Focus will kill you

Laser vision

For years, conventional wisdom held that the most focused organisations were the most likely to thrive. The logic seemed sound. Organisations without clear direction tend to:

• Drift with the preferences of the CEO.

• Lurch from initiative to initiative.

• Chase the latest management fashion or technological shiny object (today, AI).

  
  

Bearing up

Strong focus also creates coherence. It aligns decisions, behaviours, structures and priorities. This coherence can even protect against imitation. Competitors may copy your strategy but often fail to reproduce the organisational logic that makes it work.

In a relatively stable world, this made sense. But today’s reality is different.

Let’s make this personal and ratchet up the heat.

1. Surprise! - You are so focused on what you are doing that you don’t see the bear until you feel its claws. Game over.

2. Agility to the rescue – As before, but this time you out manoeuvre the bear. Ducking and weaving until it gives up and goes in search of a more compliant lunch. You survived but it was a close shave.

3. Anticipatory - Being smarter, you do not wait until the bear is upon you. You are continuously on the look-out. An early sighting will trigger a dash for the safe room. Unfortunately whilst scanning the horizon you are bitten by a venomous snake. Game over.

The bear and the snake represent disruptive forces. And in this case, even with only two forces at play, focus can be deadly. The world today comprises many forces, compounding and conflating to make our environments increasingly unknowable.

Focus on everything?

What most people don’t realise is that focus and attention are two very different things. Attention is being open to external signals without any prejudice. Focus is locking on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

Driving offers a useful analogy. Those who focus too narrowly are dangerous drivers. So too are those who spread their attention without concentrating on what matters.

Most of us instinctively do both. We maintain awareness of the wider environment: traffic flow, pedestrians and road conditions, whilst periodically focusing on the reckless motorcyclist weaving through traffic performing wheelies.

Safe driving depends on balancing attention and focus. So does organisational survival.

Getting it wrong

I was curious about the difference, and so wrote a book called Attention Dynamics, which wasn’t a number one Amazon bestseller, even for an hour, even in the attention dynamics category. An ironic example of focusing on a topic whilst not paying attention to the market.

Polycrises

Back to organisations. The need to navigate increasing disruption means that we need to blend focus with attention. So in some respects this requires a post-strategy approach. Or more specifically it requires an organisational design that can flex with reality.

Some will say that it is already well-established practice to develop a flexible strategy. And this may well keep the ship on an even keel when the weather is stormy. But throw pirates, a virus and some aggrieved whales into the mix and it soon becomes apparent that your ship was designed for a limited set of operational parameters reflective of a calmer world.

Nature abhors a plan

Creating a crisis plan for each possible disruption, each possible combination of these disruptions and the known secondary effects of such combinations is impossible. Nature knows that. Hence the lack of crisis planning documents on the savanna.

Nature offers an important lesson: the systems most likely to survive inhospitable conditions are living systems.

Our DNA contains deeply encoded survival logic, whilst culture acts as a distributed memory system, passing adaptive behaviours between generations. Together, they form a survival manual tested over millennia.

In that sense, living systems resemble nature’s version of an LLM: trained not on text, but on countless cycles of environmental feedback, adaptation, failure and ultimately on survival

Be intelligent

I advocate building organisations on living systems principles rather than relying exclusively on mechanical or agentic operating models. I refer to these as Intelligent Organisations, organisations designed to thrive under uncertainty by continuously sensing, deciding and acting in real-time. In the language of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, they are antifragile: disruption does not merely test them, it strengthens them.

My work is helping organisations become Intelligent Organisations. At its most abstract level, this is an organisation that can sense, decide, and act in real time. Rather than becoming overwhelmed by uncertainty, it remains calm in chaos and adapts continuously to changing conditions.

It also sees failure and value differently. Failure becomes information rather than blame. Value extends beyond short-term efficiency to include long-term viability, vitality, learning and human contribution.

What about AI?

Intelligent organisations recognise that AI is a tool, not a philosophy. Integrated thoughtfully, AI augments human capability rather than replacing it, allowing people to spend less time behaving like machines and more time exercising judgement, creativity, empathy and imagination.

The result is a workplace designed for human flourishing and self-actualisation, rather than a state-of-the-art battery farm. Let me know if your leadership team would value support in building an intelligent organisation.