Cognitive Infrastructure v1.0 designing how orgs think in the age of AI

AI is making work faster… but for many organisations it's not making decisions better.
[What is this?]
A framework to help orgs increase cognitive throughput - clearer judgement, faster decisions, and higher-quality outcomes - by deliberately designing how thinking happens with AI.

What are we missing?

[The AI Gap]
Things are moving faster, but not getting better.


organisations are actively embracing AI, expecting returns on their investment...
🧪

...There are pilots, tools, experiments, and plenty of activity...
🤔

...Yet leaders are disappointed as Decisions feel noisier, not clearer.
[The Root Cause]
We're not designing the conditions for better thinking.
The problem is not that AI is weak.

The problem is that most organisations have not changed how they think…
…AI only creates real value when the environment, tools, and expectations are designed so that better thinking can actually happen.
Think of intelligence like water flowing through pipes… If the pipes are messy, leaky, or badly connected, adding more water does not help - you just get more mess.

A new & open Framework

[Cognitive Infrastructure]
A framework that determines whether AI meaningfully improves judgement or simply increases activity.


It is not a tool
stack.


It is not a culture programme.


It is not a
checklist.
[What is it?]
It's the organisational systems, tools, norms, and shared conceptual models that enable augmented sense-making, decision-making, and learning at scale.
[The Framework]
four lenses that must be catered to for AI to feel useful rather than busy.
Cognitive
Abundance
Sustaining surplus sense-making beyond individual human capacity.
Cognitive
Amplification
Building effective fluency in augmented thinking, decision-making, & action.
Cognitive
Scaffolding
Ontologically engineering purpose & values into core ‘thinking’ tools.
Cognitive
Ambiance
Expecting meaningful thinking to actually happen with AI in the room.
[Cognitive Ambiance]
Expecting meaningful thinking to actually happen with AI in the room.
The leadership-set expectation that meaningful thinking with AI is normal, safe, and expected.
When ambiance is weak, AI stays at the edges - an experiment, a side tool, or something people use quietly.
When it is strong, people stop asking “can I use this?” and start asking “how do I think better with this?”
[Cognitive Scaffolding]
Ontological engineering of purpose & values into core ‘thinking’ tools.
The deliberate embedding of purpose, values, and decision guardrails into how AI-augmented thinking happens.
AI is very good at producing answers.It is not good at deciding what matters.
The right Cognitive Scaffolding ensures that speed and judgement move together.
[Cognitive Amplification]
Building effective fluency in augmented thinking, decision-making, & action.
The organisation’s collective fluency in working with AI to improve reasoning, judgement, and action.
AI stretches thinking rather than replacing it. Stronger thinking gets amplified. Weaker thinking does too.
Organisations that win in the end invest in shared fluency, not managing individual brilliance.
[Cognitive Abundance]
Sustaining surplus sense-making beyond individual human capacity.
What becomes possible when everything connects. Insights do not disappear after meetings.
Good thinking builds on itself. Decision quality improves even as complexity increases.
At this point, the organisation feels calmer, not busier. That is the state of cognitive abundance.
[Download]
Don't hAve the conditions for better thinking yet?
Download The v1.0 Framework
Includes Diagrams, Definitions & diagnostics to help you to start identifying your organisation's AI gap in minutes
Download .ZIP
Read The White Paper
A deep dive into the thinking and rationale behind the cognitive infrastructure framework, by the [UN/DO] founders
Download .PDF
[Diagnosis]
Cognitive Infrastructure gives leaders a way to diagnose why AI investment feels underwhelming:
Lots of pilots, little value?
...the expectation is wrong
Fast answers, low trust?
...the scaffolding is missing
A few stars, no spread?
...capability isn’t shared
Insights vanish?
...nothing connects them
Fundamentally, these are design problems, not technology ones.

LICENSING
& USE

[Open Source, by Design]
Cognitive infrastructure is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Attribution
“Cognitive Infrastructure” is a framework developed by [UN/DO].

Source: https://weundo.co/cognitive-infrastructure
Commercial Use
Use in paid consulting, proprietary frameworks, or client delivery requires a commercial licence.

email hi@weundo.co for enquiries
[Origins]
a synthesis of decades of research & Practice.
the Cognitive infrastructure framework builds on the work of the [UN/DO] co-founders Craig Wright & Jordan Dalladay-Simpson, bringing together decades of their thinking, research and practice across topics including tools-for-thought, metadesign, organisational design and executive practice. Earlier relevant works include:

Dalladay-Simpson. J (2026). Today’s organisations don’t have an AI problem — they have a thinking problem. UX COllective, Medium. ViSIT→

Wright, C. (2026). The Return on Intelligence: A plain‑English guide to why AI feels busy, but not always useful. UN/DO. Download↓

Wright, C. (2026). Resource Constraints to Cognitive Abundance: Why Your AI Investments Feel Busy but Unrewarding. UN/DO. Download↓

Dalladay-Simpson, J. (2024). AI beyond the ‘as-is’: updating the human operating system to unlock transformational value. HiveMind. Visit→

Dalladay-Simpson, J. (2022). Re-shaping futures. In J. Wood (Ed.), Metadesigning designing in the Anthropocene. Routledge. Visit→

Dalladay-Simpson, J. (2020). Deep Design: The Next Paradigm of Human-Computer Interaction. BCG Digital Ventures. Visit→

Dalladay-Simpson, J. et al (2009). Designers = Meta-epistemologists?. In Rigor and Relevance in Design, International Associations of Societies of Design Research (IASDR), Korean Society of Design Science. Visit→

Dalladay-Simpson, J. (2008) Tools-for-thought: towards understanding tools in relation to innovative and co-creative practice. In Networks of Design, Design History Society, BrownWalker Press.  Visit→
AI does not fail organisations.
Organisations fail to design for intelligence.