A research project about how work changes as thinking changes.

Cognitive Mode Theory, or CMT, is an emerging framework for understanding the relationship between the kind of thinking a task requires, the cognitive state a person is currently operating within, and the difficulty of moving work from one state to another.

The central idea is simple:

Tasks that look like one thing on a to-do list often contain several different kinds of cognitive work.

“Write the report” might actually require gathering information, making sense of it, reaching a decision, creating an artifact, refining it, and ultimately putting it into use.

Traditional productivity systems tend to organize work by category, deadline, priority, or project.

CMT asks a different question:

What has to change cognitively for this work to move forward?

That question is the foundation of the research being documented here.

Why this research exists

Many productivity systems assume that once a person knows what they need to do, the primary problem is execution.

But knowing the task does not necessarily mean knowing how the work needs to move.

A task can be:

• clearly named but cognitively underspecified
• technically actionable but dependent on something unresolved
• urgent but not actually ready to begin
• simple behaviorally while requiring several different kinds of thinking
• difficult because of the transition between forms of work rather than the work itself

This became particularly interesting to me in the context of executive function, neurodivergence, project management, and increasingly AI-mediated work.

Rather than asking only:

“What do I need to do?”

CMT explores questions such as:

What state are we starting from?
What needs to become true next?
What information is already available?
What is missing?
What work is actually ready?
What is blocked by a prerequisite?
What kind of cognitive operation produces the required change?
What happens when work must transition between different cognitive demands?

The current model

CMT currently treats a cognitive mode as a category of cognitive work defined by the transformation it produces, not simply by an observable behavior.

This distinction matters.

For example:

“Make a presentation”

is a behavioral task label.

It does not tell us whether the person currently needs to research information, determine the argument, organize existing material, create the slides, refine the slides, or deliver them.

Before assigning a cognitive mode, the research attempts to identify the underlying state change.

The current methodology is being developed around a sequence that includes:

Work Episode Definition
→ Recursive Cognitive Decomposition (RCD)
→ Dependency Structure
→ State Change Translation (SCT)
→ Transition Adequacy Rubric (TAR)
→ Ontology Classification

The goal is to create a method rigorous enough that classification does not depend on someone simply looking at a task and deciding what it “feels like.”

Work as a dependency structure

One of the developing ideas within the research is that work may be better represented as a dependency structure than as a flat list of tasks.

A project contains things that are:

KNOWN — information or resources already available

MISSING INFO — relevant information that is currently unavailable

READY — work whose prerequisites are satisfied

BLOCKED — work that cannot proceed because a required prerequisite is unresolved

COMPLETE — work whose required change has occurred

This creates an important distinction between something being important and something actually being ready.

A person may have five urgent tasks in front of them while only one is currently capable of moving forward.

Understanding that difference is one of the practical directions CMT is exploring.

Your Brain, The Business

One metaphor I use to make the framework more accessible is "Your Brain, The Business."

Instead of imagining cognition as one worker responsible for every type of thinking, imagine an organization composed of different functions.

Research has a scope.

Decision-making has a scope.

Creation has a scope.

Refinement has a scope.

Each function receives something, changes it, and produces something that may become an input for another function.

In an organization, raw research would not always be handed directly to a designer with the instruction to “make something.”

There may be interpretation, strategy, decisions, specifications, and other handoffs between them.

CMT is interested in whether cognitive work behaves similarly:

What does one mode need before it can begin?

What does it produce?

When is a handoff required?

What happens when the next form of work is not cognitively accessible at that moment?

The metaphor is not the theory itself. It is simply one way of making the underlying structure easier to understand.

Where ModeSpace fits

ModeSpace is the developing software implementation of this research.

The long-term idea is not to require users to learn the technical language of CMT.

Someone should be able to say:

“I need to teach a workshop.”

The system should carry more of the burden of determining:

what they already have,
what is still missing,
what must happen before something else can happen,
what work is actually ready,
what is blocked,
and eventually what kind of cognitive demand each piece of work represents.

The goal is for the user to describe their work normally while the system performs the translation underneath.

ModeSpace is currently under development and should not be interpreted as validation of CMT. The theory and its software implementation are being developed and tested alongside one another.

This research is ongoing.

CMT is not currently an established scientific theory.

The ontology, classification procedures, boundaries between modes, decomposition methodology, and practical implications are all still being tested and revised.

Material published on this site may therefore change as new cases expose problems with the model.

Those changes are part of the work.

Rather than presenting the framework as finished, this site exists to create a public record of:

what is currently being proposed

how it is being tested

where the model fails

what changes as a result

and what remains unknown

CMT is not a diagnostic tool, mental-health treatment, clinical intervention, or substitute for professional medical or psychological care.

No claim is currently being made that CMT improves productivity, treats executive dysfunction, predicts cognitive performance, or represents a complete model of human cognition.

Those are questions requiring evidence.

Why publish the process?

Most people encounter theories after the uncertainty has been removed from the story.

This project intentionally documents some of that uncertainty.

Research notes may contain ideas that are later revised.

A methodology may work well on ten cases and fail on the eleventh.

An apparent cognitive category may turn out to overlap with another.

A task may expose a transformation the current ontology cannot explain.

Those are not things I want to hide.

They are the research.

This site is therefore both a canonical reference and an evolving field journal for Cognitive Mode Theory.

Participate in the research

There are several ways to follow or contribute to the work as it develops.

You can:

Read the research journal
Follow new observations, protocol revisions, test cases, and theoretical developments.

Submit a work episode
Provide a real-world example of work that can be used to stress-test the methodology.

Join future testing
Express interest in structured CMT studies, ModeSpace pilots, and research activities as they become available.

Collaborate professionally
Researchers, educators, practitioners, technologists, institutions, and others with relevant expertise can express interest in methodology review, applied pilots, research collaboration, advisory support, or institutional partnership.

The goal is not to build consensus around CMT.

The goal is to find out where it holds, where it breaks, and what the evidence requires us to change.

About the researcher

Cognitive Mode Theory is being developed by Ashley Crockett, a Detroit-based creative technologist, project manager, builder, and researcher working at the intersection of technology, cognition, systems design, and human-centered computing.

The work grew from a practical question about why conventional productivity systems often fail to represent the actual cognitive structure underneath complex work.

That question has since developed into a broader research program examining cognitive modes, state transitions, dependency structures, work routing, cognitive accessibility, and the design of AI systems capable of supporting rather than increasing the cognitive burden of project management.