Real Flow with Brandi Olson
In this Podcast, hosts Andy Cleff, Jay Hrcsko, and Shana Burns chat with organizational agility expert Brandi Olson about her book: Real Flow and the impact of flood vs flow on burnout.
We cover a range of topics: Brandi’s inspirations for the book, cognitive science, organizational agility, lean principles, and permaculture.
Listen in and learn how to cultivate an evidence-driven approach to high-performing, agile organizations, with improved employee retention.
Teaser Snippets…
- When we work in ways that are really anti-human, we sell ourselves short. It’s not that we need to lower our expectations to be more human. We’re not realistic, we’re not realistic at all.
- What happens when you have a team or a team of teams, or an entire organization of people, who are constantly spending their days, context switching and multitasking and being flooded by competing priorities?
- The research says if you’re trying to switch back and forth between two tasks at one time, you will spend about 20 to 40% of your brain power context switching managing the switch – we don’t have to go into all the nuances of executive function, what’s happening in your brain, there’s a lot of really good reasons why that’s happening.
- This scales – so whether it’s three complex tasks, three projects, or goals, initiatives, features, take your pick – you’ll spend about 60% of your time, and not just your time, but your brain power.
- And when I say brain power, what the research tells us is, it’s literally the calories that your brain uses, and the amount of oxygen that your brain needs to manage the switch going back and forth, you’ll spend that on just managing the switch
- Say we pay somebody $100,000 a year. And we asked them to work on many competing priorities at the same time – we end up spending about 60% of their salary on just having them switch back and forth.
- Now imagine you’ve got like a team of 10 people, or a team of 100 people, or 100,000 people, how much money are we spending, just having people man back and forth between competing priorities?
