A company that figures out the value of sustained attention, and how to articulate this value, and how to support sustained attention in its management processes will have a competitive advantage over companies unable to sustain its attention long enough to ask, much less answer such questions.
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Everything in our age fragments attention.
At work it is expected that resources will multitask, switch between tasks, and wear multiple hats. Look at the average Outlook calendar. It is a mosaic of presentations, reviews, check-points, updates , ramp-ups, stand-ups, walk-throughs, all-hands, face-to-faces, dog-and-ponies, debriefs, postmortems, brainstorms, daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, annual meetings. And we have emails and texts beeping in on us constantly, which we cannot not check, not to mention the compulsory peeks at twitter, facebook, stock prices and news.
It is now far ruder to expect someone to listen to you for five minutes than it is to interrupt an conversation or to permit an interruption when the other is trying to talk.
Book after book celebrates brevity — at length. These books all started out as blog posts, but were subsequently expanded into presentations, then articles, then through endless repetition of the same basic point and reams of redundant examples, overinflated into books of which nobody reads more than the first third. But no great loss. These rambling books teach the wisdom of impatience.
How do we get our news? Snippets and soundbites. Debates are just launch-pads for zingers. Candidates don’t even address one another, because nobody remembers the substance, only stumbles, flashes, general impressions of confidence or fumbling. Dialogue is nonexistent in politics, because it is a liability. It will be picked apart into damning evidence of belonging to this or that stereotype, or believing in this or that stereotype.
And, of course there is the celebrated brusque ADD of our C-level executives, which we indulge with executive summaries, elevator pitches and filtering. Are they distracted because they are busy, or is it actually the other way around?
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Facts can be broken down, chopped up, pureed and liquified.
We can know what we’re prepared to know at a glance or, in complicated cases, in a sporadic series of glances.
But to understand in a new way: that takes sustained effort, desire and faith.
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Next time the world seems to have played itself out, that pop culture seems to have fallen into a cycle of recycling, where you cannot remember the last time something surprised you with newness and freshness and potential, ask yourself: Facebook! Twitter! iPhone! Email! Text? Squirrel!