, and improve decision making among project teams.
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