The Neural Divide

How Kanban's Form Factor Can (and Will) Rewire Our Thinking

One direction. One destination. One perspective. This is your brain on digital filters: All destination, zero context.

Have you ever noticed how your brain just feels different staring at a physical Kanban papered with Post-its versus when scrolling through task cards in a digital tool? Turns out that it’s not your imagination at play here, it's neuroscience.

Your brain processes physical and virtual spaces using entirely different neural pathways, affecting everything from decision-making to team collaboration. Understanding this cognitive divide isn't just fascinating, it can be crucial for individual and team performance. Recently I’ve been paying attention to what happens to my own brain when I switch between physical and digital Kanban (and by extension, Obeya), and what I’ve discovered matters more than you might think for the modern knowledge worker.

The Digital Blinders Effect: Beautiful Detail, Invisible Context

Beautiful detail, invisible context: the digital filter paradox.

“Just show me my three tasks.” A mere 6 words, yet they speak volumes about how we are adapting (or maladapting?) to digital task management.

Against the backdrop of my recent relocation to Canada, while contending with an insane amount of deadline-driven moving parts yet trying desperately to keep overwhelm at bay, I caught myself doing exactly this: habitually filtering my digital board down to just my immediate tasks. It wasn't until I deliberately switched back to my physical Kanban that I noticed the stark difference in how my brain engaged with my work.

In my digital tool I was isolating “my” stuff. On my physical board my peripheral vision was still naturally picking up

Jim Benson

’s work, team dependencies, upcoming projects, other lesser-priority personal work, and - using color, size, avatars, and tokens - various system patterns that were beginning to surface. What started as a moment of self-awareness turned into a fascinating exploration of my own cognitive patterns. (Although I would give anything for an fMRI machine to see exactly what's lighting up differently in my brain between these two contexts.)

Recently, when my colleague

Pawel Brodzinski

pointed out how people tend to unconsciously filter their digital Kanban boards, it struck a nerve. Not because filtering is inherently wrong, but because in that moment we rarely understand let alone appreciate the cognitive trade-offs we’re making.

While the neuroscience of how our brains process physical versus virtual spaces deserves its own deep dive (coming soon, it’s in my backlog), it's worth noting that our spatial memory and systems thinking abilities evolved in the physical world. This fundamental difference in processing underlies many of the cognitive shifts we see when teams move from physical to digital Kanban.

The Cognitive Science Behind Our Screens

When you filter your view to just “your” tasks, you're engaging in what neuroscience refers to as “attentional selection.” A form of cognitive resource management, it’s your brain's way of focusing on specific information while suppressing that which it deems a distraction. Research reveals this process actually alters how your neural networks encode information, with several studies finding selective attention can significantly reduce our visual awareness, vis-à-vis our ability to recognize related patterns.

Standing in my new house, surrounded by books that need shelving, kitchen items that need organizing, art that’s just begging for the perfect wall (all by Sunday when I host my first dinner party), I'm living this reality. My digital Kanban captures all my desires, obligations, needs, while connecting me with my team across multiple time zones. Digital functionality is powerful, essential even, for distributed teams, but even for my current expansive personal work I would be lost without my online Kanban.

Yet every time we filter out what it considers (in the moment) an irrelevant task, or constrict our view to just one piece of our value stream, we're making a cognitive trade off that affects how we understand the entire system.

Miller’s Law posits that our working memory can only juggle between approximately 4 to 7 items at a time. So when faced with a board well in excess of 100 task cards (not to mention it’s further connected to…several other boards), our instinct to filter down to just “my” tasks isn't simply a coping mechanism, it's our prefrontal cortex - “our brain’s CEO” in charge of higher level thinking - desperately trying to prevent cognitive overload.

But here's the thing: by consistently filtering out the bigger picture, we're training our brains to process work in silos rather than in systems.

Brooklyn: A Lesson in Perspective

Same bridge, different neural pathways. Systems really do reveal themselves to those who step back.

I began to consider this in terms of how my hometown of Brooklyn may appear through different perspectives. If you're viewing the borough from your flight that’s left La Guardia, you’ll see how everything connects: how the BQE snakes through neighborhoods, creating both connections and divides; how Prospect Park serves as Brooklyn’s lungs; how the tributary streets from the Brooklyn Bridge pulse like veins through DUMBO into Downtown. You’ll notice Red Hook’s isolation from the Subway no doubt shaped its evolution, or how the G train’s path reveals hidden connections between neighborhoods that seem so very distant at street level. Your brain processes this complete view using neural pathways built for understanding complex systems and relationships.

But if you only ever get to experience your tiny Williamsburg neighborhood from the stoop of your brownstone, you lose understanding of how Bedford Avenue connects to the whole of Downtown. You might not realize why traffic suddenly spikes on your corner when Smorgasburg has opened for the season. Your brain actually processes these different views using different neural pathways: one built for detailed, immediate navigation, the other for broader systems thinking.

Deep Work Meets Digital Work: My Personal Journey

Those who know me know that I'm a devoted follower of Cal Newport’s Deep Work. It's not just a book I've read multiple times, it's one that's fundamentally changed how I manage my attention. No push notifications on my phone. Scheduled times for email, which I process in batches. Intentional spaces for focused work. These aren't just productivity hacks, they're cognitive frameworks that after several years of practice are noticeably reshaping how my brain engages with work and by extension, is able to maintain focus. And yet here I was, having carefully crafted my physical environment to support deep work while my digital workspace had become a series of shallow glimpses.

When filtering signal from the noise, what stories are we really losing?

Much like limiting myself to that front-step view of Williamsburg, I was creating artificial blinders in my digital space.

This explains why team members who habitually filter to see only their tasks often miss dependencies, struggle with priority decisions, and lose context for their work. It's not about their capability, it's about how our neural architecture processes information.

Practical Steps Forward

The solution here isn't to abandon filtering - not at all, as that invites overwhelming our cognitive capacity. Instead, it's about being cognizant of these trade-offs and deliberately creating practices that maintain system understanding while managing cognitive load.

So here’s what I’m experimenting with over the next several weeks:

1. Create shallow task blocks. Just as Newport recommends batching shallow work, I plan on setting aside specific time for those quick tasks that only need narrow focus. I'll save my full board views for my deep work sessions when my brain is ready for complex pattern recognition.

2. Regular “big picture” reviews to help maintain those more globally-focused neural networks. Much like Newport's emphasis on training your concentration muscle, I’ve begun to gradually increase the time I spend looking at the full board, starting with 10 minutes of undistracted full view analysis, then working up to longer sessions of zooming out to better grasp my work’s context.

3. Schedule board rituals. Similar to Newport’s fixed-schedule productivity, I’ll set specific times for zooming out to see my work’s entire picture. (It’s a toss up whether this makes sense as my Monday morning beginning the week ritual or, if it will be better suited for my end of week planning block. I’ll likely experiment with both.)

I plan on incorporating these into my standard work, and I welcome you to join me, and share your own observations.

Understanding these cognitive implications - working with my brain’s natural processes rather than against them - is transforming how I manage my own work. When I filter my board during periods of intense focus, now it's a conscious choice, with plans to return to the full view. Because at the end of the day it's not about avoiding complexity, it's about managing it intelligently.

For those leading digital teams, consider how your practices either support or hinder this cognitive balance. Are you creating opportunities for both focused work and system understanding? Do your team members understand the trade-offs they're making when they filter their view?

In our embrace of digital Kanban tools, we no doubt greatly enhance our ability to visualize, track, understand, share, learn from, and improve upon our work - be it distributed or otherwise. But we need to be mindful of how these tools shape not just our productivity, but how our brains process and understand work. The ways we choose to view our work today - the neural pathways we strengthen today - will define how we and our teams think and collaborate tomorrow. By understanding and managing these cognitive trade-offs, we can harness the power of digital Kanban while preserving our brain’s natural capacity for systems thinking.

Because the future of work isn't just about managing tasks more efficiently, it's about nurturing our team's ability to see, to understand, and to navigate increasingly complex systems…together.

With gratitude to

Pawel Brodzinski

, who inspired this post during our most recent discussion here.

All images ©Tonianne DeMaria.