Widening the field of view
Perhaps you already know what needs to change.
You have the research, the strategy, the dashboards and the business case. People understand the problem. The technology has been evaluated. The transformation programme is ready to begin.
So why spend more time looking?
Because organisations have a habit of becoming more complicated the closer you get to them.
The process map describes how work is supposed to happen. People know how it actually happens. The dashboard tells you what can be measured. Experience reveals what cannot. The organisational structure shows where responsibility sits, while informal relationships often determine how things really get done.
None of these representations is necessarily wrong. They are simply incomplete.
This is where Attention becomes commercially useful.
Not as another methodology, or an additional layer of process before anything can happen. Attention is the disciplined practice of widening the field of view before significant decisions become significant commitments.
It means noticing the workaround before automating it. Understanding what resistance might be protecting before trying to overcome it. Finding where knowledge has accumulated before reorganising the people who hold it. Questioning whether the problem described in the brief is the problem that actually needs solving.
Isn’t that what discovery is supposed to do?
Sometimes.
But discovery often begins after an important decision has already been made. We need a new platform. A new operating model. An AI strategy. A better customer experience. The question quietly shifts from what is happening here? to how should we deliver this?
Attention allows us to stay with the first question a little longer.
Not indefinitely. Organisations need to act. But assumptions become increasingly expensive once they have been translated into requirements, budgets, technology and organisational structures.
A little more attention at the beginning can prevent a great deal of correction later.
We cannot remove uncertainty from transformation, and we would be suspicious of anyone who claimed they could. What we can do is improve the quality of the decisions made within it.
Before increasing the size of the wager, we can improve the quality of the bet.
Because the first deliverable of transformation should not be a solution.
It should be better judgement.