During takeoff and landing, airlines don't simply tell pilots to concentrate harder.
They change the environment around them.
Under what's commonly known as the Sterile Cockpit Rule, nonessential activities and conversations are restricted during critical phases of flight. Pilots aren't supposed to spend their limited attention on things that have nothing to do with safely operating the aircraft.
The logic is straightforward.
Flying an aircraft during these periods already requires significant cognitive resources. Pilots are monitoring speed, altitude, aircraft configuration, weather, other traffic, air traffic control, checklists, and communication. So rather than adding another reminder to “stay focused,” aviation removes some of the things competing for that focus.
Think about how different that is from the way many organizations approach attention. When an employee misses something, the natural response is often to focus on the employee:
* Why didn't they notice it?
* Why didn't they remember?
* Why weren't they paying attention?
* Why didn't they stop and think?
The Sterile Cockpit Rule asks a different kind of question:
What can we change about the work so people's limited attention is available for what matters most?
That's the idea behind the first organizational imperative: design work to make the best use of human attention.
That doesn't necessarily mean redesigning the entire process. Often, relatively small changes to how information is presented, decisions are structured, interruptions are managed, or work is sequenced can reduce unnecessary demands on attention.
Attention Is Also a Design Problem
In the previous article, I argued that improving attention during routine work isn't about getting people to pay attention more. It's about making better use of the attention they have. That requires us to stop treating attention solely as something employees are responsible for bringing to the job.
Attention is also something organizations can influence through the way work is designed. Consider how often employees have to use their cognitive resources on things that don't actually require human judgment.
* Remembering information that could have been visible.
* Searching through a complicated procedure to find one important piece of information.
* Deciphering an unnecessarily complex form.
* Keeping several pieces of information in working memory.
* Switching repeatedly between tasks.
* Responding to interruptions while making an important decision.
None of those demands necessarily looks significant by itself. But attention is finite. Every unnecessary demand consumes some of the same cognitive capacity people need to notice differences, evaluate information, communicate, make decisions, and adapt when conditions change.
Good work design asks: What do we actually need people's brains to do here? And just as importantly: What can the system do for them?
Sometimes Better Attention Means Less Thinking
This can feel counterintuitive. When organizations are concerned about mistakes, the instinct is often to add something.
* Another reminder
* Another checklist
* Another form
* Another verification
* Another training
Sometimes those additions are exactly what's needed. But sometimes the better solution is to ask people to think less. If a decision can be simplified without sacrificing quality, simplify it. If information can be made visible instead of remembered, make it visible. If a critical step can be designed so an error is difficult or impossible to make, do that instead of depending solely on someone remembering not to make it.
Stop spending human judgment where it isn't necessary. Preserve limited cognitive resources for the situations where people really do need to notice, interpret, decide, communicate, and adapt
Four Ways to Think About Work Design
The Sterile Cockpit Rule is one example of designing around limited attention, but protecting cognitive resources is only one strategy. There are many ways organizations can change the work itself. I find it useful to think about four broad opportunities.
1. Reduce unnecessary cognitive demand. Don't spend people's limited attention on things the work can make easier. Simplify where possible, reduce reliance on memory, and make important information easier to see.
2. Create opportunities for re-engagement. Use existing transitions or deliberately build cues and pauses into the work that periodically reconnect people with current conditions. Transitions between stages of work, handoffs, changes in location, or meaningful changes in conditions can all provide an opportunity to briefly check: Are we still on course? Does what I expected to happen match what's actually happening? Be selective. Re-engagement itself requires attention, so adding too many prompts and interruptions can simply create another cognitive demand.
3. Protect cognitive resources. Reduce avoidable interruptions and competing demands when the work requires greater deliberate thought. This is exactly what the Sterile Cockpit Rule does: rather than asking pilots to concentrate harder, it protects the attention they already have.
4. Add stronger protections where attention alone isn't enough. Some parts of the work are too consequential to depend entirely on someone noticing, remembering, or making the right decision at the right time. Look for opportunities to constrain the process, require a verification before proceeding, mistake-proof critical steps, or otherwise make an error harder or impossible to make.
None of these strategies asks employees to become superhuman. They're based on the opposite assumption.
Human attention is limited, so we should design accordingly.
That's what it means to design work to make the best use of human attention.
Take a Look at One Routine Task
Pick a familiar task in your organization and look at it through this lens:
What are we asking people to notice, remember, decide, or verify? Where can we reduce unnecessary cognitive demand?
Where would it be valuable for people to reconnect with current conditions? Look for natural transitions, handoffs, changes, or other useful cues.
What competes for people's attention when deliberate thinking matters most? Look for interruptions or demands that can be reduced.
Where are the consequences too significant to rely on attention alone? Look for stronger protections that can be built into the work.
You may discover that some of the attention problems you've been trying to solve through reminders, training, or vigilance aren't really attention problems at all. They're design problems.
And that's good news. Because changing the design of the work can be much more reliable than hoping someone remembers to pay more attention at exactly the right moment.
Coming Up Next
But work design can only take us so far. No organization can anticipate every interruption, unexpected condition, or subtle change employees will encounter. Some variability will always require people to recognize when the familiar pattern no longer fits what's happening around them.
That's where the second imperative comes in: develop employees' ability to recognize and respond to changing conditions.
That's what we'll explore next.
Next in the series: Safer Routine Work Starts With Recognizing Change