The Crucial Balance of Focus and Notice

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Is Too Much Focus a Problem? is an instructive discussion from Working Knowledge of the Harvard Business School.  To hear self help authors and management consultants talk is to think that focus is the pièce de résistance of a successful life, leadership and business.  Not just these, but also friends and colleagues have advised me to do this very thing, because as they see it I'm working on way too many things.  At best, these well meaning folks see just half of the picture:

But sometimes focus can be detrimental to our health, both individually and organizationally. For example, Jerome Groopman, in his book How Doctors Think, advised us as patients to ask what might be the most important question of our lives when consulting with a doctor who has reached, and too often focused mentally on, a diagnosis and method of treatment. The question we patients should but rarely ask is, "What else could it be?" It's a question designed to disrupt focus.

Max Bazerman, in his new book, The Power of Noticing, concludes that excessive focus, among other things, is one of the reasons leaders fail to notice important facts relevant to their decisions. To make his point, he cites the popular example of an audience of leaders asked to focus on counting the number of times that a ball is passed among a group of people being shown on film. In the middle of one version of the film, a woman with an umbrella walks through the middle of group. Invariably, far more than half of viewers focus so intensely on the ball that they fail to see the woman with the umbrella. They are better focusers than noticers.

My take

Whether it's attention and concentration, perception and memory, knowledge and understanding, our capacity to think is limited.  One manager I knew spoke about keeping things simple and practical so frequently that it became clear to many of us that he had a narrow view and weak grasp of things.  But it isn't just someone like him, but rather all of us clamor for simplicity as a natural default in out cognition or intellect.  So it is easier for those self help authors et al. to encourage people simply to focus than to undertake a more complicated review of our wide ranging issues and priorities. 

At the very least, it is also important for people to step back, and notice, and ask What else is there?  Take our eyesight, for one.  We have an ability to direct our attention, but we also have peripheral vision at our disposal.  Young drivers are schooled on this very matter, as they learn to navigate a car through a maze of roadways and traffic.  CEOs, in particular, must abstract such a lesson, and keep their eyes and those of their people on the prize, so to speak, but must also develop their peripheral vision, for example, for emerging market trends, competitive moves and technology developments.  In an optimal scenario, CEOs need to focus and notice at the same time.  But if that simultaneity is impractical or difficult, then I advise them to step back regularly.  Once a quarter, as one reader suggested in the above article, is not enough in this rapidly shifting landscape.  Once a week, or once a day, even for just a few minutes is de rigueur.

Finally, mindfulness meditation may help.  It is about keeping a relaxed hovering attention to things around us and within us.  Practices such as T'ai Chi and yoga develop our skills at focusing and noticing at the same time.  For example, one breathing exercise I do, when meditating, is to imagine my mind is a murky pond to start.  By sitting still, keeping posture, and breathing deeply but naturally, sediments settle slowly to the bottom and the pond, that is, my mind, clears up in minutes.  That clarity is what helps notice things that I may not notice in the rush of day to day activities.