Your Attention Please: A Conversation with Tom Davenport

Your Attention Please: A Conversation with Tom Davenport

Do we have your attention?

if you believe Tom Davenport, director of the Accenture Institute

for Strategic Change and co-author (with John Beck) of The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, probably not. According to Tom, the scarcest resource in today's business world is not ideas or even talent, but human attention. And when you stop to think about, it makes sense. We're all struggling to keep up with pace of change and technological development, the never-ending flow of e-mail contacts and voicemail messages, and the challenge of anticipating what an uncertain future will bring. How much of your limited attention can you allocate to any one thing?

To explore the value of attention for knowledge workers and their organizations, Information Outlook decided to chat with Tom Davenport about the book and, specifically, about the relationship between attention and strategy. We think Tom's perspectives will, well, grab your attention!

Jeff De Cagna: Why did you and John decide to explore the role of attention in our lives and in organizations?

Tom Davenport: Well, having done a fair amount of work in the area of information and knowledge management, it became clear as I spoke to people in organizations about their initiatives in these areas that attention was an essential commodity that was either already in short supply or would be soon. Everybody was building repositories and creating portals, and everybody was sending out compilations of what the organization knew. These are all great activities but, to be effective, they depended on somebody paying attention to them.

It occurred to me that at some point people were, in a sense, going to run out of free attention or at least they were going to have to get much better at allocating their existing supply. The importance of attention is one of those issues that we have come to recognize over time. People talk about it a great deal, and it is composed of various threads, including information overload and attention deficit and so on. Still, nobody had really analyzed it in any detail. So we decided we would.

JD: Just so we are clear for our readers, what is the definition you are using when you talk about "attention?"

TD: We define attention as focused mental engagement on a particular piece of information, and we are interested in how both people and the organizations in which they work get attention, keep attention, allocate attention and so on.

JD: One of the points that you make in the book is that "attention management" is not the same thing as "time management." Can you say a word about the difference between the two?

TD: I think we've all had situations when we spend a lot of time on something, yet we do not give it very much attention, and other situations when we don't spend very much time on something else yet give it quite a bit of focused mental engagement in that very short period. So, clearly, the two ideas are related, and I suppose the upper boundary of your attention is the absolute amount of time that you have. In basic terms, however, attention is a combination of how much time you devote to something, as well as how many brain cells you devote to something.

JD: Our September issue is about strategy, so let me jump into some questions on that subject. In The Attention Economy, you write that business strategy is most fundamentally about focusing corporate attention on some options above others. Can you expand on that?

TD: Well, I have always thought that the whole exercise of strategy was one of focusing on some things and not others. As we started to think about this book, we thought that when it comes to strategy, what is being focused is people's attention within an organization.

So say our strategy is to emphasize a particular product line within the organization, overcome a particular competitor, or solve a particular type of customer problem; a great many strategies say that the company will focus very heavily on its customers. All of this tells us that we have finite attention resources, and that we can't focus it on everything equally. With that in mind, let's choose the things that really matter to our success and focus our attention there. There is this kind of implicit assumption we make that if you focus people's attention on something, it will get better, it will improve. Strategy, then, is basically a set of declarations about the things on which we think it is worth focusing our organizational attention. The attention then turns into effort, action, and change, or at least one hopes it does. But I think sometimes that when strategies go awry, it is because the strategies don't involve enough choices, and organizations try to focus their attention on too many things.

JD: I think a great deal about the importance of language, and one thing I wanted to ask you about is the language choice between the terms "strategic planning" and "strategy." Do you think people in organizations are likely to pay greater attention to the idea of strategy over yet another strategic plan, with all of the negative connotations that go with that term?

TD: I think you are right that the term "strategy" suggests an ongoing process, and strategy sounds important. Strategic plan, on the other hand, suggests that the attention is to be devoted to producing a document, and we assume from past experience that those documents aren't used very effectively in many cases. Even the fact that the term "plan" implies a distinction between what we hope will happen and what actually happens is something we don't really want to believe.

So I agree that "strategy" is a more appealing term than

"strategic plan" and I think it focuses our attention on an ongoing process, rather than on producing a single document or deliverable.

JD: One of the articles in this issue deals with scenario planning. Can you share how scenarios serve to focus organizational attention on strategic concerns?

TD: Scenarios are a great example of strategy as an attention-oriented exercise because they force you to exclude most aspects of the environment and focus your attention on a limited number of factors. In scenarios, you take two dimensions of your entire business environment and come up with a four-cell matrix that represents four different scenarios about the future. This is a powerful approach precisely because we are excluding various elements of the business environment that may distract us, and acknowledging that we must focus attention on only these two dimensions and their possible impact on our organization.

JD: How does an organization create a culture in which its members are capable of devoting the necessary attention to innovation, which is increasingly a critical strategic capability?

TD: Well, I think it is similar to the idea of strategy in a way because strategy is an occasion when we step out of the day-to-day processes of our business and devote some concerted attention to what we would like our business to be in the future. I think innovation is the same way. My belief is that everybody is capable of engaging in innovative thinking, but most people don't really feel like it is a legitimate effort to which they should be devoting their brain cells at any given moment.

But if you can tell your people that some fraction of their mental energies needs to be devoted to innovation (rather than to the status quo), I think it is like turning on switch in people's brains in an effort to harness all those neurons for thinking about new stuff instead of just keeping the existing business going. I think most organizations don't really carve out attention for innovation, and when they do, it tends to be a dedicated set of people in an R&D function. I have always thought, however, that the organizations that can turn everybody's brains toward innovation are going to be more successful than those who don't.

JD: Tom, what advice can you offer to information professionals who are trying to discern how the organization is choosing to allocate its attention resources strategically?

TD: I think it's a very critical issue, and basically the kind of information proliferation that we've experienced over the past few decades has created a great need for people like information professionals who can help focus the attention of people in an organization on what really matters. Indeed, given the changes we've seen in organizations recently, I think it must be people like information professionals who look at the strategy of their organizations and then target and focus the information that is circulated throughout the firm.

If they do this, information professionals can help protect their customers' attention from stuff that is not terribly relevant. Of course, it is a pretty heavy responsibility, and it requires a close working relationship between information professionals and the senior management of the organization. Senior leaders must trust the information professional to interpret the strategy and translate that into what's really important from an information and knowledge standpoint. Historically, people have wanted unfiltered access to information, and they didn't necessarily want intermediaries telling them what information really mattered. I think, however, that as attention is in shorter supply, they will be more grateful and more in need of somebody to do that filtering and to give them the information on which it really makes sense for them to focus their attention.

JD: What are some of the attention-focusing questions you think information professionals should be asking themselves as they try to make strategic choices for their own information centers within the broader context of the organizations in which they work?

TD: You need to start out with the current state of affairs, and I think information professionals need some sense of where most of the organization's attention is going today. Then they can work with senior executives to think through what senior managers want people to be thinking about.

When we worked with one of our consulting teams on this, we found that most of the team's attention was going not to client-oriented innovation, but to internal coordination, i.e., how do we get organized and how do we work together to make sure we meet our commitments? But there wasn't much attention going to new ideas that could be brought to the client. Once we realized there was a problem, we made a conscious effort to improve things and, in fact, within a couple of months there was a big improvement.

So I think you need to examine the status quo. When you think about how you would like the future to be different in terms of what people should be focusing on, then you can determine what information is needed to support that direction for the organization's attention going forward.

JD: What is your candid assessment of the current state of knowledge management activities in organizations, and where do you think we are headed over the next five years?

TD: When it comes to knowledge management, I think we're at a crossroads. We've built many repositories, we have created many portals, and we have strung together many documentselectronic and otherwisefor knowledge management purposes. But I do not think we've done a very good job of integrating all of these capabilities into what knowledge workers do. Because attention is so scarce and because there is too little of it to go around, we have not had the effective use of knowledge management for which we might have hoped. People are too busy doing their regular jobs to be very effective as consumers and providers of knowledge.

So, we haven't "baked" knowledge management into today's jobs very effectively. We haven't redesigned the way work is done. We haven't made importing and exporting knowledge a natural thing to do to make people more effective. Instead, we've added knowledge management on top of all of the other things that knowledge workers do, and I think it has become a big problem. I believe that over the next couple of years, the organizations that will really succeed with knowledge management will be those that start to think very carefully about the roles of knowledge workers.

JD: What role do you think information professionals can be or should be playing when it comes to helping their individual customers manage their attention more effectively and managing the organization's broader "attention markets," as you refer to them in the book?

TD: I think that this whole area of attention must be added to the repertoire of information professionals. The classical model of the information professional involves finding out what information people want. You do your reference interviews, define the requirements for their information, and you deliver it to them in whatever form makes the most sense.

The fact is, however, that just because you wanted some information doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to attend to it at all. So information professionals must become much more aggressive and attention-oriented. It is a very attention-contentious world out there and, if information professionals want to be successful, they can't just provide information. Information must be provided in a very attention-getting way, and you must think very creatively about how to do that.

For example, in the book, I talk about what some of the Accenture knowledge managers are doing. They use the information they want to communicate in the context of a story, package it up in an appealing way, and send shorter items every week as opposed to longer items every month. The whole way the information is formatted and presented needs to change dramatically if you care about this dimension of attention. If you don't care about this dimension of attention, then as far as I can tell, you might as well be out of business.

JD: We like to help our readers get to know the people we interview a little bit on a personal level. This is our September issue, and since September is the month in which most people in North America go back to school, what was it that you liked best about going to school?

TD: I loved school. I wish I could go back. It is one of the reasons why I keep teaching. I like being in touch with universities and schools and so on. The idea that you could take a full-time job and devote it to reading, learning, and discussing things, that was an incredible luxury for me. Now I feel like I don't have that luxury much any more, and I really regret it.

The good thing about teaching for me is that it's a way to learn new stuff, and it's an excuse to read.

JD: Is there a particular teacher you had whose example you think about when you're having a difficult moment in teaching your own students?

TD: Well, I mostly teach MBAs and, in general, I don't find that they are that motivated by the ideas. Instead, they are mostly motivated by getting the MBA as a credential and then returning to work. I suppose, however, that my favorite teacher is a man named Richard Machalek, who helped me in sociology as an undergraduate. Even though I was a lowly student, he was willing to be friends with me and he didn't make any distinction between us as student and professor. That's the kind of teacher I would like to be, one who does not make hard-and-fast distinctions between teacher and student. Richard was interested in learning from me, just as much as I was interested in learning from him, even though I felt like I had a great deal less to offer him.

JD: You won't be surprised by my last question. What is it about libraries that you love?

TD: Oh, I like the smell of the books. I like the serendipity of finding a book that you never thought about before or for which you weren't even looking. I like comfortable chairs. And I like being around other people who are reading and looking at books.

To learn more about Tom Davenport and the Attention Economy, visit www.attentionbook.com on the World Wide Web.