I was working with a school recently that had a behaviour challenge. Or at least, that’s what they thought.
Every teacher was running their own system. In some ways that was great because people had ownership and autonomy. But it was also creating all these little conflicts. Between classrooms, corridors, playgrounds. Students didn’t know what to expect from one room to the next, and teachers were getting more and more stressed trying to hold it all together.
What they ended up doing was stripping it back. A few shared structures everyone agreed to. It wasn’t any one teacher’s perfect system. But as a whole, things settled down. The school felt like it could hold a bit more.
At the time I put it down to simplification. Fewer systems, less confusion. Makes sense. But my conversation this week with Meg Lee made me reflect on what else was going on.
Meg’s spent 20 years leading large school systems in the US, and she made a distinction on the podcast that I think is really important.
Cognitive load and workload are not the same thing.
You can cut your to-do list in half and still feel completely overwhelmed. Because it’s not about how many tasks are on the list. It’s about how many things your school is asking people to think deeply about at the same time.
And Meg goes further than that. She says organisations themselves have cognitive load. Not individual people. The system. When you stack new curriculum on top of a behaviour review on top of strategic planning on top of a safeguarding audit, you haven’t just added tasks. You’ve overwhelmed your school’s ability to think properly about any of them.
That school I was working with? They didn’t really have a behaviour problem. They had an organisational cognitive load problem. Too many competing systems asking people to think hard in too many different directions.
So here’s a question worth sitting with this weekend. Not “what can we take off people’s plates?” but “how many things are we asking this organisation to think hard about right now?”
Meg’s take is that you pick two things for the year. Stay with them. Come back next year and keep going with those same two things. I know that sounds too simple. And honestly, it’s the bit most leaders struggle with. Not because they disagree, but because board expectations, accreditation cycles, and external pressures all push in the other direction.
But if your school feels stretched right now and nobody can quite explain why, that question about organisational cognitive load might get you closer to the real answer than any workload audit will.
Listen to the full conversation with Meg here.
The September cohort of the Education Leaders Intensive is coming together and this kind of thinking is right at the heart of it. If you’re curious, have a look at shaneleaning.com/intensive or just reply to this email and I can send you more details or we can get on a quick call.
Have a great weekend.
Shane
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