Cognitive Task Analysis “investigates what people know and how they think.” – Working Minds

Some people just seem to have a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Nurses who know whether a baby is sick before the lab tests are back: firefighters who know when a building is about to collapse: chess grandmasters who can see the right move without thinking about it.

Whether services or manufacturing, more and more of the modern world relies on the knowledge of experts. Nurses, AI specialists, consultants, and a myriad of other professions all require expertise, and it isn’t always clear what exactly that means or how it can be transferred to others.

Enter Cognitive Task Analysis. The goal is to take an expert task and break it into pieces that can be organized, understood, and replicated. Working Minds is a how-to guide to making that happen: the method draws on concept maps, interviews, and other methods of trying to see into the head of experts and write down what they know and the processes they use, even if they aren’t aware of them themselves.

The book is aimed almost exclusively at practitioners, but the method itself is still interesting. The first half introduces a number of useful tools and ideas, and though probably too specialist for most readers, if this is something you’re interested in cognitive task analysis may be a good place to start. Working Minds, though a bit heavy-going at times, serves as a useful introduction to how to conduct one.

Working Minds gets bogged down in the second half, where it tries to address the potential use of cognitive task analysis. When it spends a chapter explaining that this would be useful to teach others how to do the tasks, for example, it feels like largely a waste of space; the benefits were pretty much self-evident.