In physiology, the term 'homeostasis' is used to describe the tendency of a body toward "the maintenance of a stable environment controlled internally and coordinately to buffer external changes". It depends mainly on the collaboration between the nervous system, endocrine system and the immune system. In order to function well and maintain an balanced, stable set of conditions, an organism reacts to its external environment by making adjustments through those dependent systems.
Recently my teams have been observing higher stress levels and a few people have mentioned "cognitive load". We recently undertook a restructure, which is certainly going to increase those stress responses. The stable environment had been massively disrupted and the homeostatic state of our teams became unbalanced. There are two ways I observe those responses presenting: in the team as a whole, and in the individual. That homeostatic state has been very obviously and deliberately dysregulated and now we're seeing the system overall struggling to recover.
Stress on a system - whether that's an individual person's nervous system or an organisational system like a technical team - can be increased in a raft of different ways:
- restructuring
- hiring
- individuals' personal health / fatigue
- mental health / emotional health
- task overloading
- trying to operate at / resume high-performance without first returning to equilibrium
- uncertainty
- and more...
When the team's "stable" state is upset, the system (whether that's the individuals in the team, the processes created, dropped or followed, or the resilience and quality of work throughput) responds in different ways that typically try to protect that team. If the team was an organism, then its sympathetic nervous system would be activated: essentially putting that team into a "fight / flight / freeze" response. That might be an attempt to quicky return to a familiar "normal" state prior to the stress event (e.g. artificially loading the team with work in the assumption that the return to previous workloads will bring familiar stability and workflows), dropping all work and waiting to be told what to do (e.g. a confused, directionless state of uncertainty where the team's new purpose or goals aren't well-defined), or some variation in between. For the individuals in the team, these changes and pressures can often be described as increased "cognitive load", i.e. there are too many uncertainties in play, the team are trying to make sense and order in a chaotic system and they're trying to solve too many indistinct problems.
When people talk about cognitive load, it's often an unconscious shorthand for other things. Attentional load, for example: how much is the individual being required to remember and focus on (i.e. how many plates are they trying to spin). Stress levels are another: cognitive load is a catchy, sciencey-sounding phrase that suggests how much thinking a person has to maintain, when really we're hiding the fact that people are under too much pressure and are over-stressed.
Coming back to the "team-as-organism" metaphor again, there is one more condition that can be used to describe the impact of stress or pressure forces working against the team: allostatic load. Allostatic load describes the stresses on individual components of a system that place "wear and tear" or a dysregulation burden on the system as a whole (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430278/). A system under high allostatic load can see an increased cumulative biological risk which, leads to poor health and maladaptive trajectories. The response can be one of either:
- trying to compensate by trying to maintain (or even increase) the rate of work despite it clearly being unsustainable and the source of stress or pressure ("if I just get through all these tasks, things will get better", "I should be capable of doing all this. If I can't get this work done effectively, I will fail and other people will be let down"), or
- reducing the load on the system and allow a "rest and digest" state that moves the organism from a sympathetic nervous system to a parasympathetic one ("this is an unsustainable number of demands on me. I will step away", "I cannot reasonably achieve all these tasks. I will choose to let some fail because they are less important").
Similar to a plane that is about to stall, the instinct might be to pull the nose up to try and point the plane in the direction you want it to go, but the engines and wings are not generating any lift because there's not enough forward motion. Instead, the correct approach is to stop fighting to keep the plane in the air, point the nose down towards the ground to pick up speed and let the plane generate lift over the wings so that you can actually resume controlled flight as a next step.
Sometimes the right corrective action is one that begins by taking you away from where you eventually want to be.