About
Frank Capek
Pioneer in Cognitive Experience Design and Experience-Led Transformation
Frank Capek is a leading expert in experience-led business strategy and transformation. Over four decades, he has helped more than 100 major organizations drive growth and competitive differentiation by transforming the experiences of customers, employees and other key stakeholders.
The initiatives he has helped design and implement have collectively produced more than $100 billion in annualized economic value.
From Artificial Intelligence to Experience Design
Frank earned a degree in mechanical engineering with a focus on design from MIT and a degree in mathematics from the State University of New York at Oneonta. He also pursued graduate work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, applied mathematics and operations research.
That unusual combination of disciplines helped shape what would become his life's work.
Early artificial intelligence and expert systems relied heavily on knowledge elicitation—methods for reverse engineering how experts mentally represented problems, made judgments and reached diagnostic decisions. Frank asked a different question:
Question: Can you use knowledge elicitation tools to reverse engineer the mental model of a customer?
Frank began adapting analogous approaches to a different problem. And, if you could understand how customers perceive situations, form preferences, make choices and behave, could that understanding be used to design fundamentally better experiences?
That question ultimately became the foundation for Cognitive Experience Design.
Frank's Professional Journey
Frank began his professional career in 1985 doing retail experience engineering for a major retail conglomerate.
In 1989, he joined Chase Manhattan Bank, where he led advanced technology and artificial intelligence groups that worked on some of the earliest commercially successful applications of expert systems and neural networks in financial services.
He also helped found the Financial Services Technology Consortium with peers from other leading banks, an initiative widely credited with helping introduce the term FinTech into its modern usage.
In 1994, Frank joined CSC Index—the consulting firm that pioneered Business Reengineering—and launched its Customer Reengineering practice.
Customer Reengineering inverted the traditional approach to customer experience. Rather than beginning with existing operations and asking how the customer experience could be improved, it began by designing distinctive experiences capable of intentionally changing customer behavior and driving growth.
The organization could then be redesigned backward from that intended experience.
Cognitive Experience Design
Over four decades, Frank has worked on integrating experience design with cognitive and behavioral science.
The result evolved into Cognitive Experience Design: the application of cognitive and behavioral science to the design of products, services and environments that intuitively fit and positively influence how people think, feel and behave.
At its core is a rigorous process and elicitation toolset for reverse engineering the mental model of the customer.
What Comes Next
A consistent theme throughout Frank's career has been that true innovation begins with understanding people more deeply and creating experiences that drive business success by improving their wellbeing.
Now retired from full-time consulting, Frank works selectively with organizations and causes where his experience can make a significant contribution.
He is particularly interested in organizations whose growth can create meaningful benefits for the people and communities they serve.