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"STRONGER TOGETHER" is a weekly column where Tanya explores key issues. This week, Tanya discusses why the cost leaders scrutinise least may be the one affecting their people the most: cognitive load.
By IMPACT Community Services Managing Director Tanya O'Shea
The Federal Budget continues to dominate media coverage, alongside the usual advice on how to make money stretch further. This week, I found myself reviewing a straightforward financial decision: a property valuation quote that had increased significantly since the last time we engaged the service. It prompted the usual questions: Has the scope changed? Is the market driving this? Should we test it?
That’s what good governance looks like. We interrogate cost. We compare. We justify. We ask questions for clarity.
But it struck me that while we are disciplined about financial inputs, there is one cost we almost never question with the same rigour: the cost of cognitive load.
Cognitive load is the quiet accumulation of decisions, interruptions, priorities, and competing demands that sit behind every role, but especially for those in leadership. It is the mental effort required to hold complexity, make judgments with incomplete information, and switch rapidly between challenges that all feel urgent. Unlike property, payroll or program costs, this doesn’t appear in a budget line. It doesn’t trigger a procurement process. It doesn’t get benchmarked.
Instead, we just carry it. And increasingly, we are asking people to carry more of it.
Modern workplaces have become more complex, not less. Decisions are rarely straightforward. Information is constant. Technology has enabled speed, but it has also removed the natural pauses that once allowed thinking to catch up with doing. The result is not simply “busy” people; it is cognitively overloaded people. This is not an issue related to resilience or capability. It is a structural issue. You can have highly capable, committed people still feeling stretched because the system they are operating in demands continuous attention, constant decision-making, and very little space to pause and think.
We would rarely accept a 35% increase in a financial contract without scrutiny. Yet it is entirely possible that, over time, we have allowed a similar increase in what we expect people to hold mentally, without ever recognising or naming it. And unfortunately, that has consequences.
When cognitive load is unmanaged, it shows up as slower decision-making, reduced clarity, fatigue, and, eventually, disengagement. Not because people don’t care, but because there is simply too much pressure, leading to an inability to process information at the required rate and standard.
The challenge for leaders is not to eliminate complexity (that would be unrealistic). Instead, it is to become more intentional about how much we are asking people to carry, and whether all of it is really necessary.
What can be simplified? What decisions can be removed, automated, or better supported? Where are we creating work that adds noise rather than value?
Because while financial discipline protects the organisation’s resources, attention to cognitive load protects its people.
And increasingly, that may be the more important investment.
