As technology becomes a vital part of everyone’s daily life, it also comes to be more interconnected with education. Advancement in Education isn’t limited to educational institutions; it plays a crucial role in how every organization operates — and how well apprentices are equipped to succeed in a digital-first future.
Using modern technology effectively whether in the classroom or at work requires more than just adding advanced technology and devices. An effective technology program comprises thought not only for hardware and software but also behavior and organizational culture. In order for technology to be effective, it must be available and accessible when employees need it.
Ed-Tech Solutions can help organizations efficiently implement their strategies by influencing employee behavior in alignment with desired outcomes. They also provide insightful reports for management on organizational culture.
A New York based company Cymorg Inc is a digital platform for assessing and developing organizational decision-making, using highly contextual gamified simulations, backed by behavioral analytics. The company improves organizational outcomes by improving the quality of organizational decision-making.
Cymorg provides the organization with a structured repository of organizational knowledge and senior leadership expectations about its own business model, strategy and values. It also delivers a mechanism for experiential dissemination of this repository to all senior managers in the organization, and a measure of the critical gaps in alignment around strategies and values, across decision-makers in the organization.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Insights Success and Sriram Padmanabhan:
What led to the inception of Cymorg?
Sriram: For 20 years before I started Cymorg, I have held positions of managerial responsibility across 3 continents. My last corporate role was as Sales Head for a business unit for a $500m organization. I realized that none of the countless Leadership Development Programs I had attended were helping me make any of the hard decisions I needed to make in the role. Sales leaders learn decision-making by making lots of decisions and seeing which ones work. Out of that insight came the idea of Cymorg: a “flight simulator” for developing market-facing decision-making.
Of course, unlike flight simulators which cater to a small number of plane makes and models, every organization is unique, and context is hugely important. There’s a huge difference between selling microchips and selling potato chips, or even in the definition of the same competency exhibited while selling one or the other.
So my co-founder Sam and I decided to build not one – or a small number – of off-the-shelf generic simulations, but a platform on which every organization can quickly assemble its own unique simulation, for developing its talent.
Describe Cymorg’s platform which address all the needs of its customers.
Cymorg is built around a simple premise: people remember something they did and how it turned out, far better than they remember something they read or watched.
Cymorg models your organization and the role of the employees being trained – their KPIs, the data they are privy to, the competencies they need to demonstrate in order for the organization’s strategies to work. We interview SMEs and design realistic scenarios and dilemmas that exemplify the competencies required. We then invite participants to achieve realistic KPIs over a virtual time period, navigating their way through several tricky scenarios – and every time they make a decision, they get closer to or further from their targets, and the Cymorg engine picks the next scenario to test them with. Participants learn from the nudges provided by the game, from peer discussion, from coaching and from the insightful post-experience competency reports.
How does the company’s solutions more productive comparatively to the other companies’ solutions?
Management decisions are made, not in isolation, but within the context of market and competitive landscape, organizational goals, values and strategies. Any development tool that does not capture that context is going to be unable to make the tiniest bit of difference to the way a participant understands or executes her role.
So if all you want to do is to spend a chunk of change and check a box or two, please do not call us. If, however, you want to make an actual difference to the way your teams think and work, talk to us.
Give a detailed description of the featured person’s influence over the company and the industry.
The founders – Sriram and Prasanth “Sam” Samavedam – designed Cymorg out of their own experiences working in market-facing leadership roles and selling to Fortune 100 firms around the world. We have a clear focus on the practical, contextual, and experiential – and share our end-users’ healthy aversion to the academic and text-bookish approaches currently prevalent in industry.
Describe in detail about the values that drives the company.
We have one overriding value that defines us: our success is linked to making a tangible difference to the behaviors that drive the business outcomes of every single client. We uniquely bring good old-fashioned client value focus to the Education Technology universe.
How are Cymorg’s solutions contributing in the advancement of the education technology industry?
Cymorg is hyper-personalized, contextual, experiential, immersive, gamified, AI-led and analytics-rich. The education technology industry has been talking about each of these traits for the last few years, and now, in the post-COVID world, they may even be the only effective way to train managers.
What technologies is the company leveraging to make its solutions resourceful?
It is difficult to build the corporate education software of the future without using cutting edge technologies. We use Natural Language Processing and chatbot technology, Machine Learning for the core engine, gamification techniques, and a cloud-based micro-services architecture.
What are the company’s future aspirations? What strategies is it undertaking to achieve those goals?
We want to be known as the Ed Tech company that provides the best insights into organizational culture, and helps transform behavior in tangible ways linked to organizational strategy. At the moment, we’re focusing on learning deeply from each client engagement, improving user experience and the ease of configuring the simulations to specific context. We are also partnering with premier academic institutions to improve the richness of the insights we offer our clients.