Cognitive Psychology

True help means not helping

Every act of help distributes incentives that determine how social systems evolve.

What Is Worth Knowing?

No cognitive system, human or artificial, processes the world: it selects a small part of the world and makes it tractable. True intelligence, then, lies in being able to see what one’s own process of selection has excluded.

Those who build processes should not love them too much

The organisational paradox: why companies entrust process design to the wrong people

If there is disorder within, you cannot create order outside

Our minds discard almost all the information they receive, selecting only what they consider relevant. Values, goals and beliefs act as the criteria for this selection. Understanding how the attentional filter works means understanding why some people see opportunities everywhere while others feel submerged in noise.

Gregor’s Room

Gregor’s Room An allegory of the capacity of environments to generate and classify the beings they contain. When Kafka’s Metamorphosis is discussed, all attention centres on Gregor Samsa. His transformation into an insect is analysed (Kafka wrote Verwandlung, not Metamorphose); his relationship with his family, his guilt, alienation and work are examined, leading ultimately to the question of what human condition all the events of the story might be a metaphor for.

Meaning-oriented organisations survive longer

Why do the world’s largest and most sophisticated organisations hire philosophers, anthropologists, ethicists, cognitive scientists, linguists or historians of ideas?