SBIR Phase II: Cognitive Agility Assessment Tool

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on the development of an assessment tool that will enable users to profile a decision-maker's cognitive agility and expertise in high-level business situations. It is appropriate for evaluating decision makers in organizations and students who aspire to leadership roles. This version of the product can also be self-administered. It is based on results from recent basic research conducted by Workplace Technologies Research Inc. (WTRI) that revealed the cognitive mechanisms involved in the thinking of highly accomplished experts in business. It uses knowledge elicitation technology that WTRI has developed over several years to support research on the identification of intuitive expertise (in the sense of Dreyfus 1997). The proposal outlines a plan to develop an on-line Internet based version that is self-scoring and tested among well-known experts. The product will be field-tested for its ability to predict general vs. industry specific expertise. The expected outcome is an easy to use tool for professional evaluators, professors, students or individuals, which will assist in staff development and education. The profiles generated by the product will identify hidden strengths, areas of weakness, and suggestions for further development. The long-term goal is distribution by recruiters, coaches, universities and consultancies. In the current climate of rapid workplace change, decision-makers need to continually evaluate their ability to adapt to changes and re-invent their organization's value and competitive future. Few assessment tools address the cognitive underpinnings of the skill set involved. Rather, they evaluate personal traits or sub-skills that have some correlation with leadership, broadly defined. Using an empirically verified model of expertise in business strategy development and performance prediction, the research team at WTRI has built an assessment tool that locates an individual with regard to this model; much like chess players are evaluated against a notion of a Chess Grand Master. When applied to individual client situations, this tool has been shown to have powerful predictive capability and thus has successfully informed staff development efforts. Its distinctive feature is assessment of the ability to analyze disparate sources information in order to make strategy level decisions and supporting tactical plans. Making the tool more widely available and usable by non-scientists could importantly contribute to efforts to increase the performance of both organizations and decision makers. Organizations, distributors and several institutions of higher learning have expressed interest in this technology, which they consider to be addressing an area of unmet need.