“If one considers the challenges that elite sport performance presents to the brain, it is difficult to think of any human activity that places more demands on it.” – Vincent Walsh, neuroscientist – Is sport the brain’s biggest challenge?
In common perception, performance, whether in sport or work, is a matter of endurance, strength, and competence. However, what modern sports science tells us is a quite different story: the real challenge lies in the brain of any athletes or workers.
Neuroscientific research shows that the factor that most influences our ability to sustain effort, and inherent complexity of relative tasks, is not the body in a broader sense, but the mind; is the latter one that constantly evaluates whether the effort is still “worth sustaining” or it has to be aborted. It’s a perceptual challenge, not merely a physiological one.
And this changes everything, especially when we look at modern organizations, constantly engaged in what we might call cognitive endurance: complex projects, rapid decisions, continuous pressure.
It’s not the workload that makes us fail, but the perception of not having enough mental energy left to support it.
The Lesson of Psychobiology
“Fatigue is in the mind, not in the muscles”. In 2009, Italian scientist Samuele Marcora, along with his colleagues, published a study that reshaped our understanding of fatigue.
In his lab, Marcora asked a group of cyclists to perform two endurance tests to exhaustion. Before one of the tests, he had them complete 90 minutes of complex cognitive tasks (AX-Continuous Performance Task), mental exercises requiring sustained attention and cognitive control.
The results were surprising: the mentally fatigued athletes stopped on average 15% earlier than in the control condition, even though their physiological parameters (heart rate, oxygen consumption, lactate levels, etc.) showed no relevant difference compared to previous sessions and to another control group of cyclists.
In facts, the body could have kept going. It was the mind that decided to stop.
Marcora explained this dynamic through his Psychobiology of fatigue during endurance exercise, based on two central variables:
- Perception of Effort: the subjective perception of effort
- Motivation Potential: the potential motivation to sustain that effort
In essence: fatigue is not a lack of energy, but a signal from the brain, which constantly evaluates whether the effort is still worth maintaining.
The Hidden Formula of Performance
Marcora’s model can be summarized through this formula:
Performance = f (Perception of Effort, Motivation Potential)
This actually explains why two people, under the same physical or cognitive load, can react so differently.
- Physical Load
In sport: the real bodily effort the organism must sustain to perform (heart rate, oxygen consumption, lactate levels, power output in watts, etc.).
In business: teams’ competences, skills, experience, number of team members, etc., necessary to accomplish the task at hand. - Cognitive Load
In sport: the necessary effort to sustain the pace, projection of result, scenario planning, active management of competitors, streamlining of technical movements, etc.
In business: the mental effort required to maintain focus, decision-making, and control in a complex context (task difficulty, interruptions, informational entropy, learning of new topics, etc.).
Those with high motivation perceive the effort as manageable; those with low motivation experience it as unbearable. Thus, it’s not the effort itself that makes the difference, but the way the mind perceives and interprets it.
The mind acts as a central limiter: it constantly assesses the ratio between perceived fatigue and the expected value of the outcome. When that ratio exceeds a certain threshold, the brain “suggests” stopping.
Another key finding in Marcora’s work is that perceived fatigue steadily increases over time, even if the actual effort remains constant: it’s a perceptual curve that rises until the mind decides, it’s no longer worth it.
From the Athlete’s Brain to the Organization’s Brain
Now imagine applying this model from the sports field to a typical workday.
Huge workload, long hours of focus, complex decisions, management of tensions and polarities, strong multitasking, endless meetings, and communication loops; all this drains energies, exposing people to important cognitive load and stress. And as Marcora’s study shows, even without physical exhaustion, mental fatigue drastically reduces performance, clarity, and the ability to endure pressure.
This explains why performance in companies often drops even when skills and resources remain intact: the collective brain has reached its perceptual threshold.
We wrote already about this here and called this condition with a specific name: Organizational Lactate.
Just as muscles accumulate lactate during prolonged effort, organizations accumulate residues of cognitive fatigue, tension, informational noise, loss of meaning, decision overload. This “mental lactate” is invisible but alters collective perception of effort and reduces the ability to stay in flow.
A mentally fatigued organization doesn’t just lose efficiency; it loses confidence in its own ability to sustain performance.
From Psychobiology to Leadership Design
Marcora’s model offers valuable insights that can be transferred to leadership and organizational environments. In essence, both deal with the perceptual regulation of performance:
- Perception of effort represents not how much we work, but how heavy work feels
- Aligning personal with collective meaning (when personal and company’s missions nurture each other) pushes the mental threshold forward
- Words shape perception of difficulty and confidence in success; use them accordingly
- Proactively managing the cognitive load helps teams and leaders learn how to maintain focus even under strong pressure
In short: an organization’s performance depends on its ability to regulate the collective perception of effort (the mental dimension), not merely on increasing resources or skills (the physical dimension).
In sports, athletes train not only their bodies but also their minds, to better tolerate fatigue and maintain high performance under stress. This approach, which Marcora calls Brain Endurance Training, can also be applied to organizations by building routines, contexts, and languages that allow the collective brain to sustain focus, manage pressure, and regenerate without collapsing.
From Theory to Practice
One of the key principles we’ve explored is that performance arises from the ability to regulate the perception of effort. To transform this awareness into actual competence, leaders need pragmatic tools and approaches that translate concepts into daily actions, as we discussed also in Beyond Organizational Overtraining: The Dynamics of Sustainable Hyper Performance.
Here are some practical ways to train a team’s cognitive resilience:
- Cognitive Load Mapping: a map of the team’s cognitive load distinguishing between Intrinsic Load (task complexity, required skills), Extraneous Load (distractions, information overload, disorganization), and Generative Load (what generate learning, growth, and value). It helps identify where mental energy is wasted.
- Work Periodization: cyclical planning that alternates high, medium, and low-intensity cognitive phases, preventing prolonged fatigue and encouraging recovery and learning (which are pre-requisites for innovation).
- Entropy Assessment: analysis of informational noise and interruptions that block flow; this aiming at the introduction of deep work windows or “flow blocks”.
- Knowledge-Load Sharing: dynamic redistribution of knowledge and decision-making based on team capacity and mental availability.
- Self-Efficacy Practice: weekly reflections on individual and team achievements and learning, to strengthen the sense of competence.
These simple practices help teams shift from a model based on pressure to one based on regulation.
A leader inspired by this approach is, of course, not the one who imposes speed, but the ones who regulate rhythm: they know when to accelerate and when to regenerate, bringing clarity in ambiguity, keeping the challenge high, but actively working on its perception to maintain it below the threshold of teams’ cognitive overload.
That’s the ability to make the collective mind work at the optimal point between challenge and control.
In Summary
Mental fatigue is real, measurable, and influences performance more than we think.
The limit to better performance is not “physiological”, but perceptual.
Motivation and shared meaning are key levers that push that limit forward.
Organizations, like athletes, must learn to train their collective mind, not to resist more, but to stay longer, and more productively, in the state of Flow.
Content: Human-Generated + AI Processing
