Mastering Team Effectiveness: The Power of Managing Cognitive Load

Cognitive load is a central tenet of Team Topologies principles and practices, that Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais developed. As Martin Fowler explains, "Much of Team Topologies is based on the notion of Cognitive Load." While in previous issues of the newsletter, we have focused on the relationship between cognitive load and platform groupings, we haven’t looked deeper into these concepts and how they are crucial to enable a fast flow of change in the organization.

Why You Should Tackle Team Cognitive Load

Understanding and managing cognitive load is critical for optimizing team performance. Teams, like individuals, have a limited cognitive capacity. When teams are overloaded with excessive responsibilities and interactions they face several challenges, such as:

• Increased context switching - which slows the team down, and blocks them from doing “deep work”
• Lack of mastery - because they don’t have time to master things, as they are juggling the many different tasks on their plate
• Diminished ownership over their domains - which leads to all sorts of challenges around evolving their products

By creating an organization where learning and managing teams cognitive load is more explicit and intentional, where people understand  Team Cognitive Load and, use that to reflect on their own context, we can find leverage points to create a humane and effective working environment.

Get ready to optimize your teams for fast flow. Get help from the authors of Team Topologies

Reducing Team Cognitive Load by the Figures

• Productivity Boost: 25% reduction in context switching and a subsequent 20% increase in overall productivity among teams adopting Team Topologies
• Software Delivery Performance: Organizations that manage cognitive load effectively see a 30% improvement in software delivery performance. This is supported by research on DORA metrics (DevOps Research and Assessment), which highlight key performance indicators such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore, and change failure rate (Waydev) (Pentalog) (Codacy).
• Financial Gains: If each of the 400 engineers is blocked one hour per day, with a full load cost of €160K and 260 working days per year, optimizing their workflow can save  €8 million annually.
• Employee Satisfaction: Teams with optimized cognitive load report  an increase in job satisfaction, leading to better retention rates and a more motivated workforce

Learn how Telenet has improved the flow of work and business agility at all levels by adopting the underlying principles of “fast flow” and “limiting cognitive load”.

How to Get Started

To help you better understand and manage cognitive load, here are some valuable resources from the Team Topologies authors and community:

1. The question is not "monoliths vs microservices", instead you should be focusing on managing team cognitive load over technology choices - Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais.
2. Organizing around Team Cognitive Load - Matthew Skelton In The Engineering Room Ep. 12  
3. How to identify trends of struggling in your team and where you can identify the causes of cognitive load - Manuel Pais on DevInterrupted 
4. Platform engineering: the goal of platform engineering is a “frictionless, self-service developer experience that offers the right capabilities to enable developers and others to produce valuable software with as little overhead as possible. The platform should increase developer productivity, along with reducing the cognitive load.” Krzysztof Halasa on his blog.
5. Industry examples that feature using Team Topologies for assessing and addressing cognitive load at Improbable, Docker, Nav.
6. How can you intentionally adopt a strategy for managing cognitive load by  João Rosa.
7. How you can avoid toxicity by managing cognitive load by Richard Bown
8. Cognitive load and why it is important for teams - Team Topologies Distilled video-course by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

By emphasizing cognitive load, the Team Topologies approach is a crucial strategy for enhancing software delivery effectiveness in organizations that adopt it.

What’s Coming Up Next?

• Expert Leadership Masterclass: Nimble, Humane Organizations with the Authors of Team Topologies. Get a 20% discount using this code or bring a friend and save 30%.
• Fast Flow Conf 2024
• #DL Summit 2024: Optimizing software team interactions with the Team Topologies approach

Check out the full list of events to see which one is best suited for you. If we missed any, send us an email and we will list it and spread the word

Stand out from the crowd by building and running a high-performing team-of-teams organization, which adapts to changes in your environment even without your direct involvement. Join the event in Manchester.

Join the Community

We are happy to enrich the practice of The Team Topologies with new ideas and best practices. This is why the community plays a crucial role in ever-evolving. A warm welcome to our newest members:

• Joris Swinnen
• Cansu Kavili Örnek
• Donna Benjamin
• Joep Piscaer
• Alexandra Stokes

If you're passionate about Team Topologies and want to become an advocate, we would love to have you join us. Or, if you have a story to share, we would be honored to feature it on the website. 

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