No, Harry. You were just talking to yourself. That’s all you ever do. Even in your dreams. And the act is wearing thin, the spots of the disco ball fade around you…
— A hallucination manifested as a bloated drunkard
Written by Antonio Sadaric and Carin-Isabel Knoop
We live in a world of information overload. Everything seems increasingly complex, exponentially more interconnected and interdependent, while our cognitive capacity remains the same — at the human level.
Managers in the modern workplace need to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information and evolving employee needs while dealing with leadership’s “regular” challenges. Vast amounts of data, emails, messages, reports, and various other forms of information make it challenging to process, prioritize, and make well-informed decisions efficiently. The siege never seems to end. Many of us still feel as we did in the pandemic when we lost our bearings in the fog of Zoom.
When you think you’ve grasped a fragment of understanding, another wave of data or demand crashes, dazing and disorienting.
Managing in this environment can feel like trying to piece together the night before after having one too many.
This installment of our GameFrame series joins a worn-down detective and defeated man, Harry Du Bois, in the video game Disco Elysium, to explore the challenges of sensemaking in a world of cognitive overload and how “thought cabinets” and mind and impact mapping can help managers.