Stuck at home? Watch your brain at work

in

Observing your own thoughts, staying open to alternate explanations, and loosening your attachment to your own ideas make you a better problem-solver – and less stressed to boot.

I stare out my window on yet another rainy Covid-work-from-home morning, struggling to motivate myself. I’ve got to prepare a presentation on cognitive concepts for a leadership program. I need to explain Recognition-Priming: how quickly your brain puts together stories, making sense of new situations by connecting to past experience.

Suddenly, the view isn’t boring anymore.

Read the case study

Knowledge-Focused Decision-Making

in

I’d like to share a real story about moving a biopharma team from cross-functional conflict to creative problem-solving. By thoughtfully applying concepts from cognitive science and decision strategy, a team member can focus a group on the knowledge that counts for making sound decisions.

Understanding how the brain naturally comes to conclusions helps you guide R&D groups through contentious decisions. Knowing that you don’t see the whole picture keeps you from unproductive conflict. Arraying all the options opens up the team’s thinking. Homing in on the key information saves time and money. Using the combined knowledge in the team leads you all to better decisions.

Here’s what we recommend for teams facing complex decisions:

  1. Observe the way differences in knowledge make people primed to take different actions.
  2. Reframe your own ideas as “options I see” instead of “solutions I know.”
  3. Pool team knowledge to structure decisions as choices between options.
  4. Specify the information that the team would find compelling to eliminate options.
  5. Efficiently produce robust data.

 

Read the case study

Hypothesis-Driven R&D: An idea whose time has come

in , ,

Six years ago I worked with a group of biopharma managers who wanted to reduce the risk of late-stage failures. It’s time to share again what we learned, in light of the recent Phase 3 failure of aducanumad, an Alzheimer’s drug based on a clinical hypothesis that years of data had already eroded.

The article From Phase-Driven to Hypothesis-Driven R&D shows R&D leaders that rigorous work on human biology in early development reduces the risk of clinical failure.

Rather than focusing R&D programs on advancing a compound, groups can focus on advancing knowledge about how to deliver health benefits through improving human biological function. Advancing drug candidates would be the by-product of successful work, not the product.

They can visualize R&D as a series of experimental cycles:

  • Build hypotheses about chances that treatment will succeed
  • Design sound experiments
  • Execute experiments with tools fit-for-purpose
  • Generate robust, interpretable data
  • Rigorous quantitative analysis to reduce risk
  • Boost certainty about chances treatment will succeed
  • Apply knowledge to decisions.

Many of the managers I worked with then are now leading their own R&D groups, and I have the privilege of introducing these ideas to innovative startups.  To learn how you can benefit, drop me a line at mkummer@kummerconsulting.com.

Innovating In Highly Regulated Settings

in , ,

Find it hard to innovate in the strictly regulated environment of drug development?

You’re not alone.

Problem: Recently, a client company faced a competitive threat to their leading product. The FDA issued new manufacturing guidelines that would have taken three years to implement, while their competition had already complied. The PD (process development) team proposed an innovative method that would cut two years out of implementation and save $10 million. The problem was that their executive team said it was too risky to recommend to the FDA.

Read more