Managing Your Most Precious Resource: Organizational Attention
IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX WORLD, the scarcest collective resource of the modern leadership team may just be the most important one: attention. In vigilant organizations, executive attention is leveraged for greater agility and advantage, whereas in vulnerable ones, misdirected attention creates blind spots, myopia and delayed reactions.
The contrast between vigilant and vulnerable organizations is striking. The leadership of vulnerable organizations — such as Blockbuster, Toys‘R’Us, Kodak and many other now defunct companies — remains preoccupied with operational concerns and coping with daily pressures. As a result, most of their time is spent reacting to events, rather than shaping them and anticipating avoidable crises. This treadmill of ‘firefighting’ can easily become a downward spiral, with less and less time available to sense weak signals from the periphery or to probe them more deeply. In contrast, vigilant organizations recognize full well the limits of managerial attention and stay one step ahead.
Across industries, senior leadership teams face two pressing issues: How to expand their collective attention resource so that it doesn’t become a constraint on the ability to see threats and opportunities sooner; and how to best allocate such expanded attention to spotting weak signals of threats and opportunities from both inside and outside of the firm’s boundaries. In this article we will unpack these challenges in an effort to improve vigilance and lessen vulnerability.
The Psychological Limits of Individual Attention
Every leadership team is a collection of individuals, and as human beings, each team member has an inherently limited ability to pay attention, absorb and process information through their mental filters. Fortunately, a good deal is known about these limits and how they can be overcome. Much of the research on attention has emphasized individual constraints on how much (or little) information human beings can process at any one time, the varying
