When experienced employees miss something during familiar work, one of the most common responses is some version of the same advice: Pay attention. Stay focused. Don't get complacent. Be careful.
But if we actually want to improve attention during routine work, asking people to use more of it isn't the answer. Attention is limited. Automatic execution is inevitable. And experienced employees cannot stay consciously engaged with every aspect of familiar work all day long.
So improving attention isn't about getting people to pay attention more. It's about making better use of the attention they have.
That requires organizations to think differently about their role.
Three Questions to Ask About Routine Work
That shift in responsibility starts with three questions.
1. How Do We Make the Best Use of People's Limited Attention?
Attention is a limited resource. That means organizations shouldn't simply ask employees to use more of it. They should think carefully about what they're asking people to pay attention to in the first place. Where do people really need to think? Where can the work itself reduce unnecessary demands on attention? And where can the environment help people reconnect with what is happening around them? The goal is to make the best use of the attention people have.
2. How Will People Recognize and Respond to Changing Conditions?
Even exceptionally well-designed work cannot anticipate every changing condition. Equipment fails. Plans change. People misunderstand one another. Something unexpected happens. At some point, people still have to recognize: Something is different.
But recognition depends on re-engagement. People need reliable ways to periodically reconnect with the work and determine whether the familiar pattern they're following still fits current conditions. In essence, they need opportunities to ask: Does my mental picture still match what's actually happening?
And when it doesn't, they need the skills to respond deliberately.
3. How Will These Behaviors Become the New Routine?
Identifying the right behaviors isn't enough. Neither is teaching them once. If a new behavior is going to compete with years of established habits, it has to survive outside the classroom and become part of how people actually work. That means organizations need to think beyond what people should do and consider what it will take for them to do it consistently.
Three Organizational Imperatives
Together, these three questions lead to three organizational imperatives.
1. Design Work to Make the Best Use of Human Attention
The first responsibility is to design the work itself. Instead of relying on employees to manage attention entirely on their own, organizations can reduce unnecessary cognitive demands, make important information easier to see, protect attention, and create opportunities to re-engage into the work. That means asking questions like:
* Where can unnecessary complexity be removed?
* What information can be made easier to see?
* What decisions can be simplified?
* Where can verification be built into the work rather than relying on memory?
* How can interruptions and competing demands be reduced when attention matters?
* How can the work itself create opportunities for people to re-engage rather than relying on them to remember to "pay attention"?
Sometimes the best way to improve attention isn't to ask people to think harder. It's to design the work so they don't have to spend limited cognitive resources on things the system could handle for them.
2. Develop Employees' Ability to Recognize and Respond to Changing Conditions
Even the best-designed work cannot eliminate variability. People will still encounter situations where something doesn't match what they expected. When that happens, they need to recognize the difference and respond appropriately.
The goal is to identify small, repeatable behaviors that help people reconnect with current conditions, recognize when something has changed, and respond deliberately. Instead of teaching only broad concepts like “situational awareness,” “critical thinking,” or “communication,” identify the specific behaviors that help create those outcomes.
* Deliberately scan the environment.
* Ask a critical question.
* Verify information with another person.
* Challenge an assumption.
* Pause briefly to compare what's happening with what was expected.
These are things people can actually do. They're observable. They're coachable. And with repetition, they can become habitual.
I sometimes think of these as anti-habit habits: behaviors we intentionally develop to periodically reconnect people with the work and verify that their existing habits still fit the situation.
3. Embed Those Behaviors Into Everyday Work
Once the right behaviors are identified, organizations need to make a concerted effort to embed them into everyday work.
This is where training often falls short. Organizations invest significant effort in teaching people what they want them to do, but much less in creating the conditions that make the new behavior likely to survive. People need to be able to perform the behavior, recognize when to use it, and get enough repetitions for it to become familiar. Leaders need to model and reinforce it, supervisors need to coach it, and the surrounding system needs to support it.
The surrounding culture needs to make the behavior feel normal rather than exceptional. Eventually, the goal is for people not to have to remember to use the new behavior. It simply becomes part of how the work gets done.
A Different Way to Think About Routine Work
Put the three imperatives together, and you get a very different organizational response to the Productivity–Awareness Paradox.
None of it requires eliminating automatic execution. Quite the opposite. We want experienced people to benefit from the speed, skill, and efficiency that familiarity creates. Instead, design around the tension: make better use of limited attention, develop reliable ways for people to recognize and respond when familiar patterns no longer fit, and embed those behaviors into everyday work. This allows automatic execution to do what it does well while creating reliable ways for people to re-engage when the situation requires something different.
That's a fundamentally different approach from asking people to “pay more attention.” It broadens our view of responsibility. If familiarity predictably changes how people allocate attention, then organizations have a role in designing work and developing behaviors around that reality.
That's where the practical work begins.
Coming Up Next
We'll start with the first imperative: how organizations can design routine work to make better use of people's limited attention without sacrificing the efficiency that experience creates.
Next in the series: Designing Routine Work for the Human Brain