What exactly is cognitive ability?
11 December 2023
Cognitive ability has nothing to do with giving good advice. Instead, it is the necessary capacity to make decisions in situations you encounter while working.
If those situations are relatively surveyable and unambiguous, then you need to have less cognitive ability than if a situation is less easy to survey. This has to do with two aspects.
One: the number of variables. The more difficult or complex a situation is, the more variables affect your decision. On the assembly line, these are just one or a few variables, such as the speed of the belt. In contrast, if you need to devise a sales plan, then market conditions, buyer preferences, production capacity, purchase prices, composition of the team of account managers etc. etc. play a role in choosing the right strategy. Then more cognitive ability is needed to correctly integrate all those variables into a successful strategy.
Two: time or perspective. The further away in time the consequences of your decision become visible, the longer the period of time you need to be able to oversee. On a conveyor belt, that time span might be one or a few seconds, but for making a sales plan, the present is not nearly enough, and you will need to be able to look a year or more into the future. Because only then will it become clear how ultimately your strategy has worked out overall. It seems to me that extra demands will then have to be made on cognitive ability.
Valuing added value, therefore, is nothing more than rewarding the cognitive ability that must be used daily to make wise decisions.
But yes, what is sensible?
Work them, Rolf Baarda