What Are You Paying Attention To?
I am an obsessive podcaster, never missing an episode of Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam or Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell. I recently found a new addition to my queue (via a Revisionist History cross-post): No Small Endeavor. All three podcasts share many of the same guests and same topics of discussion. But, I was particularly interested in how Lee C. Camp—the host of No Small Endeavor—approaches the podcast from his perspective as a professor of theology and ethics. The goal of the No Small Endeavor podcast is to explore what it means to live a good life. Therefore, I was intrigued with how often he returns to the topic of attention, finding it worthy of my (ahem) attention.
Attention and its Values
Something about the word “attention” feels harsh to me. It calls to mind adults directing children to “pay attention!”; or the accusing question, “Are you paying attention to what I am saying?” I think my negative connotations are further reinforced when attention is framed as a commodity, such as the theoretical concept of an attention economy and the entities competing for our attention like social media.
Yet, despite my negative connotations of the word “attention,” I recognize there is something inherently important about attention as a quality. Some of the values of attention that I took away from various discussions on No Small Endeavor include:
Computation: Amishi Jha, the author of Peak Mind and Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative and professor of psychology at the University of Miami, describes how the human brain evolved with an attention system to help us compute all the information around us in an orderly manner to act upon, such as to identify physical or social threats.
Time management: Oliver Burkeman, the journalist and author of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, describes the relationship of attention within the finite-ness of life for helping us to manage, optimize, and/or be in control of our limited time. And while this may seem somewhat crass, he also connects time management to a greater end: “The world is bursting with wonder and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
Connectivity: Naomi Shibab Nye, a poet and writer, describes how attention is important for connecting to other people and our world, appreciating the richness of the world around us. She extols the virtues of learning to look (including as a child at the Saint Louis Art Museum), and poetically and humorously underscores that in her writing: “Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?”
The list above helped me sort out some of my conflicting feelings about attention. Even my original perception of Oliver Burkeman’s approach to time management and attention in the negative lens of “lifehacks, self-help books, and productivity gurus” (to quote the introduction to the No Small Endeavor conversation) changed. But what I really found illuminating was Lee C. Camp’s recollection in that episode with Oliver Burkeman:
“We recently did an interview with Rebecca DeYoung, who's a theologian, on the Seven Deadly Sins, and I was reminded of her description of the so-called sin of sloth, where typically we've thought of sloth as being lazy, with regard to productivity, but she notes that, historically sloth was thought of as inattention to more important matters or inattention to relationship or inattention to the meaning of life, and … it may be actually our obsessions on productivity might lead us toward, unexpectedly, sloth.”
This reflection really connected the dots for me about why attention is important. When we are deliberate about how we focus our attention, we work towards leading a meaningful life…including our working lives.
Attention and Museum Work
While I might describe my reflections on attention as an “a-ha moment,” it was also a “duh! moment”. My professional full-time work began with Randi Korn in 2008 back when Kera Collective was RK&A. At that time, Randi Korn and ACE Everett were focused on supporting intentional practice for museums, “a holistic way of thinking and working that includes collaborating with colleagues from across the organization to articulate the organization’s intended impact so it can plan the organization’s work” (p. xix in Intentional Practice for Museums: A Guide for Maximizing Impact). Intentional practice is all about focusing a museum’s attention on its intended impact and aligning its resources to achieve that end. Randi adapted Jim Collins’ hedgehog concept about company success in the for-profit sector to museums, which was itself inspired by a Greek parable about a hedgehog and fox to illustrate the value of a company that focuses its attention (a hedgehog) versus a company that is scattered and diffused (a fox).
Attention continues to be fundamental in the audience impact strategy work we do today at Kera Collective. We work to help museums center audiences and develop tools to help direct museums’ actions toward impact. These tools could be logic models, decision trees, audience composites, evaluation plans, question banks, impact audits, alignment checklists, or something else. Regardless of the specific type of tool we develop, all are designed to help museums continue to reorient themselves around audience impact.
There are many riffs on the phrase, “you are what you ___.” You are what you pay attention to is one version. What we do and do not give our attention to is a reflection of who we are. Thinking about museums, if the activities that you are doing are not aligned with the impact you want to achieve, then you are not truly attending to the impact you want to achieve.
Attention (and Inattention) as a Reflection of Who We Are
In my writing, I often look at definitions. I should not have been surprised to find that the definition of attention from the American Psychological Association points out the weighing of capacity and resources:
Attention
noun. A state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment rather than on others and the central nervous system is in a state of readiness to respond to stimuli. Because it has been presumed that human beings do not have an infinite capacity to attend to everything—focusing on certain items at the expense of others—much of the research in this field has been devoted to discerning which factors influence attention and to understanding the neural mechanisms that are involved in the selective processing of information.
Therefore, I leave you with three questions that you can apply personally or professionally:
What are you paying attention to?
What are you NOT paying attention to?
If our attention is a reflection of who we are, how do you feel about what you are and aren’t paying attention to?
