Specialty areas include competency modeling, assessment systems, learning and development, cognitive skills, social & cultural competencies, human performance, psychometrics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, people analytics.

Winston Sieck is a senior data scientist at the Korn Ferry Institute, where he contributes to the ongoing development of KF’s suite of tools to collect, measure, and assess individual, team, and organizational performance at scale. Dr. Sieck pursues continual improvements in scoring systems for assessments, supports AI/ML projects for creating prototype next-generation tools, delivers advanced analytics projects to address key people-related challenges for clients, and conducts primary research on topics related to human performance and the future of work.

Previously, as principal scientist at Global Cognition, Dr. Sieck led applied cognitive research and development projects to investigate high impact skills and competencies, primarily related to decision making, critical thinking, learning, adaptability, culture and collaboration. These investigations have often involved analyzing indicators of cognitive processes in verbal data and studying their associations with individual and team performance in naturalistic settings.

Selected projects at Global Cognition:

• Conducted experiments using generative AI, large language models (LLMs) for scoring competencies from behavioral interview assessment data.
• Used multi-level, multinomial regression models to analyze factors for predicting gains in foreign language proficiency in a workplace training program; provided recommendations for program improvement.
• Designed and managed a complex study for a large, government human resources agency that used advanced analytics and open-response situational judgment tests (SJTs) to derive mastery levels for a cultural competency model that has been implemented in personnel policy.
• Co-authored Save your ammo: Working across cultures for national security.

Winston Sieck received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Michigan in 2000, and M.A. in statistics from the same university in 1995. He continued as a research fellow and statistics instructor at the University of Michigan (2000-2001), and then served as a post-doctoral scholar in quantitative psychology at Ohio State University (2001-2003).

Dr. Sieck was recruited into the Skilled Performance and Expertise group at Klein Associates in 2003, where he conducted studies to understand the reasoning and decision making processes of experts in several professional domains. After acquisition by Applied Research Associates, he continued on at the Klein Associates Division.

Selected projects at Klein Associates:

• Designed and led an interdisciplinary project using natural language processing of online sources to investigate and measure metacognitive beliefs related to critical thinking.
• Derived domain-general measures of forecaster competence from written explanations of judgments as part of a large-scale IARPA project on crowdsourcing approaches for forecasting world events.
• Conducted a “mental models” survey study that used finite-mixture models and influence diagrams to delineate and describe the causal beliefs and values of different cultural groups in Afghanistan.
• Compared expert and novice reasoning strategies for making sense of surprising and ambiguous situations, and identified verbal indicators in think aloud data that discriminated the strategies.
• Developed a survey instrument to measure beliefs about teamwork and implemented it in a cross-cultural study of four different countries; identified implications for multinational collaborations.
• Conducted cognitive-cultural field research in Lebanon to investigate the decision making processes of security forces and crowd members involved in large-scale protests.

Check the publications page for a list of his articles and research items.