Full to overflowing

This morning I'm keynoting aand opening a conference. It’s a 2-day program, with 3 streams running concurrently, which means there will be about 30 sessions for people to choose from.

Many conferences present us with this choice about what to do, what to attend. As delegates, we're about to be blasted by a firehose of information. The information flow is never ending.

We start the day with high hopes, clear minds and open eyes, ready to capture the insights from presentations and conversations.

But during the day, we hit the wall, full to overflowing and we experience 'the overload'.

To deal with it, we need to manage it. No one will do it for us. We need the skill of 'cognitive load coping' which the Institute for the Future said we'd need about now.

Yet I don’t see enough of it in the workplace to equip people to cope with all the information!

In today’s keynote I :

✅ Show how multitasking at a conference lowers our IQ;

✅ Explain we have a blindness to information, missing key content; and

✅ Share templates and techniques for better cognitive load coping.

This quote below from Seth Godin is a goodie! More on this topic as the week goes on.

Managing the overload

Do we consciously think how we’ll manage the deluge of information we’ll be exposed to today? Or do we just hope for the best?

Yes, we read, think, assess, evaluate and make sense of so much stuff. Every day. And while we’re trying to make sense of the information that’s INCOMING to us, don’t forget we also need to make sense of the information that we’re preparing for others : our OUTGOING.

We can spend too long on how things look - a presentation or report for example - when it may actually be all wordy, with jargon, cliched. That’s hard work for people to make sense of.

As you manage your own cognitive load, be aware you need to help others manage their load too. When preparing information, make it easy for them. If it’s easy - that doesn’t mean simple - if it’s easy, it gets digested, absorbed and, importantly integrated into our learning and understanding.

You'll feel less zombie-ish and more alert if you make conscious cognitive load management one of the ways you go about your day. I’m opening the SIRF Roundtables National Forum with a keynote on this super skill, cognitive load coping.

I’ll share more on cognitive load coping this week.

Managing information overload in a world of too much %$#&* information

The Institute for the Future said cognitive load coping was a 'got to have it' skill for 2020. I've been keynoting at conferences on Day 1 giving delegates these much needed 'cognitive load coping' skills.

Are we ever 'taught' or 'shown' what to do in a situation of information overload? Many people zone out, reach for the comfort of their mobile device, feign understanding (head nodding) or daydream.

Info overload at conferences happens:

🐌 g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y (end of Day 1 you feel zombie-ish)

or

🚀 rapidly (presentation is so fast, laden with charts and stats you lose the threads ... gone).

Part of the 'it's all too much' zone is when we foolishly choose to REWORK information. We store it (take photos of slides at conferences, save PDFs, type notes, screenshot stuff) fully intending to 'look at it later'.

But it's one of the most ineffective and inefficient ways to handle information overload. Rather, get up out of the 'it's all too much zone'. It's worth building the confidence and capability to handle all that information, live ... in the moment so you are indeed 'all over it'.

Did you know that Sensemaking is a ’thing’?

You know when you’re having a meeting or a conversation and you’re listening to what people say, trying to work out what it means, what it’s about?

That’s Sensemaking. We do it intuitively, habitually, automatically. But we might also be doing it in ways that don't get the most out of our grey matter - our brain - or the other people in the room.

It's why we miss out on information, feel overloaded and get overwhelmed with too much information.

It’s certainly why we get into heated debates, arguments, confusion and misunderstandings. Even though we’re trying to get on the ’same page’, we often don’t even have a page, anywhere to be seen. It’s all talk.

We can make Sensemaking a more deliberate action in our daily work and daily lives. It’s more than taking notes, it’s more than listening.

It’s a kind of super power or rapid path to clarity when we’re dealing with complex issues and information. Plus it’s the way to make decisions quicker and work together better.

Sensemaking. It’s a thing and we can most defintely be more deliberate about it.