Thinking outside the bot
Why management and cognition are about more than information processing
Information. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it, amirite?
Information is a word that comes up in both cognitive science and organisational , and I want to explain something that I think we get wrong about information processing in both contexts. If I do a good job, you’ll be able to spot organisational dysfunction and have an idea about what to do about it.
Information processing in human cognition
This is a big topic but I’ll try to do it brief and well-explained justice.
The ultimate information processing machines are computers. Computers take an input of information (contained in the 1s and 0s of binary code) do some clever mathematical operations on it and spit out an output in the form of 1s and 0s wrapped up into a more intelligible form, such as images of letters displayed on a screen, a picture or a sound.
Computers are information processing machines, and the wonders of computer-based technology available to us - from the sleep detector of your watch to the AI chatbot polishing your emails and making you sound clever - depend on it. With the invention and popularisation of this technology, people started wondering what else might be a clever information processing machine. In particular, the cognitive scientists of the post war era.
Cognitive science and modern computer science were two eggs hatching in the same post-war nest. The modern cognitive scientists were also contributors to computer science. A standout example is Noam Chomsky, the ‘father of modern linguistics’. Chomsky’s work on language laid out new ground for humans grammar, which in turn supported the rise of natural language programming approaches in which you can interface with a computer using human language.
Newell and Simon - though less well known - worked on the first Artificial Intelligence programmes in the 1950s. Through the computational undertaking of trying to make intelligent problem solving computers, they invented theories and frameworks that help us understand how humans too act as problem solvers.
All this is to say that it was natural in the latter half of the 20th Century to see the brain as a kind of biological computer, taking inputs of information from the senses, doing clever maths in the brain, and spitting out information in the form of thoughts or instructions to our muscles.
The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) was thus born, and it has woven its way into how we think about our own cognition and minds. CTM is based around the notion that cognition is computation, where the interesting bits happen in the brain. Neurons are binary logic gates like the 1s and 0s of computational binary. If you understand the phrase ‘let’s download information from your brain’ then you’re using some of the imagery rooted in Computational Theory of Mind.
CTM has evolved into more modern computational neuroscience, which tries to understand cognition by modelling the brain as if it works like a computer and making sense of all of it using increasingly sophisticated techniques.
Since 1970s however, cognitive science has been undergoing a revolution, offering up alternatives to CTM based in the body and action. In the 1970s JJ Gibson explored an approach more interested in the continuity of perception and action, between organism and environment which he termed ecological psychology.
Biologists Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis describes how mind and life can emerge naturally from complex, self-organising biological systems. This led Varela along with Buddhism scholar Evan Thompson and psychologist Eleanor Rosch to publish Embodied Mind in 1992, which emphasised the role of the body in cognition.
This marked the beginning of the era of 4E cognitive science. 4E cognitive science interested in all the ways that cognition is:
Embodied - ie takes place in the whole body and not solely the brain.
Embedded - in an environment, and the environment around the body is a fundamental part of cognition
Enacted - cognition is about action, and action can be a part of cognition
Extended - cognition extends out into the cultural context and tools that a person uses
These 4Es draw the focus away from cognition as computation and information processing, and towards something more alive, dynamic and entangled.
I don’t know about you, but for me understanding all the ways in which cognition is the 4Es (as well as maybe some computation-type-things) feels much more alive and engaged with the world. If cognition is just maths in my head, then I’m likely to give priority to my thoughts, even though my thoughts often think very strange and detrimental things to my wellbeing.
If on the other hand my body contains knowledge that I should listen to, I pay attention to my emotions and the physical sensations that connect me to the earth and to other people. It’s what Nora Bateson calls Warm Data, the ‘the interrelational processes between and among systems’. Our distance biological ancestors experienced the world through rich sensory experiences long before they evolved conscious thought and inner monologues. There’s probably something in that embodied experience that’s worth paying attention to alongside my chattering brain.
By recognising that my cognition is extended, I pay attention to the tools and artefacts that I use in my life, and make sure that I am making the most of them. If I recognise the way in which my mind is tightly interdependent with other people and the culture that we create and inherit between us, I may hold less tightly to culturally inherited ideas that don’t serve me. Or I might wish to conserve and amplify those that nourish me.
If we see our minds as solely information processing computers, we miss out on all these ways that we are also alive. We hamstring ourselves from understanding the nature of our experience, and the nature of ourselves.
Information processing in management
We could see ‘traditional management’ as operating on the same assumptions as Computational Theory of Mind. Management is just information processing. Inputs from either the customer or the mind of highly paid senior person - are passed through hierarchical structures towards the people who do the work - outputs. I call it management as information processing.
People are interchangeable in this system, in the same way that it doesn’t matter which particular silicon chip your phone uses. As long as a chip is in the right location doing the right maths, your phone works and as long as you have anyone with the right skills in a team doing the work doing the right maths, the company will get the right output.
Information can in principle be passed around without any kind of degradation. The information contained in the binary string ‘110100100’ is the same whether it is spoken in a sentence, sent in an email, or printed into a giant poster. This explains why management are happy to pass on potentially complex instructions in a meeting, a memo, an email, or a slide deck. It’s all just information right? So as long as someone passes along the information through the chain, the person at the end of the chain will have what they need to do their work.
This explains the phenomenon of managing through hierarchies. Boss tells deputy boss tells head tells lead tells senior tells junior with the expectation that the right message will land with the right person and the right thing will therefore happen, just like our binary string. So too, if the junior has information that the boss needs, it can go up the layers hierarchy with no degradation and the boss will get the information they need to make the big highly paid decisions.
I hope you’re starting to join the dots here - this way of running organisations works beautifully for some kinds of task, and TERRIBLY for others.
I think it’s time for organisations to have their own 4E revolution, away from seeing management as just information processing, and towards appreciating the embodied, extended, enacted and embedded modes.
There are fundamental parts of management that are not served by treating everything as an exercising of passing on information.
As an example, trust between management and managed is a necessary component of a high functioning organisation. If I believe that my boss’s boss will punish me for making a mistake or bearing bad news, I’m unlikely to give them the information that they want or need when they need it. Trust is a key enabler for the right information going where it needs to go, and treating all management as information processing misses this.
The antidote to management as information processing is more humanity at work. More meaningful conversation and interactions. It’s very in vogue at the moment to say ‘this meeting should have been an email’. I reckon there are also plenty of emails that should have been meetings.
Another reason why management as information fails is that it’s very easy to lose context as information is passed from layer to layer. With every hand off and every email in a chain, you increase the opportunity for some important context to be missed. So even if some management information is technically correct and transmitted to the right place, it is insufficient for the recipient to do the right thing.
This is the kind of revolution that the early agile movement came along to create, along with Scrum and other evolutions of management. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development values ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’. They get it. Scrum encourages cross functional teams empowered to make the right decisions and given all the context and skills they need to deliver value. They too get it.
Organisations that understand how management is not just information processing are more organic. They understand how important organisational culture is in enabling productive behaviours. They value deep and meaningful human interaction at the right times amongst the right people regardless of title. They appreciate that organisational intelligence lives in the rich, embodied ecology of an organisation. In the warm data as much as in the cold information.
Hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed it. Subscribe for more stuff like it, and if you got this far do let me know…