Cognitive load balancing

This reminded me of how we have been working at COMMUNIA for the past few years:e

Split the information you’re consuming amongst your team, whether that team is your colleagues, family, friends, or your professional fellow travelers. Read different sources, sorted by local and global, social and technical, known reliable correspondents or experts, and so on. Sort the light from the heavy, the narrative from the data, or whatever way works best to keep you from carrying the burden of all of that cognitive load alone.

Individuals build specialized knowledge, develop good critical radar for sources, and track rises and falls in information trends quite well. A group with diverse interests, tolerances, knowledge of industry dialects and players, strategically spread across time zones, can work together to keep their eyes on the landscape, and save any one person from burning out on breadth, depth, and span of material. This approach can also help mitigate overly negative or overly positive views of one person.

It is a passage from a longer essay titled “Managing Abyss Gaze In a Time of Difficult Futures” written by Scott Smith that is pretty insightful (if you can tollerate the pretty thick layer of post-consultancy lingo). (via BruceS)