In 1990 Tad McGeer published his research into a robot that could walk but without any brain or computer. Using a well-designed series of hinges and bars approximating knees, hips and legs, he demonstrates that walking is possible just by the physical design of the walker. You can check out the charmingly 90s footage here:
Nowadays this kind of technology looks quaint in comparison to the (frightening?) Terminator-like abilities of the Boston Dynamics lab, but this kind of demonstration encapsulates the concept of embodied cognition.
Until the late 80s, our cognition was thought to consist mostly of computation in the brain. In this paradigm our brains form internal representations of the outside world and compute them before spitting out an action or a thought.
A body of work challenging this model emerged in the 1980s. The computational, representationalist doesn’t account for the impact of culture on our cognition, the influence of the body, and it doesn’t take into account the thinker’s own perspective and insight into their own experience (a branch of philosophy called phenomenology).
In 1991 the publication of Embodied Mind began to reconcile “the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms”. This means that the body (and not just the brain) is the place where experience happens, and it is for the body that cognition happens. This set in motion a paradigm shift in the world of cognitive science which is still in place today.
Modern Cognitive Science - the study of intelligence and mind - sits largely atop this Embodied Cognition paradigm. There are 3 other Es to this paradigm - cognition is also Embedded, Enacted and Extended - but I’ll save those for another post.
The overall picture is that our cognition takes places dynamically across the body including the brain. Cognition is coupled intrinsically to the environment, and as our environment changes our cognition changes accordingly. We are constantly and unconsciously shifting and adapting - self-organising - to our various cultural, physical and environmental settings.
McGeer’s brainless walker mechanism shows us a way in which intelligence is to some extent embodied in physical structures. Walking is a problem solving activity, and McGeer showed that problem solving can happen without thinking.
In this way the design of the body automatically solves the problem of walking. We could argue that embodied cognition consists partly of the ways in which the complexity of a problem is simplified down by the design of the system. In this walking example the calculations and computations of bipedal (ie two-footed) walking are embodied into the physical legs and knees of the walker.
This definition of cognition offers a new perspective on how we run our teams and organisations. Making a product made or running a service require lots of explicit and implicit thinking and calculation. Just as the bipedal walker embodies the problem of walking into its skeleton, our processes, ways of working and working culture embody the problem of how to run an organisation.
When I organise a monthly meeting with my line manager I am 'embodying’ the problem of supervision and guidance into the calendar. I am designing a structure that means I don’t have to constantly be thinking about ‘how do I get my supervision?’ or ‘how do I ask my line manager a complicated question?’.
Another example might be when I follow an organisational process such as booking my paid time off. The process takes all the knowledge and wisdom about what the employee and the team need from someone taking a holiday, and embodies it into a process. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel, I just follow the process the same way the bipedal walker just obeys the laws of it’s own construction.
Unless you work with physical products or items in some way, it’s likely that you’re a knowledge worker. In knowledge work pretty much all of our embodied knowledge is in this quasi-imaginary world of processes, agreements, rules and meetings.
Embodied cognition goes wrong in an organisation when the embodied knowledge is not well-suited for solving a problem. For example if submitting a paid time off request involves 20 sign-offs from management and a rigorous examination about how you’re going to make sure your work is covered, you’ve embodied lots of risk aversion knowledge but at the expense of ease and flexibility. This might have unintended consequences like employees avoiding taking time off until it turns into stress-related sickness.
If you’re Homer Simpson in charge of safety at the local nuclear power plant maybe this kind of embodied risk aversion is warranted, but in most jobs this would be a non-adaptive embodiment of knowledge.
Paid time off is a simple or at most a complicated problem - but what happens when we get to complex domains? Complex problems are those in which you can’t know everything about how to solve the problem upfront. You solve complex problems with Probe-Sense-Respond approaches and your solutions emerge from interactions within the system.
If you have fixed embodied knowledge about how to solve the problem in the form of a fixed processes - there’s a good chance that your process will actually get in the way of solving your complex problem. This is a world in which McGeer’s bipedal walker is ‘walking' across a landscape of unknown terrains and needs to adapt its walking style according to what it encounters.
Often, organisational processes for getting work done embody a certain amount of useful knowledge and wisdom, but also embody elements which get in the way of doing the work. If you have the kind of work which would benefit from non-hierarchical and collaborative work, but you find yourself in a setting where the work is done by stressed-out individual contributors sitting on their own and handing off to each other over email in a frustrating sequence, your organisation has probably embodied some unhelpful knowledge.
Agilists like myself don’t think of agility as a process per se because individual processes are fixed approaches to solving a problem. Agility is the art of adapting ways of working and processes to be right for a problem domain. Agility is about making sure that the embodied cognition in an organisation and a team is able to change when the shape of the problem changes, whether that is an external problem domain (ie a customer) or an internal problem domain (ie ways of working or the setup of the organisation).
You need some embodied knowledge, it’s not feasible to invent everything from scratch every day. This is why Scrum with its fixed timeboxes and suggested setup of roles, artefacts and events is often a fit-for-purpose as a starting point for a team, as long as the embodied knowledge that scrum brings with it can itself be adapted and changed as time goes on. This is another take on the ‘how many bags’ problem.
When an organisation adds another meeting or process to solve a problem this isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I would encourage team members to see changes to their process as an experimentation with which knowledge they want to embody.
Ask - if we add this meeting, does it help us do our work with the same ease that the bipedal walker can walk unaided?
If yes then hang on to it, and if not then ditch it. In any case let’s try it out. At the front of mind should always be the image of an organisational organism, self-organising it’s own imaginary body to make it well adapted to solving the problems that matter to it.
And that’s that for now. If you want more of this kind of thing as well as my podcasts, make sure to hit subscribe. If you liked this, give us a like at the bottom of this post and a comment with what you enjoyed. If you really liked it then share it on linkedin - it will make everyone think you’re clever.
I’ve spent the last week recording a couple of very insightful and interesting podcasts with special guests. Make sure to subscribe not to miss them
See you next time.