There’s a pattern I've seen regularly in organisations; you may have seen it too. Something serious happens, perhaps a missed deadline, a customer complaint, or a system failure, and everyone dives into it with real urgency. Meetings are called. Charts appear. People engage. And we have one of those 'we can’t let this happen again' moments.
And then… a few days later… barely a mention. Last week’s 'top priority' has become this week’s gentle background niggle. Not fixed. Not forgotten. Just… parked somewhere behind the next wave of urgency and noise.
This is what I call the half-life of attention: the rate at which focus, energy, and commitment fade after the initial spike of energy and urgency. The problem may still exist, but that feeling of urgency evaporates surprisingly quickly.
And there are some very good reasons why this happens - and not surprisingly, they're just a normal part of being human.
First, many issues simply feel more dramatic when they first appear. It's the surprise, the unknown, and we imagine worst-case scenarios. We feel the heat. Then, as more information comes in, we realise the issue may not be quite as catastrophic as we first thought. Urgency dips.
Second, new urgent things arrive. Every day brings its own mini-crises - some real, some imagined. And with limited cognitive capacity (and even more limited organisational capacity), something always has to give. Usually it’s the thing that’s no longer shouting the loudest.
Third, we adapt. Give a team a recurring or ongoing problem and, after a while, they’ll simply learn to live with it. It becomes 'just the way things are'. We probably put a band-aid on the problem which was meant to be a temporary workaround, but those often harden into permanent fixtures if nobody keeps attention alive long enough to make the proper fix.
Fourth, talking about the problem often feels like progress. A good meeting, a robust discussion, a few action points - and suddenly everyone feels lighter, as if something meaningful has been resolved. Except it hasn’t. Only the emotional weight has been lifted.
And finally, when leaders move on (to the next big question, issue, shiny thing etc), the organisation moves on with them. Attention follows authority. If leadership shifts its focus to something else, even subtly, the energy around the issue dissolves almost instantly.
When attention fades too quickly, we get half-baked solutions. Things get patched, not fixed. We get carry-over problems that quietly shape culture and performance for years, becoming the source of bigger problems further down the road.
This is simply how we humans operate. When the pressure is on, we focus on the 'here and now'; those things that are threatening us NOW. And if, after a short time, we are still here, alive and kicking, then perhaps the issue wasn't too bad after all - we got away with it - we are probably OK and are probably going to be OK. And so, attention has a natural decay curve. Energy dissipates. Even good intentions have a shelf life. This is largely done automatically - it's our natural response.
The leadership challenge is knowing this - and planning for it.
The challenge with attention isn’t enthusiasm — it’s endurance. Most issue resolution starts with plenty of energy and noise - we may put out the fire, limit the damage, and fix a few things; we may apply Band-aid fixes which give us a false sense of closure. The initial discomfort fades. And the issue becomes easier to live with than to complete. And so, if we don't push on and really tackle the real underlying problems - the issue will just quietly join the backlog of 'things we meant to fix'. And, the incremental cost of delaying an inevitable response to a problem is well understood.
This isn’t about keeping everyone in a state of constant tension. It’s simply about applying leadership to resist our natural tendency to let our attention to move on, and holding it steady for long enough to get the job done; to understand the issue properly, decide what we need to do about it, and then follow through.
Once we have taken the time to (pause and) understand the problem, we can allocate an appropriate amount of attention and resources to it. Sometimes that’s as simple as asking a question at the right moment: “Where did we get with that?” Sometimes it’s making it a recurring agenda item, or sometimes a full blown project.
If pausing can help us make better choices, persistence helps those choices actually make a difference.
The half-life of attention is real, but with a little care, we don’t have to let it decide the outcome.
Ad Futurum
Graham
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