Are you struggling to do more with the same number of people? Are your teams bogged down or burnt out?

A failure to understand and balance cognitive load can affect teams and whole organisations. In fact, cognitive load is a key lens through which to view an organisation, it’s teams and how value flows to it’s customers.

It causes burnout, hampers productivity and stifles innovation. We’ll reveal how to identify cognitive overload in your teams, and adjust the flow of work to recover lost efficiency, maximise delivery and improve employee retention. Expect practical advice and strategies, along with real-life success stories, and the pitfalls to avoid.

This webinar is a follow-on from the sold-out talk at FastFlowConf in May 2023 - if you missed that, you won’t want to miss this too.

Who is this session for?

This session is designed for senior tech leaders such as CIOs, CTOs and Heads of Engineering/DevOps, but is open to all.

What will I learn? What will I leave with?

• Better understand Cognitive Load: What it is, and the three types of Cognitive Load.

• How to identify issues within your team: How issues manifest in teams and individuals.

• How to optimise your team’s Cognitive Load: Specific, actionable strategies you can use to highlight and improve issues.

• A workshop template to use with your teams 🎁🎁

Q&A from the webinar

• How do I make time for this if my team’s cognitive load (int/ext) is already at capacity? I’ve got deadlines that I’ve committed to.

  This is a super common problem. I don’t know what your work is like but I am going to assume the worst case scenario: You are completely at max, and your boss cares, but doesn’t appreciate how bad it is. So bad you can’t even get 30 min to run a retrospective.

  First you need to make the problem visible to them. Highlight the workload in some visual form, I recommend looking at Make Work Visible if you are looking for inspiration on how to do that.

  My favourite way is the lego time tracking game. You need a bunch of lego bricks, of assorted colours and to assign a type of work to each of them. The types of work should relate to your intrinsic/extraneous/germane, but you can be more specific than those categories. Every hour you grab a brick that represents the sort of work you have been doing and add it to a stack.

  This can help make visual what can be a bit abstract.

  At the very least this should give you the space for a 30 min, or 1 hour “retrospective” in the style of the workshop. I would follow the Guineapigs advice: SimpLEEfiy the intrinsic, MINImise the extraneous, and MAXimise the Germane.

  This should build on the space you got from making work visible, and keeping the exercise going, week on week to keep trimming down your work to the important parts.

• What was the journey in implementing some of the changes from these exercises i.e. which part of the organisation took these onboard well vs. took some time? I am asking because sometimes these exercises with middle managers have had impact and after a point they need momentum from the rest of the org?

  It varies wildly. Sometimes I see the middle of organisations respond quickly, sometimes slower.

  The general theme is that people are reluctant to get involved in something that they don’t feel agency over. I find that building a social movement inside the company, by contributing to communities of practice, running lunch and learns, and getting the support of people who are interested and influential. Give them the tools to try it themselves with minimal effort, give them a prompt to do it - like reminding them on a retrospective day, and you will see a lot of adoption simply with people doing it.

  This sounds intimidating, but consider this workflow:

  1. Do it in the team you have most directly worked with

  2. Share your experiences at a lunch and learn and get the commitment of a single senior person, and another team to try it out

  3. Remind them, collect feedback, and repeat.

  Obviously as this gains momentum, you can have other leaders in your organisation ask their teams to try it. It’s hard though, get in touch if you need support on this.

• I thought psychological safety was the foundation of high performing teams - is this more or less important?

  I think these are complimentary. High levels of extraneous cognitive load, can be an indicator of low levels of psychological safety.

  I find Psychological Safety sometimes can be a bit nebulous, I find the cognitive load lens can actually make it a bit more of a tractable problem.

• If I want to try this out - what do I do next? What should I do first?

  Run it in a Retro! Or just for yourself.

  I would love to know how you find it!

• How do I measure the value of reducing cognitive load? I can see lines of code or features shipped. I think I’m going to struggle to get my stakeholders to buy into this.

  There isn’t a good way to measure cognitive load, that will let you say “I have 7 cognitive load and that is good/bad”.

  Having said that you can measure change in delivery speed, using things like the DORA4, and that works well for some people. One thing that is less talked about though, is hyper local metrics.

  Have the team who you are working with think up something that is really meaningful for them, it can let them tell a really powerful story with a really clear link to what the team does.

• Would you run this workshop with someone who is already burnt out? Or is this meant mainly for prevention

  YES! The first time I (Billie) did this was with my mentor at Armakuni (an awesome person called Victoria). It let me frame my work in a way that made it manageable. Keep is small and personal the first time, if you are burnt out a psychological safety is low.

  Having said that, this isn’t just about burnout. This can be used in any situation where there seems to be something up with your flow.

Meet the speakers

Billie Thompson - Lead Consulting Engineer, Armakuni

Billie Thompson specialises in Cloud Native software development, DevOps and Day2Operations. With a background spanning multiple programming languages Billie is a true polyglot developer, comfortable architecting microservice applications, building and supporting infrastructure platforms and coaching teams to adopt new technologies and practices.

• LinkedIn: Billie Thompson

Ben Dodd - CTO & Co-founder, Armakuni

Ben Dodd, Armakuni’s CTO & Co-founder, is a thought leader in Cloud Native software development and digital transformation. A true change agent, Ben has a proven track record of leading both public and private organisations’ adoption of DevOps principles and culture, using his technical expertise at ground level to drive the change while also acting as a strategic advisor to the C-suite.

• LinkedIn: Ben Dodd