Human-Centered Productivity for a Changed Business World

Executive Function: Decision-Making Centered in the Mind

Executive Function (EF) refers to the neurocognitive skills that regulate the attention needed for focus and goal-directed problem-solving, perspective-taking, and emotional regulation. 

 

Measuring EF through RPI’s assessment software enables an upstream driver to transform human and organizational productivity. Based on 20+ years of scientific research to inform product development, RPI’s app is designed to be easy to use while connecting EF skills to workforce performance.  

To date, applications have included workforce upskilling, team development, and performance assessment and improvement.   RPI’s SaaS technology delivers a seamless assessment and improvement experience. 

Everchanging Business Landscape Demands Executive Function Skills

The urgency to address EF measurement and skills development has been exacerbated by:

  • Oversaturated entertainment culture creating frequent distractions and increased stress
  • Flat organizations with employees within 3 degrees of separation from the customer
  • At home and hybrid work reducing organizational support and influence
  • Increased dependence on online tools and knowledge instead of interpersonal skills
  • General declines in reading time, critical thinking, and communications skills
  • Lower levels of organization and, at times, work commitment among some workers

Measuring EF skills and supporting the growth of individual and team EF skills helps reduce employee risks, improves well-being and productivity, and generates substantial ROI.

Objective Measurement Leverages the Human Productivity Lifecycle 

EF can be correlated to human performance factors to develop a more productive workforce. Reflected in these example measurements of EF is a wide dispersion of results along a declining normative curve for participants between 20 and 60 years old. Positive outliers above the curve demonstrate how cognitive skills can remain strong while others could benefit from maintaining or improving cognitive skills at any age.

Reflect/EF: Unlocking Productivity in 5 Minutes with a Measurement App 

Reflect/EF, RPI’s game-like app, provides a quick, easy to use online experience. Introduced by a video to improve the participant’s foundational awareness of Executive Function (EF), the game then begins by presenting a series of challenges that progress in the level of difficulty. The game is deceptively simple yet reveals thinking power through a scientifically validated and proven measurement that enables improvement in self-management skills to benefit all areas of life. 

Executive Function Measures Higher-Level Thinking 

RPI’s objectively scores EF measurement directly from data obtained within the Reflect/EF app’s results. It is not observational, nor self-scored. Participants obtain scores for EF and three of the cognitive root skills that underlie EF. These scores anticipate human factors across any business. 

These root level skills are critical for reasoning, communication, and problem solving. They help people put what they know into practice.

It is not so much what participants know that matters in the app’s measurement. It is whether they can apply their knowledge in the moment, which is designed to model the intensity and pace of modern workplaces and life in general, including high-stress situations and other diverse environments.

RPI’s Assessment Delivers Improvement for Individuals and Teams

RPI’s EF measurement is applicable to all adult ages, and useful for life success or work performance. It has also been integrated into a seamless online improvement experience delivered by laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Participants receive a read-out of productivity aids based on assessed cognitive strengths and weaknesses, which can be enhanced through EF skills training.

Is the Right Person in the Right Role?

Cognitive Technology Puts Team Productivity First.

 

Workforce turnover can be extremely costly and disruptive when it comes to organizational development and the ability to execute. Despite the embedded costs and lost revenue results, management teams often rationalize such churn as business as usual. With the support of their boards, they often focus on the risks of failing to retain their top executives, salespeople, and technologists, while leaving other turnover ignored across the organization. 

 

But what if executives could universally increase the probability of recruiting and developing the right person for the right role — and then obtaining higher performance and retention through innovative lifecycle metrics that integrates personalized training results. 

 

Solving this perennial challenge requires finding and supporting the talent best suited to the team by emulating how the best athletic coaches develop high-performing teams. In most cases, this doesn’t necessarily mean finding “top talent.” Instead, assessments for ideal “fit” from the outset are critical to team composition and ability to learn and perform in high-stress situations. 

 

Adopting a Systems Model for Productivity: Putting the Team First

 

The traditional point-to-point employment model first analyzes individual skills, competencies, and personality types. Expanding upon this approach can help reduce turnover, as there is little operational or financial leverage in building an organization person by person while other employees continue to come and go through a continuously revolving door. 

 

Instead, a systems model can help with both assessing and developing the high-performing teams that make up organizations. This includes Executive teams, Sales teams, Product 

Development teams, Production teams, R&D teams, Implementation teams, and Support teams. 

 

A systems view enables objective assessments that cut through subjective, observational, and historical criteria to focus on team composition and specific roles within the team. From this vantage, neurodiversity matters and importantly, lower-level, and mid-level employees are critical team players that also impact execution and results, even if they’re commonly overlooked or ignored in project planning and corporate development. 

With Reflective Performance, Inc., our cognitive assessment centered in Executive Function measurement helps optimize greater productivity with attention to the sum of all parts. 

 

Creating System Change: Driving Performance from the Human Source 

 

Human factors are widely understood as determinants of business success, yet they are rarely managed systematically through objective data. Advances in cognitive science have created a new method to measure performance across the employment lifecycle through Executive Function skills in terms of cognitive functioning and mental acuity. Reflective Performance, Inc.’s Reflect / EF software app measures the brain’s responses to provide a score around four fundamental measures: a composite Executive Function score and underlying measures of Working Memory, Cognitive Flexibility, and Impulse Control. 

These scores represent how people think, act, and make decisions — and can be analyzed based on norms developed for diverse employee groups. As a result, they provide an enhanced measure of performance improvement at the root-cause level across the workforce, with even greater success than content knowledge or experience. They develop innovative insight into how employees perform in the moment-critical in team relationships, customer interactions, and unsupervised operations. 

 

Executive Function Scores. 

Systems Analysis. 

 

  • Team Composition, Roles, and Dynamics. 
  • Focused KPI Correlations (Operations and Employment Lifecycle.
  • Employee Awareness and Self-Improvement. 
  • Team Improvement. 

 

High ROI and Higher Profitability   

 

Human-centered Systems Design and Augmented Intelligence 

 

AI is powerful for assessing performance yet best applied in combination with a more forward AI: Augmented Intelligence. 

 

When organizations are viewed as a human-centered system, advanced cognitive measurement creates two transformative performance levers: 

 

Performance understanding is moved upstream to the mind-body connection. This Productivity Multiplier is developed by corporate talent and teams working in unison at the highest efficiency across the business out to customers 

 

Achieving these competitive advantages starts with SaaS measurement through a 5-minute  game for a greater understanding of human factors, then analyzed through a systems model.

 

Reflective Performance, Inc.’s Executive Function analytics further unlock solutions for workplaces to address turnover by supporting the right person in the right role while doing so in a way that’s mutually beneficial for job prospect, employee, and employer alike. 

 

Corporate leaders can be empowered from upstream measurement of cognitive functioning to develop clearer root cause analysis across domains and team by team. They are then better equipped to develop their organization for peak performance and achieve operational excellence by viewing corporate structure and systems in new, human-centered ways. 

John G. Carlson, © 2025, all rights reserved jc******@**********************nc.com

Moving beyond the lies built into hiring

Moving beyond the lies built into hiring

A recent article from the Economist.

Our guest writer, John Carlson, shared a recent article published in “The Economist.” He felt the content of “Moving beyond the lies built into hiring” would be of value to readers here at Learning Without Scars.

In “How to get the lying out of hiring,” The Economist makes a strong statement about lying on both sides of the hiring process: “You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves are prone to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.”

I can’t help but think about the more fundamental issue at the heart of hiring: does the employer just want to fill the position or to obtain someone who best fits the role and who has the greatest potential to perform well and stay? Our team at Reflective Performance, Inc. have been working to offer this better way based on the latest in cognitive science applied to the workforce.

Lies are only possible in a subjective world. Instead, employers and employees can benefit through objective measurement of how people process information, make informed decisions, and deal with fast-changing environments. We do this by determining the fit for a position and organization based on direct measurement of Executive Function skills and Cognitive Reflection abilities to determine human potential in all kinds of corporate environments.

These performance factors are nothing you can lie about or fudge when you are engaged by a software app that puts you through questions and situations that determine the accuracy and speed of response, simulating how your brain responds. Are you impulsive and don’t take valuable time to reflect? Certainly, our social media onslaught can be encouraging of such a response. Wouldn’t it be beneficial for employers to know how human performance factors are addressed based on real data, not subjective evaluations and impressions and past positions?

Able to customize our insights around an organization’s goals, Reflective Performance develops datasets for the performance of current successful employees, plus norms for functional areas to identify Fit Markers and KPI correlations related to the work that a potential hire will be doing. 

It’s time to move past subjective and untruthful information in the hiring process and to take the analysis of human factors out of research labs to apply in workforce optimization, ultimately able to eliminate so much embedded waste in terms of costs and lost productivity. Too much money remains on the line for organizations making bad and marginal hires as well as in so much employee turnover. Advanced brain science applied through data-driven systems analysis is where progressive employers are focusing, not in fooling applicants to join their organizations.

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A Wake Up Call

A Wake Up Call

A quick update we wanted to share here from John Carlson:

 

People Are Assets to a Business, NOT Simply Labor Costs

People Are Assets to a Business, NOT Simply Labor Costs

John G. Carlson is CEO & Co-Founder of Reflective Performance, Inc., a data and analytics company bringing a human-centered approach to increase productivity and corporate profitability. Informed by extensive experience in corporate turnarounds and operational improvements, Reflective Performance helps organizations enable a more stable and highly productive workforce — regardless of industry, products, or technologies — by applying the cognitive science of “executive function” (EF). In less than five minutes, a game-like software app called Reflect / EF unlocks previously unattainable insights about personal decision-making, life skills and workplace success.  Organizations benefit, too, through better management of the employment pathway for higher employee and customer retention and workforce development. He makes his first guest blog post with Learning Without Scars this week: “People are assets to a business, NOT simply labor costs.”

I’m glad to see Fortune call attention to the financial short-sightedness of organizations viewing their people as mere “labor costs.” Employees aren’t line items to manage, but people whose fundamental impact on the business can be enhanced through better management and tools that enable self-management. (This is what we’re doing with Reflective Performance, Inc. by using data and analytics to help organizations unlock the greater potential of their employees.)

As companies strive for profitability, they need to be able to seize improvements from a stable and highly productive workforce. This requires moving away from traditional financial metrics and management methods. People aren’t “capital,” but they can be understood as assets with an extended employment lifecycle in a way that parallels IT and other hard assets. Looked at from this perspective, costs can actually be measured from hiring to onboarding to training and then through high performance and retention, then analyzed through a Total Cost of Productivity framework.

Companies can greatly reduce so many wasteful costs and unnecessary overheads, not to mention “time sinks,” through lifecycle process management supported by investments in learning technologies and improved decision-making tools. These tools, data, and systems are readily available to enable this kind of system change, but first they require corporate leaders to change their perspective to build corporate profitability through human-centered productivity.

 

Companies don’t know how to measure their human capital other than as a labor cost–and it’s hurting profits

fortune.com

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