The attention crisis costing your business more than you think

On a domestic flight in Australia last month, I saw an extreme example of a routine problem. In the middle of take-off, a teenager sitting on the other side of the aisle gave his siblings and mother the slip and skipped over to the empty seat in front of me. All he wanted to do was switch on his mobile phone and return to scrolling social media unobserved.

His decision led to two major dressing-downs: first from a baffled and outraged flight attendant, then from his jaded and exasperated mother. His response was a smokescreen of performative anger and lies: “Wasn’t posting anything… just playing a game… how dare you accuse me…” It’s a bit of a cliché to talk of screen addiction, but substitute “drugs” for “phone” and the fundamentals of the story endure.

Which is of course exactly the way phones are designed. To be addictive, to create dependency, to hoard our attention and to hollow out the appeal of the real world. Job done, Big Tech. Smartphone addiction has made us both “stuffed and starved”, to borrow the phrase that British journalist and academic Raj Patel applied to the global food industry.

Deep down, we all know this analogy is frighteningly applicable to technology too, hence the success of books such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.

Here comes the problem. The collapse of concentration falls between the overlapping responsibilities of multiple parties – families, schools and countries. This accountability confusion raises questions about agency in the internet age: is curbing phone addiction an individual’s responsibility? And if not, who should take the lead?

Some countries – such as Australia, as it happens – have banned social media for the under-16s. Some think that’s going too far (arguing people won’t be ready for the watershed when it comes), while others say that the real problem is the non-stop interaction with internet-connected devices, whether used for social media or otherwise.

Parents lobby schools to enact bans that they are reluctant to enforce at home. People tell friends that they will hold out and their children will have to wait – then an iPhone pops up at Christmas. It’s our fault, someone else’s fault, Big Tech’s fault, everyone’s fault. And always the guilty truth that we adults are also gorging in the sweet shop, unable to take our hands out of the jar. And so the Titanic drifts on.

I’d add another troubled conscience to the list: companies. As a founder, I’ve been thinking about our distractedness epidemic – in this instance, adult inattention – from a business perspective. In expecting our colleagues to be permanently available – and hence online – we are effectively nudging them towards being distracted.

This is a critical misstep in the management instincts of businesses. Online does not mean at work. Often, it means the opposite. One of the reasons that so-called frictionless Zoom or Teams meetings have become so painful is that many people are second-screening – replying to emails, actively working on other tasks or numbly scrolling through feeds.

Online meetings are the new form of presenteeism: everyone present, little progress made. A meeting without collective attention is a mutual agreement to waste each other’s time.

Twenty years ago, I used to argue that people got more done when they weren’t stuck in the office. Now that the office is in our pocket, even less real work is getting done. But of course, it’s far harder to encourage people to put down their phones than it is to encourage them to leave the office earlier.

In order to think creatively, which we will need to do when AI is doing all the easy stuff for us, we are going to have to stop being distracted. It’s rare that jealousy strikes, but it hit me hard when I heard that the designer Paul Smith said he had never possessed an email address.

The most important book I’ve read on screen addiction and the resulting concentration deficit does not belong to the growing library of hits from American pop psychologists. The book is Craftland: A journey through Britain’s lost arts and vanishing trades, by the British art historian James Fox, and screens are notably absent from its pages.

Fox’s exploration takes the form of a dozen or so studies of craftspeople, masters of classic or obscure crafts – the dry-stone waller, the watchmaker, the letter cutter. By the end of the book, you can almost touch the sense of hard-earned value in their hands and hearts, the connection between consumer and producer, the thread from past to present.

A question follows for us all. There is, surely, an element of craft, in the broadest sense, within almost every industry – intuitive expertise based on trial and error, deep mastery that is often not fully understood or explicable, collective wisdom about problem solving that is not possessed by a single person but instead shared by the team.

How can we encourage that element of craft in our own businesses? How can we embolden and reinforce it? Because it’s likely to be where the real value lies. Here are three stories about craft, each from different parts of my life.

First, cricket. Mike Brearley, England’s celebrated captain, once told me about sharing a long plane journey with his left-arm spinner Derek Underwood in the late 1970s. Brearley found himself happy just to ask questions, to encourage his player to chat freely.

Brearley found his curiosity deepening about Underwood’s craft, and that curiosity became an aspect of his leadership. Because being interested is the clearest sign of caring (an easy trait to profess but much harder to enact). Instead of implementing strategy, first try to understand.

Second, academia. I recently had a discussion with an academic colleague about grading essays in a humanities Master’s course. The trend in academia today is to provide ever more precise rubrics – student-facing deconstructions of how essays will be marked – based on the presumption that academics can describe exactly what a distinction looks like in the abstract.

But my more senior colleague was impatient with this trend. “You know from your experience,” was all he said. Reading carefully, weighing up, sensing intellectual texture, developing instincts – all of it hard to measure, but central to both effective teaching and fair examining.

Finally, The Times columnist Matthew Parris recently gave a lecture at the University of Cambridge on the future of journalism. It included this assessment: “All my life I’ve struggled with the inertia that says, ‘No need to actually go there,’ or ‘No need to actually meet him.’

But time and again, it has been my experience that if you weren’t there, if you weren’t physically in the room with your interviewee, if you got your picture of a riot in La Paz off the internet, something dies in your report. And if you go, something living will enter it.”

Parris’s sentiments on writing and reporting apply to almost everything. The gravitational pull of not going anywhere grows stronger every day – WFH, AI, desktop research – which of course means that the value of showing up in-person grows exponentially. Differentiation is the best protection from becoming irrelevant. And being prepared to live in the real world is increasingly becoming a point of difference.

A few years ago, a sports team sought my help. I proposed dates to meet online or on neutral ground in London. Instead, they came to my house and got to know my family and me on our own soil. It accelerated my ability to care about the team and hence (I hope) add some value. The point applies to more routine leadership and management.

How many management problems would dissolve if 10 video calls were replaced by one conversation held side-by-side, walking around a park? Technology creates the problem it pretends to solve. Good business for the tech giants, bad news for us.

If we are really interested in efficiency and efficacy, we should be slower to judge the addicted teen and quicker to turn our critical eyes closer to home. Whatever is getting easier, from a business perspective, will soon be on the way out. Because easy things have never been valuable and never will be. We need to stay close to the human bits, especially the difficult human bits.

I’ve never forgotten a school prize-giving when I was 12 years old. Our stern and puritanical headteacher was retiring. He had one final piece of advice for his school before heading for the exit. “Nothing easy is worth doing,” the old man said, hobbling off the stage.

The epicurean in me has always instinctively disliked his aphorism, and I’ve often argued with him in my head over the intervening 35 years. But today, as the lazy, endless screen scroll sucks the life out of everything, his words ring truer than ever.