Day-to-day shifts in priorities and ways of working quietly drain the cognitive capacity teams and individuals need to work and learn. Discover how designing work to protect that capacity can help your team spend less time managing change and more time driving it.
We all know the feeling of ending a week full of activity but short on progress. Between shifting priorities, back-to-back meetings, and the constant rethinking of work, it’s easy to find yourself spending weeks managing change rather than driving it. Multiplied across an organization, that’s not just cognitively exhausting; it’s a drain on the very capacity that allows teams to adapt, innovate, learn, and thrive. Cognitive capacity is an organizational resource. Designing it deliberately is one of the highest-leverage moves a people leader can make.
Our McKinsey Research and Innovation Learning Lab operates in a highly dynamic environment. While our goal is to drive innovation in how people learn and develop at work, our methods are continually shaped by evolving research, emerging technologies, and shifting stakeholder needs. In this setting, as in most knowledge work, the cognitive toll builds quietly. Without the right structures to absorb these shifts, research suggests that [1] cognitive effort naturally drifts toward what feels immediate, rather than toward the slower, more exploratory thinking that innovation depends on.
As a lab, we looked inward to identify where structure could shoulder the cognitive burden individuals were managing alone. The result was a series of small shifts that accelerated our pace while safeguarding our best thinking.
Here is what we found:
Make sensemaking a shared team practice
Change becomes most costly when people are left to interpret the implications of change on their own. Navigating [3] uncertainty individually by cycling through unresolved questions while trying to move work forward draws on the same cognitive resources needed for the work itself. This uncertainty also stalls learning, as it’s hard to build on existing knowledge when you aren't sure what still applies.
In the lab, we created a formal ritual to regularly reflect on changes around us and discuss the implications and opportunities for our work. We call this process “sensemaking.” Without it, individuals are left to process change alone, often gravitating toward risk rather than possibility. Our ritual shifted that dynamic, reducing the quiet, fragmented sensemaking happening in the background and giving everyone a clearer foundation to build from.
For people leaders, this means building sensemaking into the team’s regular rhythms rather than leaving each person to navigate change in isolation. Collective sensemaking doesn't replace the need for personal reflection; it strengthens it. By creating a shared foundation of understanding, leaders ensure that individual processing time becomes more focused, grounded, and effective. Most of us treat that time as optional, but making it a recurring commitment by protecting it in calendars is what stops it from being the first thing to give away. Like any habit, its value builds over time, creating the conditions that enable you to make sense of what is shifting around you and do the deeper work that demands your best thinking.
Align on what makes work worth doing
A surprising amount of cognitive effort does not come from work itself; it comes from uncertainty about whether the work truly matters. Research on meaningful work suggests [5] that when people cannot connect their efforts to clear value, engagement and focus suffer, and individuals are left to carry that uncertainty alone, making it harder to sustain the quality of thinking the work demands.
In the lab, when we identify opportunities during sensemaking, we put them through a filtering ritual. We rate an idea’s potential impact on the organization, but we also evaluate its broader value for our industry. This ritual clarifies the work and aligns everyone on why it matters. It also signals something important: Work that passes this filter will create productive friction, which is the kind of challenge that pushes scientific thinking, accelerates learning, and makes change energizing rather than exhausting.
For people leaders, this means defining what makes the work meaningful before it begins, rather than leaving individuals to figure that out while executing it. Clear intent up front reduces friction and aligns effort from the start. For individuals, when that clarity is missing, the most effective move is to surface it early. Ask directly, or make your assumptions visible so they can be tested and refined. But part of that judgment also belongs to you. Deciding how much is enough to deliver real value, and stopping there, is what allows you to keep doing good work across everything else.
Agree on what stops before something new starts
The brain does not switch between tasks cleanly. Each interruption creates a switching cost and leaves behind cognitive fragments from the previous task that limit focus [6]. Over a day, those fragments build up and reduce the ability to think deeply. This also applies to learning: Every interruption makes it harder to process what you are working on deeply enough for you to make progress.
In the lab, we practice frequent prioritization through a simple rule: When a new opportunity emerges, something needs to be paused or subtracted entirely. In our space, ideas and opportunities emerge often, and it’s incredibly tempting to gravitate toward the new idea, but just as hard to let go of work already in progress. This shift toward frequent prioritization has reduced our project time frames and freed our cognitive capacity for work that drives the most value.
For people leaders, this means making subtraction a team-level decision, not something individuals are expected to negotiate quietly on their own. That discipline must still happen at a personal level: When something new arrives, it is worth asking what you will stop or reduce to make room for it. Without that, everything competes for the same limited capacity, and nothing gets the depth it needs. That discipline extends beyond work too—recovery time, including during weekends, must be protected with the same intention, or there is no space for the brain to reset [8].
Protecting cognitive capacity as a strategic organizational resource will increasingly differentiate organizations that adapt, innovate, and thrive through change. People leaders who build the structures that make that possible—shared sensemaking, a clear standard for the work that gets chosen, prioritization as a team discipline—and who help individuals work within them, are future-proofing their organizations’ ability to keep learning as the pace of change accelerates.
Citations
1. Cortney Stephen Rodet, “Does cognitive load affect creativity? An experiment using a divergent thinking task,” Economics Letters, November 2022, Volume 220, Article 110849.
- “Cognitive load induced by a number memorization task significantly reduces the quantity and variety of creative ideas.” (pg.1)
- “Stressors like time pressure, ambiguous objectives, lack of autonomy, and a burdensome workload have been shown to undermine creativity.” (pg. 2)
- “Organizations seeking to innovate and spark creativity ought to carefully consider work design (eg, workload, the division of labor, and the timing of deadlines) to mitigate the negative effects of cognitive load on creativity.” (pg. 7)
2. Oshin Vartanian, Sidney Ann Saint, Nicole Herz, and Peter Suedfeld, “The creative brain under stress: Considerations for performance in extreme environments,” Frontiers in Psychology, October 2020, Volume 11, Article 585969
Note: This study focuses on extreme environments (e.g., polar expeditions, deep-sea missions). The neural mechanisms described are applied here to knowledge work contexts by extension
- “It is generally assumed that stress has a detrimental effect on creativity. This assumption is not unreasonable: given that in the immediate aftermath of stress, physiological and cognitive resources are reallocated to promote vigilance and survival (Hermans et al., 2014), it is likely that higher-order cognitive capacities that would otherwise support creative cognition would be shifted to meet those more urgent needs.” (pg. 4)
- “The reallocation of resources away from ECN to SN, as well as the increased functional connectivity between SN and sensory cortices for prioritizing attention to salient stimuli may well hamper the neural dynamics that support the emergence of creative thought.” (pg. 4)
3. Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld, "Organizing and the process of sensemaking," Organization Science, July–August 2005, Volume 16, Number 4.
- “Explicit efforts at sensemaking tend to occur when the current state of the world is perceived to be different from the expected state of the world, or when there is no obvious way to engage the world. In such circumstances, there is a shift from the experience of immersion in projects to a sense that the flow of action has become unintelligible in some way. To make sense of the disruption, people look first for reasons that will enable them to resume the interrupted activity and stay in action.” (pg. 409)
- “When information is distributed among numerous parties, each with a different impression of what is happening, the cost of reconciling these disparate views is high, so discrepancies and ambiguities in outlook persist. Thus, multiple theories develop about what is happening and what needs to be done, people learn to work interdependently despite couplings loosened by the pursuit of diverse theories.” (pg. 418)
4. Sophie Leroy, “Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2009, Volume 109, Number 2.
- “People need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task, and their subsequent task performance suffers.” (abstract)
- “Attention residue refers to cognitions about a Task A that persist even though one has stopped working on Task A, transitioned to Task B, and is now working on Task B ... people who experience attention residue while performing another task operate under cognitive load due to the lingering cognitive activity.” (pg. 168)
- “Study 1 reveals that people do not systematically transition their attention as they move from one task to another. In fact, ending one’s cognitions about a task is difficult even when one must engage in another task.” (pg. 173)
- People often fail at fully switching their attention when they switch tasks and their task performance tends to suffer ... even when people are behaviorally focused on one task and are not multi-tasking, their minds may not be completely focused on the task at hand. ... In other words, multi-tasking may not only be due to competing simultaneous demands, like receiving an email or a text message during a meeting, but may also be a function of how the mind operates in a context where people must manage multiple tasks, activities, or responsibilities at the same time.” (pg. 179)
5. Blake A. Allan, Cassondra Batz-Barbarich, Haley M. Sterling, and Louis Tay, “Outcomes of meaningful work: A meta-analysis,” Journal of Management Studies, May 2019, Volume 56, Number 3; Andy Kemp, “Purposeful Work Boosts Engagement, but Few Experience It,” Gallup, November 12, 2025.
- “Results of this meta-analysis broadly support the notion that people with meaningful work feel better and work better but also extend the JCT by supporting a more complex outcome structure related to meaningful work and by providing evidence that meaningful work is conceptually distinct from closely related constructs.” (pg. 515)
- “Meaningful work had significant positive relations with (1) organizational commitment, (2) self-rated job performance, (3) organizational citizenship behaviours, (4) work engagement, (5) job satisfaction, (6) life satisfaction, (7) general health, and (8) life meaning and significant negative relations with (1) negative affect and (2) withdrawal intentions.” (pg. 510)
- "Meaningful work is a motivational force that propels people toward goal-directed behaviors and leads to positive affective states associated with work engagement (Chalofsky, 2003; Hackman and Oldham, 1976). Given this research, work engagement would have large correlation with meaningful work as one of its key proximal outcomes.” (pg. 503)
6. Sophie Leroy, “Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2009, Volume 109, Number 2.
- “Since working under cognitive load tends to hurt performance (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989), people experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task.” (pg. 168)
7. Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke, “The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2008.
- “Our results suggest that interruptions lead people to change not only work rhythms but also strategies and mental states.” (pg. 4)
- “When people are constantly interrupted, they develop a mode of working faster (and writing less) to compensate for the time they know they will lose by being interrupted. Yet working faster with interruptions has its cost: people in the interrupted conditions experienced a higher workload, more stress, higher frustration, more time pressure, and effort.” (pg. 4)
- “After only 20 minutes of interrupted performance people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.” (pg. 4)
8. Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz, “The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, July 2007, Volume 12, Number 3.
- “According to the Effort-Recovery Model, recovery occurs when no further demands are made on the functional systems called upon during work (Meijman & Mulder, 1998). When individuals psychologically detach from work during off-job time, the chances increase that demands on the functional systems taxed during work are reduced. However, when individuals do not detach and are still thinking about job-related issues, the identical functional systems are continuously challenged and no full recovery can occur.” (pg. 206)