Paying attention to attention

The irony of publishing this on a site where writers are competing with catchy headlines and alluring first line previews isn’t lost on me. But if it nudges even one person towards a more purposeful path, I’ll consider the light dose of hypocrisy to be worth it.

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I recently had the privilege to participate in a number of discussions and panels around impact investing, my current main line. Unlike with mainstream finance, in which the objective is always financial risk/return optimisation, impact investing people are seeking to enable positive social or environmental outcomes, leaving much room for disagreement about how to weigh the various factors at play.

One of the most contentious elements is the tracking and reporting of impact metrics — how many tonnes of CO2 sequestered, how many students educated, or patients treated, or land area of wilderness preserved. There are inevitably trade-offs between bespoke vs standardised, and between rigour vs simplicity. Because there are so many ways to slice the data, and because positions on social and environmental goals tend to be driven by heart as well as head, the volume of discussion and nitpicking can seem to dwarf the issue at hand. So the question is reasonably asked — does it really matter?

The short answer is yes, but I don’t believe it is being well articulated by participants in this space. People will often cite Peter Drucker’s maxim — what gets measured gets managed. I think a better way of putting it is that by requiring something to be measured, we require attention to be paid to it. What we decide to pay attention to determines how we spend our limited resources of time and energy. Also, there is a reflexivity between attention and priorities. We allocate our attention based on an assessment of our priorities, which are then reinforced by fact that they are occupying our conscious awareness.

In extremis this results in hammer-always-seeking-nail syndrome, in which someone’s chosen field creates a mono-lens for interpreting the world. Anyone who has spent time in academic arts departments can attest to this — post-colonialist, feminist, psychoanalytic theorists, they are all guilty of this. Any text, regardless of authorial intent, will, upon examination, be revealed to be a treatise on the iniquities or colonialism or the Oedipus complex or whatever the particular area of expertise of the critic may be. They may have initially been drawn to the field by natural inclination, but extended focus entrenches a particular way of seeing things. Attention informs priorities.

In the case of investing, to require reporting on financials alone is to imply that financial outcomes alone should be paid attention to, should be optimised for. So I would suggest that the particulars of one impact reporting methodology vs another aren’t as important as saying to corporate management or investors — “the effect of your activities on the people and the planet matters at least as much as the economic return you derive from those activities; THAT is what you should be paying attention to!”

Of course, this applies not only to corporations but also to each of us as individuals. Our attention is our greatest resource. It dictates how we experience the world and the role we play in it. The decisions we make with how we direct our attention are really the decisions we make about the people that we want to be, or, unfortunately more often, the people we are prepared to settle on being. I think the Sartre had it right:

There is a war underway to capture our attention, to deprive us of agency over our most precious resource, essentially to prevent us from ‘realising ourselves’. And most people aren’t fighting back, if they are aware there is a war going on at all. The fundamental business model of Facebook, Twitter, et al. is predicated on them being able to capture your attention and then sell it to the highest bidder. There are teams of people with deep expertise and vast resources refining these products to each be more addictive, more compelling than the last. They take advantage of every psychological incentive system they can to keep our attention on trivialities so people can sell us shit we don’t need or even particularly want. What is at stake is truly fundamental. On a recent podcast, investor and author Albert Wenger put it brilliantly:

In the meantime, the world is facing pressing issues at every scale from fraying communities at the local level to existential calamity with climate change at the global level. There are no shortage of problems to which we should be allocating our time and energy and each one of us can, within our own capacities, make a contribution to the issue that resonates the most. Unfortunately too often, when our attention isn’t being hijacked by trivialities, the metrics we choose to focus on prevent us from maximising the true value that we create for others, as well as for ourselves.

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