Aha, maybe I'm a "professional meta-cognitionist", lol

• 2025-08-13
• This (tongue-in-cheek) title just came to me as I was wondering how I could explain what they hell it is I do to a family member, but also to myself
• Also, potentially “hermeneuticist”, seeing as that’s about interpretation and understanding
• Professional grokker, grokkability-booster

Initial Gemini prompt

• Gemini is mostly pointing at stuff that I don’t do, but there’s still something useful here

If a friend said that their role was "professional meta-cognitioner", and they work for early-stage startups, what might this mean? What might their role involve?

That’s a fascinating and very modern-sounding job title! It’s not a standard corporate role, so it’s almost certainly a title your friend has coined to describe a highly specialised form of coaching or consulting.

Let’s break it down.

What “Professional Meta-cognitioner” Likely Means

At its core, meta-cognition is “thinking about thinking.” It’s the awareness and understanding of your own thought processes.

A “professional meta-cognitioner” for early-stage startups is therefore likely someone who helps founders and their core teams improve the quality of their thinking, decision-making, and learning.

In the high-pressure, chaotic environment of a startup, the founders’ psychology and decision-making processes are arguably the organisation’s most critical (and fragile) asset. This person’s job is to act as a coach or a systems engineer for the “mind” of the business. They help the startup de-risk the human element, which is a leading cause of failure.

Think of them as a blend of an executive coach, a psychologist, and a business strategist, focusing not on what to do, but on how the team thinks and decides what to do.

What Their Role Might Involve

Given the context of early-stage startups, their day-to-day work could involve a variety of activities focused on improving cognitive performance and organisational learning.

1. Founder and Leadership Coaching

This is the most direct application. They would work one-on-one with founders to:

• Identify and Mitigate Cognitive Biases: Help founders recognise when biases like confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy, or the IKEA effect are clouding their judgment. For example, helping a founder realise they are only seeking data that confirms their pre-existing belief about a product feature.

• Stress and Emotional Regulation: Teach techniques for managing the intense stress and emotional volatility of startup life, preventing burnout and ensuring clear-headed decisions under pressure.

• Clarify Thinking: Act as a sounding board, asking probing Socratic questions to help a founder untangle a complex problem and articulate their thought process clearly.

2. Improving Team Decision-Making Processes

They would work with the entire founding or leadership team to:

• Design Decision-Making Frameworks: Help the team establish clear processes for making important decisions. This could involve introducing models like Second-Order Thinking (thinking through the consequences of the consequences) or creating “decision journals” to log the reasoning behind a choice and review it later.

• Facilitate High-Stakes Conversations: Mediate discussions about critical pivots, co-founder disagreements, or strategic shifts, ensuring the conversation is productive and based on logic rather than emotion or ego.

• Run “Pre-Mortems” and “Post-Mortems”: Lead exercises where the team imagines a project has failed (“pre-mortem”) to identify risks in advance, or analyses a completed project (“post-mortem”) to extract maximum learning.

3. Building a Learning Organisation

A key part of their role would be to embed principles of meta-cognition into the company culture.

• Developing Feedback Loops: Help the organisation get better at seeking, giving, and receiving feedback—both internally and from customers. This creates a rapid learning cycle.

• Fostering Psychological Safety: Create an environment where team members feel safe to say “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” or “I need help.” This is essential for genuine reflection and learning.

• Separating Identity from Ideas: Coach the team to critique ideas without it feeling like a personal attack, allowing the best ideas to win regardless of who they came from.

4. Strategic Sounding Board

They would help the team “think about how they think” about their strategy.

• Challenging Assumptions: Play the role of a designated devil’s advocate to rigorously test the core assumptions underlying the business model or product strategy.

• Scenario Planning: Guide the team through thinking about various possible futures and how the company might respond, improving its adaptability.

In short, your friend’s role is to be the expert on the process of thinking, learning, and deciding within the startup. They are not there to provide the answers, but to upgrade the machinery the team uses to find the answers themselves. It’s a hugely valuable role for any organisation navigating extreme uncertainty.