Overcoming Attention Fatigue
How to manage your most valuable resource in meetings
Actively listening to people is exhausting. It takes your whole body and mind. It’s an awareness of situation, body language, volume, tone, cadence, word choice, context, the list goes on. In over a decade of consulting, designing, facilitating, and researching, I’ve found that it’s our attention to people that’s at a premium, not our intellect. In this article I’ve tried to put into words a few mental techniques that help me manage my attention economy in group settings.
I ride a motorcycle. Sometimes I ride fast. I ratchet my attention up in the curves, chasing each apex with all my senses, and then relax my mind and body in the straightaways. I’m managing my attention economy, the emotional energy it takes to keep my mind clear for the most challenging — and fun — aspects of the ride. As a facilitator you have to manage your attention similarly so that you can put your energy where it matters most.
One of the most challenging and rewarding things you do as a consultant is solo facilitation. The reason it’s so taxing is because you are shepherding a groups’ momentum toward a destination and constantly assessing, recalibrating, and managing your own attention economy. When I’m in one-on-one conversations I strive to give people all my attention. Early in my career I tried to pay attention to everyone in a group equally. I quickly found my attention wrecked, I was physically exhausted, and my facilitation was mediocre. Maybe I needed more coffee, maybe less? What was I doing wrong?
My problem was that human attention doesn’t scale. I was trying to use the same techniques with many people that worked so well one-on-one. I was treating facilitation like a never-ending series of curves in the road. I spent all my energy early in the meeting because I couldn’t identify the places where I could catch my breath. Over time I’ve come to see that in conversations there are types of comments or phrases that get used often enough that they can be tagged. By tagged I simply mean organized by a single, descriptive, memorable term. If I could increase my ability to tag conversation elements quickly, I could decide real-time what to pay the most attention to. Like a motorcycle rider, I could distinguish the corners that really needed my full attention from the straightaways that didn’t.
While every person is valuable, everything they say in a facilitation is not equally as relevant to you as the facilitator. Your ability to manage your own attention depends on your skillfulness at deciding what’s essential for the group and spending your attention on it. While deciding what’s best for a group takes experience, judgment, and a hard look at your biases, it can be done. Realtime tagging can make it easier. Being selective about where I put my attention means that now I’m less spent after facilitating and my clients are getting much better experiences. The taxonomy below is a quick and dirty way for those of us who need better ways to manage our attention while facilitating. It’s meant to help organize thinking quickly in realtime. Below we’ll look at: tracking the conversation, distilling the essence, and wrap up with a few tips for setting yourself up to make it easier to manage your attention from the start.
Tracking the conversation. In a facilitation when participants are conversing, listen for the following dialog elements that suggest a tag, Essentials are the most important tag.
Essentials: a unique perspective, point of view, idea, or critical observation that if missing the conversation would be diminished. Listen for phrases that:
- Are opportunistic
- Put together knowledge in a new way
- Introduce a novel and intriguing way of doing something
- Spark interest in other participants
- Analytically present trade-offs without judgment
- Get everyone’s heads nodding
- Recognize contributions and advance ideas
During a two hour conversation there are typically about five to seven real Essentials. Spend most of your attention on these. The rest of the discussion is taken by the common tags below, which — while important — can’t steal your attention.
Rounders: phrases or comments that add detail to Essentials but don’t change them materially. These are explicit expressions of support for an Essential because they assume the Essentials value. Spend less attention here.
Reinforcers: affirmations that don’t add to Essentials but signal interest or support for a person. These comments in dialog help you locate who in the group is prioritizing positive feelings and participation. Take note of the people who say these rather than the content of their comments because you may need to enlist them as your allies if the conversation starts to go sideways.
Positionals: locate the speaker in a business process or organizational structure. These help you understand what a participant thinks his limits are based on their role in the organization. Generally, these are less important when ideating but vital when planning an implementation. Determine how much attention you give these based on the objective of the facilitation.
Politicals: allusions to internal turf, tribes, or dogma. These help you understand where alliances can advance work or where antagonism can thwart it. These are important to note for your client because they will have to face these after the facilitation. Give these some attention and follow-up with your client post facilitation. Unless you’re there for an intervention, tackling these while facilitating isn’t advisable.
Reframes: a Reframe shifts the power of the conversation to a single participant and establishes them as the authority to organize the entire discussion. A Reframe sweeps aside the conversation as it has organically evolved and re-directs conversational energy in the direction the speaker wants it to go. Listen for phrases like:
- Guys, the real problem isn’t the one we’re talking about it’s X and that’s what we should focus on.
- There’s already a way to solve this problem and it’s X, let me show you how it works.
- These are good questions but without doing X first, they really don’t matter.
- This is all solvable if we just did X, we can talk all we want, but there really isn’t another way.
Watch out for these phrases, your facilitation could be in the process of being hijacked if you see them being used. These moments are worth spending your attention on.
Distilling the essence. After you’ve spent some of your attention listening for Essentials during your initial activities, now you need to devote more attention to distillation. It is from the Essentials (comments, insights, ideas, and points of view) that you produce your synthesis. Again, you’ll probably have five to seven things tagged Essential when you turn from conversation to synthesis. If you have more than seven Essentials think hard about whether they are actually fit the criteria.
While there are a myriad of ways to synthesize, it’s always your job to hold on to things you’ve tagged as Essentials and get the group to work with them. Regardless of how generative or engaged the group is, you are responsible for guiding their attention to the Essentials. By the time you get here, you’ve got to have enough attention left in the tank to guide the group to their objective. Your success in doing so depends on how well you managed your attention up until that point.
Tips for making it easier to manage your attention:
- Use icebreakers you already know — you shouldn’t spend your attention here.
- Design activities that participants facilitate — this gives you time to really listen.
- Use worksheets with directions on them to create quiet spaces — explaining instructions verbally forces you to switch between exposition and reflection.
- Take notes only if it helps you focus your attention. As Maya Angelou says, people will never forget how you made them feel. It’s hard for people to get good vibes from you’re furiously taking notes.
- Eat well, and watch your caffeine intake.
So whether you’re riding a motorcycle through a twisty canyon or facilitating a small group, managing your attention is possible. Your client will have a better experience and you’ll have the energy left to ride off into the sunset.
