The quarterly all-hands meeting announces the new priorities. Customer experience. Innovation. Operational excellence. Three months later, what actually gets discussed in the weekly leadership meetings? Firefighting the same operational crises as last quarter. The strategy deck is pristine. The attention allocation is unchanged.
What an organization pays attention to is its real strategy. Not the stated strategy. Not the aspirational strategy. The actual, in-practice strategy that emerges from where collective attention flows. You can see this in what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what triggers executive involvement, and what gets quietly ignored. These patterns reveal the true priorities, regardless of what anyone says the priorities are.
This creates an interesting leverage point. If you want to change strategy, you don't necessarily need a new strategy document. You need to change where the organization's attention goes. What questions get asked in meetings. What data shows up on dashboards. What behaviors get noticed and celebrated. What issues trigger urgency. Attention structures shape behavior more reliably than any policy ever could.
The discipline here is alignment. Not everyone needs to focus on the same thing, but the collective attention needs to add up to something coherent. When marketing is optimizing for one thing while product optimizes for another while operations measures success by a third, you get an organization working against itself. The strategy fragments at the attention level even when the words on the page are unified. Collective focus isn't just important. It is strategy.