Reduce the cognitive load

When guiding an agile team to better ways of working, we consider how to increase transparency, inspection and iteration.

There's two other aspects that I believe are important to consider too:

• one is psychological safety - how comfortable team members feel to speak up and challenge each other;
• two is reducing the cognitive load (RTCL) - reducing how much people have to actively remember and providing anchor points to help people remember key things

I want to focus on this second point today. I see RTCL as having a slightly different driver from transparency - transparency is about putting things in the open to help keep the team and each other accountable whereas reducing the cognitive load is about playing back events, facts and key decisions in a way to help them embed them into the team's memory.

Ultimately, they both often translate to being more transparent but I find it helpful to have RTCL as a consideration as it opens up different ways of communicating with the team.

For example, when working remotely I've often found it a challenge to remember things that happen on a daily basis because I have no interaction with others beyond my screen, so all meetings and activities kind of blend into one.

When we are in person, we have more 'hooks' for our memory to work: sights, smells, laughs, awkward moments.

So how can I counteract that forgetting? We might be tempted to document more or invent process here but that isn't what I want to do.

With one of my teams, I started to reflect back or summarise things that have happened in concise Slack posts on a weekly basis. Short but regular.

This helped to get people who were absent up to speed but the regularity also helped people come to meetings remembering what are the key issues and what else they need to consider by reminding them (passively) and providing an accessible reference. This was particularly useful as the team didn't have the opportunity to meet daily.

Ultimately, this approach reduces missed opportunities and reduces the time spent on blockers that aren't really blockers but originated in some of us or all of us forgetting.