Capture Attention with Lean Communication

Have you ever had the experience of having someone hang on your every word, giving you their full attention in a sincere effort to profit from what you’re saying? Feels great, doesn’t it? But how often does that happen?

We all know that time is money, but I would submit that attention is worth even more. Getting time on a busy person’s calendar is hard enough, but getting their full engagement during that time is much harder; the temptation to multitask, to glance at their email or to be distracted by more pressing concerns, is extremely tough to overcome.

With all the world’s information seemingly at our fingertips, and with the crazy and ever-growing demands on our time, attention is one of the scarcest resources we have. As economist Herbert Simon said, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”[1]

Here are a few disturbing statistics:

In 1968, the average length of a political soundbite on national news was 43 seconds. By 1988, it was down to 10 seconds and down to 7.3 seconds in 2000, although it has since ticked slightly upwards from there.[2]

We all know that doctors are under heavy time pressure, but it’s still disturbing to know that the average length of time that a doctor will listen to a patient before interrupting is only 18 seconds, according to one study.[3]

Most people nowadays go through life in a state of what Linda Stone calls continuous partial attention[4], where they are constantly scanning their environment for more information, stimulus or novelty. (So far, in writing this article, I have already checked my email twice, refilled my coffee twice, checked the weather and the Wimbledon TV schedule, and answered the phone once.)

You can’t influence if you don’t get heard, so if you want to be influential within an organization or be successful in selling, the most important currency you can have is the undivided attention of your audience—and they won’t give it to you without begrudging every single second of time and cognitive effort.

So how do you compete in what Thomas Davenport calls the Attention Economy? When quantity is unlimited, quality is more important than ever. In this buzzing confusion, your only hope of capturing and sustaining attention is to use lean communication to deliver maximum value for minimum effort, or increase the Return on Time and Effort (RoTE). Put another way, you can either increase the payoff from attention, or reduce the cost.

You increase the payoff by focusing on the listener’s needs above your own, and showing them how you can improve their outcomes in some way. That means that you must prepare carefully, taking the time and making the effort to understand your listener’s needs, to view the situation from their perspective, and to give them a compelling reason to not want to miss a word of what you say.

You also have to reduce the cost of attention by reducing their expenditure of time and effort. Time is the first and most obvious cost, so you want to ensure that you craft and deliver your messages as concisely as possible, and make sure you deliver your main point first while attention is still fresh. But just as important as time is the mental effort you require from your listeners. Make it easy for them: do the work of gathering, analyzing and interpreting the facts so that they don’t have to.

All of this takes hard sustained effort on your part, but the investment will definitely pay off for you in the long run. As you build a reputation for delivering value, you will be like the old E.F. Hutton commercial: when you talk, people will listen.

[1] Cited in The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, p. 11.

[2] https://www.cmpa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/prev_pres_elections/2000/2000.09.28.The-Incredible-Shrinking-Sound-Bite.pdf

[3] Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think

[4] https://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/