Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining Our Fight for Focus | BBC Worklife

A few weeks ago, I made a post about a Forbes article, Why Cognitive Load Could Be the Most Important Employee Experience Metric in the Next 10 Years. Cognitive load (CL) is a theory that suggests that people have trouble performing tasks and learning new things if they are trying to process too much information at once. As CL increases, it detracts from quality decision-making, productivity, and wellbeing, to name a few. The article posited that CL is a measure of productivity for the business and a measure of employee wellbeing and employee experience. As noted in the article, the measurement of CL and its impact on business and employee measures could be the “new frontier of people analytics.” And while the pandemic has contributed heavily to the CL of workers, CL was problematic before the crisis and will undoubtedly exist in a post-covid world. As such, firms can benefit by expanding their knowledge of this topic. With that in mind, this BBC article provides a good overview of CL and how it interferes with our ability to focus. I believe that CL will become a more significant component of workforce and talent strategies since it is a determinant of organizational capacity.