![]() You’re carrying a heavy physical load and collapsed from exhaustion. As tasks are delegated it frees up mental lifting capacity and makes it easier to carry the remaining load. In the cognitive arena, shedding workload means delegating. If (and this is a big leap) a person would realize they are becoming mentally overloaded (which they are very likely not going to do until it is too late), they can employ some of the same tactics used for physical overload. ![]() These symptoms may include confusion, forgetfulness, task fixation, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, stress blindness, and more. Neither the person being overloaded nor those around them may directly observe the symptoms. The outward signs of mental overload are not, unfortunately, as obvious. Or they may ask someone to help them carry the load. To cope with physical overload, a worker may shed some load to make their work easier. They become physically exhausted and no longer able to carry their load. When a person reaches their physical workload limits the symptoms are very obvious and outwardly observable. Issues of individual capacity aside, it is important to realize and acknowledge the limits to existing and, under stress, you’re going to reach those limits much sooner. Whether it is physical workload or mental workload, each of us have limits and those limits are not created equally in every person. This underscores the lesson I want to share about brain capacity under stress. Indeed, Caleb! You’re probably a little young to understand the cliche that “Two heads are better than one.” But you’re certainly old enough to intuit the thinking power of two brains being greater than the thinking power of one brain. When his dad asked him why he did that, Caleb said a two-headed fire chief would do a better job. Without prompting from dad, he put two heads on his incident commander and two heads on his safety officer. Caleb’s father, Will Ball, is the volunteer firefighter with of the Williamsport (MD) Fire Department and a career firefighter for the Hagerstown (MD) Fire Department.Ĭaleb was playing with his legos and set up an incident scene. Here is the incident scene photograph that was sent to me by the father of six-year-old Caleb Ball. Let’s spend a little time examining workload management. This lesson, unfortunately, is often overlooked and is often implicated as a contributing factor to near-miss and casualty events. A subscriber to the Situational Awareness Matters newsletter sent me a photograph of an emergency incident scene that caused me to reflect on a very important situational awareness lesson.
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