Commonplace Expertise
Lia DiBello on The Mental Model of Business
Episode guests
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Cognitive agility is crucial in adjusting mental models to technological advancements in business.
- Strategic rehearsals aid in overcoming cognitive rigidity and promoting efficient decision-making in business scenarios.
- Businesses should prioritize social responsibility by implementing technologies and approaches beneficial for society while remaining profitable.
Deep dives
The Profile Instrument and Strategic Rehearsal
Doctor Lea de Ballow, a cognitive scientist and business person, developed the Future View Profile and worked on accelerated expertise. Her team created the Strategic Rehearsal, an evolution of her earlier work with the OPSIM. This tool accelerates expert acquisition, particularly in business, used across industries like finance and manufacturing.
Cognitive Agility in Business Expertise
Dr. de Ballow's research highlights cognitive agility in business expertise, emphasizing the need for constant mental model adjustments due to technological advancements. Businesses must evolve their mental models frequently. Cognitive agility is vital in adapting to changing environments and challenges in different industries.
Lessons from Strategic Rehearsals and Business Experience
By creating strategic rehearsals, overcoming cognitive rigidity and learning effectively are key for business superstars. Individuals acquire expertise through failures, adaptation to challenges, and learning from experiences. Dr. de Ballow's work encourages role-playing and gamifying business scenarios to promote cognitive agility and efficient decision-making.
Creating Socially Responsible Businesses through Strategic Initiatives
The podcast discusses how businesses should focus on social responsibility by being profitable enterprises that implement technologies, sciences, and business approaches beneficial for society. By emphasizing on businesses that bring positive change while being financially viable, the episode highlights the importance of companies pursuing endeavors that benefit society.
Utilizing Strategic Rehearsals for Enhanced Business Performance
The episode delves into the concept of strategic rehearsal as a method to improve business performance by disrupting ingrained business practices. Through immersive experiences that challenge employees' decision-making processes and offer rapid feedback, businesses can unlearn inefficient habits and develop new strategies to enhance their operations. By utilizing strategic rehearsals that emphasize a clear goal and diverse learning scenarios, businesses can foster adaptability and improve their overall effectiveness.
Dr Lia DiBello is the CEO, President, and Director of Research of WTRI (Workplace Technology Research Inc), and Senior Scientist at Applied Cognitive Sciences Labs Inc. She is a cognitive scientist as well as a businessperson. In the late 2000s Dr DiBello discovered in an NSF-funded study that all great businesspeople share a common mental model of business, and that mental model can be used for all sorts of interesting things, including the assessment of business expertise, which she did — she was the principal inventor of something called the FutureView Profiler.
In more recent years, Dr DiBello is more well known for her work on accelerated expertise — she published a book with a few other researchers in 2016 with that very title. She and her team have created something they call the Strategic Rehearsal, and this actually stemmed from her PhD work, where it was called the OpSim. What the Strategic Rehearsal allows WTRI to do is to accelerate the acquisition of business expertise in the businesses that they consult for, and her training interventions have been used in industries as diverse as biotech, pharma, manufacturing, financial services, and others.
- The Triad Mental Model of Business, paper: https://wtri.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Informed-By-Knowledge-Chapter-12.pdf
- A summary blog post of the triad mental model: https://commoncog.com/blog/business-mental-model/
- FutureView Platform — http://futureviewplatform.com or https://acsilabs.org/
- WTRI — https://wtri.com/
- List of publications by WTRI, which, if read chronologically, includes a full history of the Strategic Rehearsal — https://wtri.com/research/publications-by-wtri/
- Lia's LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/liadibello/
- Lia's Twitter — https://twitter.com/LiaDiBello4
- Gary Klein on WTRI's training with Rio Tinto, on miner safety — https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/seeing-what-others-dont/201803/training-if-your-life-depended-it
- The Oxford Handbook of Expertise — https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795872.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198795872
- Accelerated Expertise — https://www.amazon.com/Accelerated-Expertise-Research-Applications/dp/184872652X
00:00 Introduction
01:32 Lia’s Story
04:49 The Triad Mental Model of Business
10:38 Transfer of the Triad Between Business Domains
16:18 The FutureView Profiler Explained
20:42 How She Gets Her Clients To Accept Profiler Recommendations
25:21 The Midwest Foundry Story
40:14 Cognitive Agility
47:32 How Great Businesspeople Learn in the Real World
51:08 How This Has Affected Her Practice as a Businessperson
54:42 What Lia is Currently Working On
1:01:10 The Cognitive Science Behind the Strategic Rehearsal
1:09:47 Piaget and Vygotsky’s Theories of Expertise Development
1:17:50 The General Form of the Strategic Rehearsal
1:21:56 Non-Business Applications of the Strategic Rehearsal
The coffee company Lia mentioned: https://amorperfecto.com/
The Hollywood Bowl performance: https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/events/performances/1258/2021-08-27/carlos-vives-with-the-la-phil
Some words from Amor Perfecto to describe what they do:
This is a coffee movement launch. For almost two centuries coffee has been at the service of the intermediaries and not of the coffee growing countries. Amor Perfecto, in collaboration with amazing people like Carlos Vives, his wife, Claudia Elena Vasquez and their Tras La Perla Foundation, is going to push to rebalance the unfairly tilted value chain of coffee. Every one in the coffee world knows it exists. Equally important, the product of Roasted at Origin coffee by Amor Perfecto, harvested, roasted and set to you from the mountains of Colombia is a uniquely amazing coffee. It might be the best tasting coffee available today, because producing coffee where it is grown makes a much fresher, better tasting coffee. As Luis Fernando Velez says “have you ever seen the French exporting containers full of grapes to make champagne in Brooklyn?” Coffee should be no different.
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