Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, observed in a May 2026 New York Times podcast that the rate of change we’re living through is unlike anything humans evolved to process. And the data backs him up.
In 2010, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, noted that humanity was generating as much information every two days as we had from the dawn of civilization through 2003. Based on IDC’s 2018 forecast that the global datasphere would reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, the world now generates roughly that same five-exabyte volume of data in about 15 minutes.
While the data volume has grown, the human brain hasn’t upgraded to keep pace. The brain holds roughly four things in working memory at any given time. Four, against a civilization’s worth of information every 15 minutes.
COGNITIVE OVERLOAD
This is what researchers call cognitive overload: the point where the volume and complexity of incoming information exceed what working memory can process. When it happens, the prefrontal cortex, which is the control center for strategic thinking, becomes less effective, while the amygdala, wired for threat detection, becomes more active to protect us. The challenges we face as leaders in helping teams navigate a high-tech world are not just motivational or even technical. They are biological.
What this older neurological wiring does, in my experience, is pull us toward one of two extremes. The first is fear. A topic starts to register as a threat, the noise becomes overwhelming, and we lose the ability to pick out signals. The second is fascination, where we become so absorbed in a single idea, tool, or trend that we shut out everything else.
You can watch both extremes play out daily in how leaders respond to AI. Some are driven by fear of the technology itself: what it will do and what it means for our role in the world. Others are so fascinated with what AI will enable that they lose sight of how it connects to governance, culture, talent, and the larger systems around it.
In the center of this spectrum lies familiarity. Familiarity is enough context to know what matters, where to focus, and how to move with greater clarity. Familiarity is the humility to admit you can’t know everything anymore, and the discipline to build real context anyway, on the topics that matter most.
HOW TO BUILD FAMILIARITY
So how do you build it? Through deliberate practice, choosing which topics demand your attention, and going deep enough to build real context. For me, it has arrived in three different ways: as validation of an already present instinct, as amplification of an instinct while I built more context around it, or as the harder work of unlearning.
The first two have always come through reading widely and seeking opinions that differ from mine. However, I have found that unlearning matters most, because it’s what moves you back toward the center, and the center is where you can discern signal.
Familiarity gives leaders clarity. But clarity in one person doesn’t move a team forward.
Social neuroscience reinforces something many of us may know deep down, that human beings are wired for connection. Connection is one of the brain’s default responses to uncertainty and stress, and part of how we survived, adapted, and made progress together.
There is a line from Maya Angelou I have long admired and like to paraphrase for a current leadership context: People will forget how many promotions you helped them earn, how many P&L goals you hit, how much NPS you moved; but they will never forget how you made them feel.
The more technology and data accelerate, the more leadership has to become deeply human. High-tech demands high-touch.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In a time of cognitive overload, leaders must build the familiarity to separate signal from noise, the heart to make that signal matter, and the clarity to help people move forward together. That is how we turn complexity into conviction, and conviction into progress.
The same evolutionary wiring that can pull us toward fear or fascination is the wiring that built human connection, storytelling, and social bonds. And it can build the kind of collective intelligence that has carried our species through every disruption it has ever faced, including the ones that seemed, at the time, like they might be the last.
I believe that we still have that capacity.
Pawan Verma is executive vice president and chief data and information officer of Cencora.
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