Flow and Cognitive Load

“Maximise flow by minimising cognitive load”. Wait a minute…

I’ve had a bad back recently and have been scrolling LinkedIn more than I usually do. One thing I noticed was the words “flow” and “cognitive load” coming up a lot, quite often together. Now I’ve heard three people in real life saying almost the exact phrase above and I think it warrants a bit of extra thought.

I guess the first whiff of something fishy is that it smacks a bit of our old friend and adversary Mr Frederick Winslow Taylor. The suggestion of optimisation and words like “cognitive”, sound quite sciency, don’t they? Scientific management has been around a long time. It tends to get sidelined during times of boom to be wheeled out again during the bust. We are no longer in a boom cycle so fair enough but the deserved concern around its dehumanising aspect still remains and we need to be careful. (Also, to me, cognitive load and flow seem to have something vaguely reminiscent of time and motion. Probably my imagination.)

There’s also something fishy about the use of the phrase “cognitive load” itself. Are we talking about an individual’s capacity for learning the skills required to do the work or the whole team’s ability to assimilate that knowledge as a group? It seems quite confused. In either case, there is no better formula to demotivate a skilled person than to remove the need for their skill, especially if you say it’s for their own good. I hope that what is really being meant by “cognitive load” is to minimise the bureaucracy, the burdensome tools, the handoff coordination, the form filling, the approval seeking, all the stuff that really gets in the way of flow.

And talking of flow… secondly, and obviously, flow means so many things. It could just mean not being blocked. It could refer to a simple experience like an easy payment process. It could imply a certain grace and ease such as the flow of a passage of text or a piece of music while at the same time, and less elegantly, it could mean a slicker pipe through which material can be discharged quickly.

Most interestingly to me, “flow” could mean a mental disposition such as the one conceived by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi where work is energising, engaging and enjoyable. Everyone from programmers to PowerPoint wranglers know and enjoy that feeling. However Csíkszentmihályi proposed that the most productive and satisfying work wasn’t done by minimising the difficulty of the task, but by balancing the difficulty with the skill of the person or people involved. If that were the case we don’t want to minimise cognitive load but to balance it.

Whatever the case, whatever maximising fast flow means to you and whatever minimising cognitive load means to you, we’ve been saying for years that it’s velocity, not speed that’s important, that is direction and purpose over how fast you go. We’ve also said that we need skilled and motivated employees fully engaged in the work they are doing. Maximising flow and minimising cognitive load sounds like it could be a recipe for the best possible feature factory.