Here's a question I ask leadership teams.

What's the first thing your people do in the morning?

Nobody knows. But I do. They pick up the phone. Before coffee, before a thought of their own, they let someone else's feed set the pattern for the day.

I write in my next book about what that habit does. Start the day with the feed and you've told your pattern-seeking brain that the feed comes first. You'll go back to the trough all day.

Now multiply that by your entire company.

What's the pattern?

Every era has one scarce resource that the winners figured out first. Land, in the agrarian age. Energy, in the industrial one. Information, when the internet arrived, until information became free and infinite.

What's scarce now is attention. The ability to focus on one hard thing long enough to solve it. Every platform you use is engineered to take it, and most companies then spend whatever's left on Slack, back-to-back meetings, and eleven priorities that are all number one.

Old attention economy joke: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Inside a company it's worse. You're paying people for their attention and then giving it away for free.

The three defenses I write about for the individual mind are focus, discernment, and innovation. They're the same three for an organization. Where does attention go? What gets in? What new thing can we make with what's left?

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Audit attention like money. For one week, count the hours your best people spend in meetings and messages versus on actual work. The number will scare you. Good.

Protect one block a day. No meetings, no pings, for everyone, at the same time. Companies that do this describe it like discovering an extra day in the week.

And declare one priority. Not three, one. Attention can only go to one place at a time, and that's what a priority is for.

Your competitors can buy the same AI you can. They can't buy a focused team. That's still yours, if you keep it.

Where does your attention actually go before nine a.m.?

Related: Does change fatigue exist, or is it change without a pattern?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote