Know how you get overloaded

I'm posting on cognitive overload this week. We feel overload at conferences or training when we feel 'full', overflowing with information and can't take any more in.

Here's how it happens:

🐞G-r-a-d-u-a-l

This mental overload happens over a long day. You feel like a zombie and the simplest tasks can seem difficult. As the day wears on, you might think the sessions are less interesting or less captivating, but it's usually because we are less able to discriminate and determine what's of value.

🚀Rapid

You can get overloaded in a single presentation or meeting; this is over a shorter period of time; too much information and too high a degree of difficulty (yes, like Olympic divers or gymnasts executing a tricky move!)

Cognitive overload is a common problem in the modern workplace. We're confronted with so much information from so many different sources, and in so many different styles.

It's not going to fix itself ... we'll need to do something about it. The skill is 'cognitive load coping.'

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.

Quotable quotes

At this, or any conference, it’s easy to be swamped, firehose style with content, topics, presentations, models and references. The key in distilling information is to get up higher in context, out of the detail of a case study for example, so you can take a key message and share it or explore it further.

Here’s a tapas of some quotable quotes from today:

🔸The culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is willing to tolerate (Gruenert & Whitaker)

🔸 Rules for inquiry: turn judgement into curiosity; conflict to shared exploration; defensiveness to self reflection; assumption to questions (Jeremy Lightsmith & Glenda Eoyang)

🔸 Great managers manage themselves first (Johanne Rothman)

🔸 When someone is in flight, fight, freeze - that’s not a time to coach. It’s not a teachable moment (Cailtlin Walker and Andrea Chiou)

🔸 Setting an objective that is impossible to achieve won’t motivate employees (Mariya Breyter)

🔸 Pay attention. Learn to see. Sense and Respond (Woody Zuill)

What's a quotable quote you live by or use as a guide for thinking and acting?

Attention and focus

Reporting in from Agile 2019 in Washington DC ... Author Chris Bailey kicked off the conference keynoting on how to manage your attention in a world of distraction. I

t turns out we don't need to fit more content in, we need to create more space. Productivity he says, is a combination of time, energy and attention.

We'd do well to take care of our energy. It was funny when he said that having a coffee now is borrowing our energy from later in the day. (Alcohol is borrowing energy and happiness from tomorrow!)

But the key message is, we crave distraction - lasting just 40 seconds on a task before we get distracted - lapping up the dopamine hits we get from checking devices and drowning in screen-time. We need to let our messy minds wander; to rediscover boredom. It's over-stimulation which is the enemy of focus.

As Chris spoke, I captured these rapid fire notes in this visual one-pager. Lots of information there and better than a list of boring writing that won't get looked at again. (I use visual notes like this to manage my cognitive load at conferences. It's only Day 1 of 5 - it's a marathon not a sprint!)  

Yawn! How could you rediscover boredom ?

Agile is a way of thinking and working

This week I'm at the Agile 2019 conference in Washington DC. Some people think 'agile' or 'agility' are buzzwords or cliches. Well they are if you throw them around trying to sound all ... agile!

Agile is actually a way of thinking and working that's sweeping the world. And it's not just limited to the tech industries where it started to thrive. It's being applied across all sorts of fields, sectors and industries.

I keynoted at the conference on the topic of ‘ish: The Problem with our Pursuit for Perfection and the Life-Changing Practice of Good Enough’.

This week I'll be posting insights and key points from the 18 streams and hundreds of sessions available on agility ... not to mention those magical, spontaneous conversations you get to have at great conferences!

If you’re stuck in long-term planning mode or taking w-a-y too long to get products and services created and out into the market, you’ll join the list of businesses who aren’t in business anymore! We all have to adjust, respond and adapt to the changes going on in the world and the demands and expectations our customers have. This is being agile.

How could you be more agile in your role, team or business?