Return on Attention is a key metric in a world of Attention Scarcity

Atten­tion is increas­ing in rel­a­tive scarcity (as explained in details in a pre­vi­ous post), and what is scarce is valu­able. While any prod­uct, ser­vice or other activ­ity costs atten­tion to both the con­sumer and pro­ducer, atten­tion is becom­ing increas­ingly valu­able. It is hence essen­tial to ensure that what you pro­duce or con­sume pro­vides your clients or your orga­ni­za­tions with a high enough Return on Atten­tion. This met­ric should be tracked by all busi­nesses and its use adapted to each spe­cific activity.

Mea­sure and act on ROA for each role in the value chain

ROA should be tracked from the point of view of every par­tic­i­pants in a spe­cific value chain, and ana­lyzed based on each roles and activ­i­ties they under­take. The ques­tion each actor is ask­ing is “Of the total atten­tion I allo­cate to a par­tic­u­lar source, what is the pro­duc­tiv­ity of that atten­tion in terms of value received for effort and time invested?“¹.

For instance, an orga­ni­za­tion is both a sup­plier and a con­sumer: the ROA should be mea­sured for both roles, even if in a small orga­ni­za­tion the same per­son is doing both. ROA is a ver­sa­tile tool that can be used in customer/producer rela­tion­ships, from an orga­ni­za­tion or indi­vid­ual per­spec­tive. A cou­ple of examples:

• Con­sumer: What does it cost me in Atten­tion to con­sume this prod­uct or service?
• Pro­ducer: What is my ROA for each client? Which one is the high­est? Which may be negative?
• Mar­keter: How to ensure we pro­vide the high­est ROA for each client? How to pro­vide a good ROA through our com­mu­ni­ca­tion, thus ensur­ing the mes­sages keep reach­ing their targets?
• Orga­ni­za­tions: How to max­i­mize ROA for each employ­ees? What can we mod­ify to improve it or han­dle neg­a­tive ROA sit­u­a­tions? Are my com­mu­ni­ca­tions and inter­nal ini­tia­tives of a high enough ROA so that my employ­ees will engage mean­ing­fully with them?
• Indi­vid­ual: What are the activ­i­ties that reward me the most for the time and effort spent? Are they aligned with the pri­or­i­ties of my organization?

  IT tools are key to improve ROA

Han­dling infor­ma­tion and con­sum­ing mainly atten­tion, IT tools are also a pow­er­ful means to improve ROA. Indeed, as with any ratio, there are two pos­si­bil­i­ties for improve­ment: increas­ing the returns or decreas­ing the amount of attention:

• Decreas­ing the amount of atten­tion con­sumed: you can use workflow/process redesigns, along with automa­tion to decrease the cost in terms of atten­tion of a spe­cific activ­ity. For exam­ple, going from an approval process with 15 clicks on 3 dif­fer­ent tools and man­ual entry to 3 clicks in one tool with auto­mated data entry would improve the ROA.
• Improv­ing the returns on the same amount of atten­tion spent: this is the sin­gle largest oppor­tu­nity. Take advan­tage of inno­v­a­tive IT tools that max­i­mize the returns you get from the time you use them. Going from emails to infor­ma­tion flows cus­tomized and pri­or­i­tized based on your social net­work and rel­e­vant objec­tives will raise dra­mat­i­cally the returns an employee gets from spend­ing 15 mins try­ing to get up to speed with a new project or client. Along this line, it is also pos­si­ble, again by using the right tech­nol­ogy, to increase alto­gether the total amount of atten­tion an indi­vid­ual has to spend. “Flow appli­ca­tions” for exam­ple have the poten­tial to allow an employee to ded­i­cate not just 0 or 100% of her total atten­tion to the activ­ity at hand, but to start split­ting it across sev­eral activities.

Where to start?

ROA is not easy to put in place and use effec­tively. Start by iden­ti­fy­ing the crit­i­cal areas of:

• your busi­ness model and processes
• your clients portfolio
• your tal­ent pool

Then, sep­a­rate the dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties of each cycle and for each actor, ana­lyze the ROA from their per­spec­tive (includ­ing yours as an orga­ni­za­tion). You will quickly zero in on the areas at risk due to poor ROA, and the diag­nos­tic should pro­vide the nec­es­sary indi­ca­tions for improv­ing the situation.

Photo credit: vishy-washy

Ref­er­ences

1. 1 John Hagel, Mas­ter­ing New Mar­ket­ing Prac­tices [↩]