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We
live in an attention economy. At this point in history, capital,
labor, and information are all in plentiful supply. Computer processing
power increases by leaps and bounds, but the processing power of
the human brain stays the same. Telecommunications bandwidth is
not a problem; human bandwidth is. The implications for business
are dramatic. Through research and simple observation I’ve become
convinced that attention is the scarce resource in today’s
economy. Education and learning activities, and elearning in particular,
are major consumers of attention. How will they compete? And what
are the implications for knowledge workers already struggling to
divide their attention between their worklife and homelife, while
also being told that “anytime, anywhere learning” is the wave of
the future?
The Attention Crisis
Attention
is at a premium partly because information has becoming less expensive
for many, many years. By one analysis, in a single edition of the
Sunday New York Time has more facts than anyone in the world
could have commanded in, say, the 15th century. In 1472,
for example, the best university library in the world, at Queen’s
College in Cambridge, had 199 books. Today more than 300,000 new
books spew out of worldwide presses every year. The web includes
well over two billion pages, a large chunk of which can’t be found
even with the best search engine. (And let’s not forget 11,339 distinct
electronic databases, up from just 301 in 1975).
It’s
not just codified information that overwhelms us. The typical viewer
can choose from 80% more new feature films today than were released
in 1990. And every new product or service requires attention to
comprehend and consume. The average grocery store stocks about 40,000
different items with roughly 15,000 new grocery products introduced
each year. Think of the business problem: in this environment, how
can your new product become one of the only 150 SKUs the
average household buys each year? The problem is not only in reaching
consumers; it affects business-to-business and internal management
as well. Today’s manager can, with just a few mouse-clicks, call
up more external information than any of us can ever fully absorb—all
while dealing with increasing numbers of phone calls, faxes, and
mail.
Attention and Learning
Learning
has always been a major consumer of attention for well-educated
white-collar workers. Most of them have spent 17 or more years engaged
in more-or-less full-time learning. Unfortunately, many of us had
our attention directed elsewhere during our educational careers.
Sure, we can still read, write, think, and do a bit of research,
but we have forgotten most of the specific information we were supposed
to learn in school. It didn’t help that we went through much of
our formal educations at the same time we were going through childhood
and adolescence, when our attention was focused largely on having
fun with our friends, our changing bodies, the opposite sex, and
so on. It also didn’t help that few of our teachers were trained
in how to get and keep our attention—and we know from experience
that they rarely figured it out on their own.
Since
much of our formal educations didn’t take, and because the world
is changing all the time, we must all undergo at least moderate
levels of workplace learning. Yet the workplace is hardly a domain
in with plenty of slack attention lying around. The increasing speed
and complexity of our business lives has become a ravenous user
of our attention as well. Decades of global competition have produced
lean organizations, very high customer expectations, short cycle
times, and a need for just-in-time everything. As a result, business
schools are finding it increasingly difficult to get executives
to come on campus for extended executive education stays. My anecdotal
experience suggests that supervisors are putting more and more pressure
on subordinates to justify time spent away from work in education
and training.
Into
this environment comes a set of technologies for elearning—ostensibly
a solution to the work/life balance problems faced by many individuals
in organizations today. Forget travel—learn at your desk! Even better,
learn at home! eLearning promises greater efficiency in acquiring
learning, a closer match between the time of need and the provision
of learning, and the power of interactive multimedia to get and
keep the attention of the learner. It seems to be a match made in
heaven among corporate objectives, work/life balance, and attention.
No Free Lunch
Despite
the potential benefits of elearning, it’s not easy to construct
an environment in which people meet their learning objectives online
while paying attention, getting their work done, and living fulfilling
family and personal lives. Several aspects of the attention environment
for elearning are difficult—but important—to face:
Interactive multimedia is appealing in principle—but
not always in reality. Development of high-quality elearning is
expensive, and the skills to do it well are still somewhat rare.
As a result, much elearning is not-very-multi-media and not-very-interactive.
In fact, I’ve seen an increasing amount of elearning that amounts
to PowerPoint without the human speaker, which isn’t very attention-getting
or attention-keeping at all.
The use of elearning is generally unsupervised by
any instructor or training professional; this is one way it achieves
economic efficiencies. However, it also leaves the learner free
to divert his or her attention to the many other possible uses available
at the desktop: other work tasks, the telephone, the Internet, today’s
snail mail…
While the consumption of elearning may take place
somewhat closer in time to the user’s need than traditional education,
much of it is as unrelated to specific work needs as typical classroom
training. Only a small fraction of elearning qualifies as “performance
support,” available at the time of need.
Some types of elearning are much more successful
at getting and keeping attention than others. “Performance simulation,”
for example, which offers a simulated work environment, a compelling
goal for the learner to achieve, and online coaching, seems to qualify
as “learning by doing.” And a National Training Laboratories study
found that content communicated through “learning by doing” was
more than three times more likely to be retained than traditional
computer-based instruction.
Given
these issues, firms need to think carefully about whether their
existing elearning initiatives are actually getting and keeping
the attention of their employees. If the content of such initiatives
isn’t being attended to, all of the “efficiencies” provided by online
learning technologies will be for naught.
Over the Top
Another
concern about elearning is that given the ability to receive it
anywhere, job pressures will lead employees to begin doing it at
home, further disrupting their work/life balance. It’s unlikely
that supervisors will actually force employees to consume elearning
materials on their own time—that would probably be illegal under
most circumstances—but the power of suggestion and informal pressures
might well encourage it. Some employees may even choose to take
their elessons home simply because there is less competition for
their attention away from the workplace.
But
while home might actually be a fairly effective place to be an “e-student,”
most employees are already highly burdened at home with work-related
activity. In a recent Accenture survey, for example, the majority
of white-collar workers stated that not only did they check voice
and email messages at home, they even did so on vacation. An Institute
for the Future study in 2000 suggested that 60% of white-collar
workers feel “overwhelmed” by the amount of information they receive.
Extending the information flow homeward through elearning applications
is likely to make the situation much worse.
If
you’re an employee of an organization and you feel you can learn
better at home than at work, more power to you. But be careful about
letting elearning—or any other work for that matter—extend too much
into your already scarce personal life. If you’re a manager, be
cognizant that time at home is sacred for your employees. And if
you encourage your people to take a dose of online learning at home,
make sure that it’s undertaken during normal work hours.
Attending to Attention
Regardless
of where you take your elearning, it’s all for naught unless a high
proportion of brain cells are engaged. If you’re concerned about
the relationship between elearning and attention—and you should
be—there are several steps you can take to address the issue.
First,
get some sense of where the attention of your employees is going
today, and how much of it goes to elearning. John Beck, my co-author
for the book The
Attention Economy, has developed a tool for measuring attention
allocation called the AttentionScape. It’s a quick, subjective analysis
of how an individual or team has allocated its attention over a
given time period. You can see how attention is measured on the
website for the book at www.attentionbook.com.
Try asking employees who’ve just gone through an elearning exercise
to map out their own attention for the day. If they’ve spent a lot
of time online, but the content of the exercise didn’t really register
on their attention screens, you’ve got a problem.
Second,
you need to understand what else is competing for your target audience’s
attention and the AttentionScape can also be useful here. If people
are worried about how they’ll survive your firm’s economic downturn,
for example, they may not be very receptive to even the best elearning
experience. If you find out that a non-productive topic is taking
up a lot of your audience’s brain cells, you can try to dispel the
issue by directly addressing rumors or fears.
Your
elearning targets’ attention can be protected in other ways. Some
are technical, but most involve policies. There may be technologies
you can employ to filter out unwanted communications. More likely
to be effective, however, are policies and suggestions that help
people manage their own personal information environments. Suggest,
for example, that checking of email and voice mail while involved
in a learning experience may be counterproductive.
Finally,
our research suggested that some forms of information are much more
attention-getting than others, and you may be able to employ these
strategies in your online curriculum design. We found that people
pay attention to information that is personalized, concise, emotionally
evocative, and from a trustworthy source. So try to create elearning
programs that have those characteristics.
We’re
only beginning to understand how elearning and other information-intensive
activities are affected by the growing shortage of attention. Those
astute individuals who practice attention-conscious elearning are
bound to identify a host of new ideas for how to direct attention
where it is most needed, and to protect it from unwanted distractions.
eLearning practitioners must realize that, like everyone else, they
are competing for their audience’s attention. Those whose elearning
efforts are not attended to will fail. Those who are good at getting
and keeping attention will be successful.
Tom Davenport is Director of the Accenture
Institute for Strategic Change and a Distinguished Scholar
in Residence at Babson
College. He has co-authored or edited nine books, including
the first books on business process reengineering, knowledge management,
and enterprise systems. His latest book—coauthored with John Beck—is
The
Attention Economy (Harvard Business School Press), which
describes how individuals and organizations can manage “the new
currency of business.” He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in
organizational behavior and has taught at the Harvard Business School,
the University of Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business,
and the University of Texas at Austin. He has also directed research
centers at Ernst & Young, McKinsey & Company, and CSC Index.
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