For many years I’ve wished a technology tool would come along to monitor my work and process, and help me do better. My dissertation focused on technology monitoring and performance… in 1988 forms. Today, tools are coming on-line that approach my wishlist. Ment.io adds a layer of intelligence to our daily on-line discussions. The AI engine follows the content of a team’s posts, requests for clarification, restatements, counter-arguments, and the like, offering insights into the decision, the team’s process, and how you as an individual are contributing to the process.

“The machine learning and algorithms analyze the discussion and decisions and highlight... areas of agreement between your team’s answers. This allows the [decision-maker] to point to the most trusted decisions and most trusted participants on each topic.”

Co-founder and CRO Tzvika Katzenelson told TechCrunch

One of the crazy things we’re doing is that for every person, we’re creating their cognitive matrix. We’re able to tell you within the context of your organization how believable you are, how balanced you are, how clearly you are being perceived by your counterparts, because we are gathering all of your clarification requests and every time a person challenges you with something.

I’ve had the chance to talk with Joab Rosenberg, Ment.io’s CEO and co-founder, and will be joined in a future post by Ment’s Anat Itay-Sarig, where we focus on how to integrate Ment.io into a team’s activities. I’ll update with a link here later.

Leveraging Work We Already Do

As I’ve thought more about Ment, I see that this is an opportunity to learn from activities we already do. (In my perfect world, Ment would integrate with Cisco Webex Assistant for Webex Meetings (aka Voicea) so verbal meetings would contribute as well as on-line, written discussions.

Taking on the Hardest Problems

Nobel Laurette Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, highlights many of our human tendencies to make errors of judgment. He offers ideas to inoculate us against these errors (as do Nobel Laurette Richard Thaler and Holberg Prize winner Cass Sunstein in their book, Nudge -- clearly, these are issues worthy of the attention of some of our greatest minds). However, while these books are fairly recent, the underlying research and recommendations have been with us for decades (e.g., Nobel Laurette Herbert Simon’s work on satisficing first came out in 1947). Yet, the problems are still with us.

Maybe What We Need Is An Always-on Automated Process

Again returning to some of my earliest research, in the 1980 and 1990s, we had Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS and GSS). These were purpose-built rooms with systems of computers where teams would participate for specific goals (e.g., strategic planning and other heavy-weight decisions). We were thrilled with the possibility of anonymous brainstorming (and some of the systems could even sort the results!)

Ment.io is offering this always-on, no extra step (or room) required capability. Maybe Ment serves as training wheels for improving our human decision-making overall. At a minimum, it offers guardrails and nudges for our practices.

What do you think? Are these systems training wheels, exoskeletons, or something else?