Your focus is more scattered now. This appears to be a fact. Whatever you are trying to achieve in your business or personal life is being undermined by a lack of focus. It’s not your fault. An article this week in Fast Company states that our attention has been “stolen by big and powerful forces”. Undoubtedly, the stress of the pandemic and a sub-optimal diet play their part. There are constant interruptions today that claim our attention, but as humans we do have free choice.
Focus and build your brain muscle
“That was really tiring!” was the comment of a client after working for an hour on a Prerequisite Tree, one of the Thinking Process Tools from the Theory of Constraints. Work makes us tired in many ways and fatigue is inevitable. What’s important is the results achieved through what makes us tired.
Our minds are engaged at work all the time, but to what end? It’s a sad fact that we tend not to use our brains as productively as we could. We are continuously distracted and that makes deep focus very challenging. Distraction is perhaps the number one enemy today, as highlighted in the disturbing article, ‘Our Minds Can Be Hijacked‘. This long read presents the concerns of several people who were involved in the creation of the very mechanisms that distract us on the internet and that they themselves have come to recognize as harmful. One of these people is Justin Rosenstein who developed the Facebook “like” button.
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
Technology and choice
The problem goes beyond simple distraction and could be a threat to the way we operate our democracies:
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
Rosenstein and others like him are restricting their use of addictive technologies. The article goes on to suggest that technology is interfering with something as fundamental as our free will.
According to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”
We are distracted by continuous stimulation from devices, emails, notifications of all sorts. We are distracted by endless meetings that make little sense. We are distracted by incorrectly designed interdependencies that make us lose energy and focus towards the goal. This is a real problem, because without deep focus we can’t produce the kind of quality analysis we need to guide our decisions and actions in a meaningful way. We will keep deciding and acting, but the end results could be disappointing, even quite the opposite to what we intended.
An antidote to distraction
The Theory of Constraints is all about focus. Adopting a consolidated method for focus can be an effective antidote to distraction. Working with the cycle of Thinking Processes from the Theory of Constraints takes us through critical phases of cognitive shift, from gaining a clear understanding of a current situation of blockage, through defining a realistic goal and identifying all the necessary steps to transition from our current reality towards a more desirable, future reality.
How can we heighten the focus of leadership teams? By understanding that an organization is one, whole system and that every system has a constraint. We can choose the constraint strategically as a leverage point. It becomes the focus of the organization and everything else is organized to make sure the constraint performs flawlessly. Focus becomes heightened through the availability of a clear and shared map of change. The Thinking Processes not only provide the analysis and the path, they also build and reinforce our ability to think systemically. It requires effort and, for many, an unprecedented amount of concentration, but the rewards pay off. We have seen over the years the remarkable things that companies can achieve by identifying an ambitious goal and pursuing it step by step, with the support of the Thinking Processes. Throughout the pandemic, they have proven to be a highly effective way for people to work together towards a goal at a distance. (See also ‘How to Do Meaningful Meetings with Purpose and Results‘).
Most importantly, the Thinking Processes give us back our ability to choose. They enable self-determination. By focusing our attention on what requires change, creating a goal and working to make that change happen, we affirm our right to participate in shaping the world. Let’s not be mindlessly distracted into other people’s agendas and remember that we always have a choice.
Intelligent Management works with decision makers with the authority and responsibility to make meaningful change. We have helped dozens of organizations to adopt a systemic approach to manage complexity and radically improve performance and growth for 25 years through our Decalogue management methodology. The Network of Projects organization design we developed is supported by our Ess3ntial software for multi-project finite scheduling based on the Critical Chain algorithm.
See our latest books Moving the Chains: An Operational Solution for Embracing Complexity in the Digital Age by our Founder Dr. Domenico Lepore, The Human Constraint – a digital business novel that has sold in 43 countries so far by Dr. Angela Montgomery and ‘Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization’ from CRC Press, New York by Dr. Domenico Lepore, Dr. .Angela Montgomery and Dr. Giovanni Siepe.
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