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Here’s an alternative way that we might design this meeting through our lens of understanding.

People are themselves viewed as part of a distributed system of cognitive resources—we believe each person in attendance brings with them a set of experiences and perspectives that are probably vital to the meeting topic. In addition to the people in attendance, the whiteboard, the markers, the sticky notes—even the height of the table—are all viewed as potential resources to be designed. The leader views their role as more of a facilitator than speaker, more as a cognitive enabler than an information transmitter. This means that attention is managed through active learning and sharing. Care is taken to create a psychologically safe environment. Rather than marching people through a bullet-laden deck, a single problem statement is handed to all, with an opening challenge to explore options and share ideas. If there was background knowledge, it was distributed ahead of time for folks to read. Knowledge is curated rather than transmitted. Ideas are drawn together, on the board, with markers or sticky notes handed to people to make their ideas visible, or to show how their idea fits into or contradicts what someone else has rendered. The meeting moves fluidly between moments of standing and sitting, depending upon the activity, as the facilitator knows there’s a correlation between the body and thinking. The facilitator is also careful to frame and reframe the problem in many different ways (and encourages others to do the same), challenging how this problem is viewed. In short, people are actively working and learning together, to make sense of the project ahead (see Figure 2.5).

There’s a lot to unpack in this second scenario. It illustrates many of the principles that run throughout our work, principles that guide how we work and think and create understanding with information. These principles might be stated as follows:

• Attend to every association

• Make learning active

• See learning as a communal activity

• Make concepts tangible

FIGURE 2.5 Two very different kinds of meetings—one originating with a brain-bound view of cognition, the other with an extended view of cognition.

• Make concepts visible

• Design the environment

• Explore multiple frames

• Use the whole body

• Make it safe to share

Although this is an incomplete list, we provide it to show how all this theoretical discourse might be applied in a daily activity. Our concerns are practical rather than theoretical—we’re more interested in utility than truth. First, how do people understand information, especially when they have a lot of it? And second, how can we make information more understandable? Understanding the underlying theories of cognition provides us with a chance to radically reframe how we approach all problems of understanding.