Cognician puts ideas in your employees’ heads and make them stick.

Cognician gets your team to think like experts by leading them with expert questions. Whether you want to make better leaders,
train new methods, or even plant the seed of change in your company, Cognician puts the right ideas in the heads that need them.

As easy as having a chat

Your own virtual coach

Cognician lets you choose from a range of conversational guides, or “cogs” for short. Each cog is a collection of questions plus support material that allow you to engage in a chat with a virtual expert. It’s like having your own personal coach to guide you through new or complex tasks.

No endless clicking through powerpoint slides. No drill and kill. Only genuinely thought-provoking questions to get you thinking above your experience level.

Choose a cog to suit your needs

There are cogs for everything from employee induction to leadership development and our catalogue keeps growing every day. There are two ways to get a suite of cogs for your business:

we can adapt your material into the cog format, including training manuals, books, company systems, websites, blogs, white papers, etc.
you can commission us to create original cogs that are tailored to your unique needs.

In time the publicly available selection of cogs in our online store will grow too.

Get in touch now if you’d like to learn more about how we can engage your team with thought-provoking content.

Self-directed, online, just-in-time

Create user groups around content

Imagine you’ve got a new team going through induction. A more seasoned group are going through leadership development. Another crowd is brainstorming strategy. Cognician has a unique group space for each of them. Create user groups that give your teams access to only the tools they need.

Train the task while doing it

Most training is costly, disruptive to schedules and time-consuming. And when you consider that the learning doesn’t always sink in, you have to admit that it’s pretty inefficient too.

With Cognician, you can build cogs around job tasks. That is, a user can work through a cog and, in the process, complete their task. Imagine a cog that guides you to write a report. Or a cog that leads you through the project management process. Using Cognician means you don’t have to train someone just in case they need to perform a task. Now they can learn what they need to know just-in-time.

Drop us a line if you’d like to bring your training to the cusp of where it’s really needed – right where the work gets done!

Crowd control

Monitor and track usage

Cognician tracks the usage of cogs, so you can get a good sense of who is engaging and what content is working best. Plus, with our game-like leaderboard, your team members will be able to compete for top spot. It’s a great way to encourage engagement. If you think it could work for you, let us know now.

Collect and share insights

Collect valuable team insights inspired by cog content and share these with all users. Share leadership insights or insights for innovations in production or operations. With Cognician, you can catch and share great ideas while everyday work gets done. Tell us if you’d like us to bring this innovation to your business.

A dashboard for good measure

Our user dashboards allow you to get the measure of your team in a flash. How are they performing against your company values? Who has the edge when it comes to sharing great ideas? If you’ve been looking for a way to measure the soft stuff, then give us a shout. Cognician makes it possible for you to build detailed profiles of your people with a simplicity that’s never before been possible.

Better thinking, better people

Develop attitudes and mindsets

Cognician makes it easier than ever to promote and develop the kind of attitudes you’d like to see in your managers and employees – the kind of attitudes that make your company great!

Build cogs based on key ideas from your company CEO, directors, industry leaders, keynote speakers, business consultants, business book authors, you name it. Cognician allows you not just to reflect on powerful ideas, but also to put them into practice. It bridges the gap between intention and behaviour. If you’d like to learn more about how we can get your team to not just talk the talk, but to walk the walk, then drop us a note.

Develop powerful mental models

As we go through life we collect mental models from experiences, peers, teachers, books and more. A mental model is a collection of ideas that guide our thinking in a specific context. In marketing, for example, we might first learn about the “Four Ps”. Over time, as our knowledge and experience grows, we develop a much richer mental model to understand and manipulate the marketing domain. The difference between a new employee or manager, and an experienced one, is largely the difference between the breadth and depth of their mental models. Cognician helps managers apply powerful mental models to their work, making them think and act as if they had already acquired the mental models of far more experienced staff.

Working with cogs helps to inculcate mental models that make employees better thinkers. Contact us if you’d like to raise the IQ of your company.

The value of it all

Digitise powerful ideas	Build cogs based on key ideas from your company CEO, directors, industry leaders, keynote speakers, business consultants, business book authors – thought leaders.	Source
Spread ideas and make change	Use cogs to disseminate corporate culture, mission, vision, values, ethics, policies, principles, strategies, processes, methods, perspectives, etc., throughout your organisation. This is not training; it’s just-in-time performance support for innovative thinking.	Content
Create rich content	Include text, images, video, animations, etc. Anything that can be viewed on a site can be incorporated into Cognician.	Media
Reach key audiences	Provide cogs to managers, employees, sales reps, suppliers, stakeholders, CSR beneficiaries, etc., to help structure and direct their thinking.	Audience
Effect change	Empower users to apply important, valuable ideas systematically to their own decision-making and work, leading to greater efficiency and effectiveness, and better business relationships.	Impact
Collect & share insights	Collect valuable insights inspired by the content and share these with all users, for instance sales insights or ideas for innovations in production or operations.	Insights
Track analytics	For each user our dashboard measures frequency of use, duration used, cogs completed and insights shared. Few systems provide as detailed a picture of how users are engaging with and applying your corporate culture, philosophy or policies.	Analytics
Get feedback & improve	Cognician is built to harvest feedback from users and apply suggestions for improvement, so that the content evolves with the changing needs and emphasis of your organisation.	Feedback

Some of our clients

Old Mutual

For Old Mutual, the FTSE 100 financial services powerhouse, we created The Entrepreneurs’ Guide, which included a suite of 33 cogs. This was Old Mutual’s gift to the entrepreneurial community and it includes hours of HD video and the seasoned advice of some of South Africa’s top web entrepreneurs. The cogs guide entrepreneurs to think through the impact of more than 150 key concepts on their business. Categories include, Entrepreneurial Basics, Finance, Legalities, Marketing, Running Your Business, Starting Up and Technology.

The Allan Gray Orbis Foundation

For the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation’s academic fellows we created 120 cogs to develop the kinds of mindsets expected of high impact leaders and entrepreneurs. The fellows are expected to work through these cogs over the course of a three or four year degree, so that by the time they leave university, they have worked on developing the kinds of ideas you’d only find in someone ten years older.

Allan Gray Ltd

Allan Gray is one of the most successful investment institutions in South Africa. The company is built on a solid foundation of values that governs not just their investment decisions, but also the way that the Allan Gray team conduct their lives. We built a suite of cogs based on one of Allan Gray’s leadership development programmes to help Allan Gray employees keep their core ideas top of mind in their work and in their lives.

TNS

The Customer Equity Company at TNS is responsible for thought leadership at the global marketing giant. We developed a suite of cogs to help their execs get up to speed quickly and ensure that they’re always considering best practices in their core job functions.