Understanding how the brain processes inputs can help your employees create the workplace that will lead your company into the new economy.

Capitalizing on your 'cognitive surplus'

By M. Daniel Suwyn, managing partner

We here at RapidChange spend a lot of time studying the brain and how you can use what we learn to improve your business. We take a lot of pride in how we make the complex simple to understand. But sometimes, somebody else says something and you just have to say... "that is really cool."

That is what happened when I read a recent blog post by Paul Hebert on the site Incentive-Intelligence.  His post reinforced that despite all the shortages our companies face, we still have a huge opportunity and resource to be successful. I'm going to try to summarize it here:

Our companies currently face a shortage of credit, a shortage of trust and a shortage of spending. But there remains a "cognitive surplus" in the world that has been ignored and underutilized for quite a while. Now we have the social and participative technologies to unleash it. And it is time for your company to tap into it. 

Consider the example of Wikipedia. The online, collaborative encyclopedia represents about 100 million hours of "volunteer" time, Hebert says. On average, America spends 200 billion hours watching television year. That's billion ... with a "B." So we have a cognitive surplus in the United States to create 2,000 Wikipedias.

Consider, also, that on just one weekend, we collectively spend 100 million hours just watching or buzzing through the commercials on TV.

Some quick, unscientific math here - with roughly 150 million working adults in a country of about 300 million people, that means that about half the 200 billion hours of TV watching comes from working folks.  With that in mind, lets call the number 100 billion hours (I'm sure they watch less than the average child but this is about a concept, not a PhD), therefore each working adult spends 666 hours (scary number, eh?) watching TV each year - or about 10% of their waking time (365 days x 24 hours - 8 hours per day for sleeping.) 

I'm sure it's less than 10%, but I've also read that the average American spends 4 hours per day in front of the tube (which is 1440 hours), so I'm probably being generous here.

Now, put that in the context of your organization.  How much cognitive surplus is there in your company?  How much time is spent on things either company sponsored or not, that are sapping the thinking power of your employees - or your consumers for that matter?  I have to believe that companies could do a similar surplus calculation.

Think of it this way.  If 10% is a good number for a cognitive surplus, it would represent 10 employees in a 100 person company - or roughly $500,000 assuming an entry level employee at a cost of $50,000 per head.  Not a bad number.

Or, bounce that against the cost of energizing those same hundred folks with new participative technologies such as Wikis, blogs, social networks and reward programs to get them to engage with these new-fangled tools.  Does it justify the cost?  I have to believe the answer is yes.

Of course, none of this will work unless your company has an environment that encourages and rewards input from every level of the organization. You have to put in place the appropriate award and recognition strategies to encourage and highlight participation in these tools.  You have to change the culture. The future is all about teams and leveraging the total intelligence of a company.

Without some reason to shift their surplus from one area to another, they won't make the shift.  But the numbers seem to show that it might just be worth your effort to find a way.