In a world that increasingly feels like white-water rafting through relentless rapids, finding focus has become both a personal challenge and a strategic necessity. For business leaders and HR, this isn’t just a self-help issue, it’s a pressing organisational imperative.
Recent data underscores the scale of the problem. The Financial Times (Feb 2025) identifies the digital fragmentation of attention as a critical threat in today’s “attention economy,” contributing to cognitive overload, impaired memory, heightened stress, and diminished creativity and critical thinking. Meanwhile, a 2023 study by the QEII Centre revealed that UK businesses are losing approximately £19.9 billion every year due to distractions during meetings, 83% of people report being distracted in person, and 85% online. The price of distraction is not just personal, it’s profoundly economic.
The Fog of Fragmentation
Our working lives are now shaped by what Johann Hari, in his book Stolen Focus, describes as an “attention crisis.” Constant notifications, overloaded diaries, back-to-back virtual meetings, and the endless churn of information have created a kind of cognitive smog. Leaders are breathing in this fog every day, struggling to see what matters, chasing shallow tasks, and losing the capacity for sustained, strategic thought.
Psychology and neuroscience tell us that this isn’t a failure of discipline; it’s a biological response. The modern world is perfectly designed to trigger the sympathetic nervous system, the fight, flight, or freeze mode. When bombarded by micro-stressors, our brains default to scanning for threats, reacting quickly but shallowly, and finding false safety in busy-ness. We are paddling hard, but we are going nowhere meaningful.
The Lighthouse in the Storm
If we want to find focus amidst fragmentation, we need to consciously activate the parasympathetic system, the body’s natural reset switch. This system governs rest, reflection, and deep focus. It’s where creativity, strategic clarity, and genuine human connection reside. You can think of it as the lighthouse in the storm: a steady beacon that cuts through the fog and orients you towards what truly matters.
Jennifer Garvey Berger, in Unleash Your Complexity Genius, challenges us to develop minds that can hold complexity without collapsing under its weight. She argues that the leaders who thrive in today’s ambiguous world are those who can zoom out, slow down, and create spaces where they can think in systems, not silos. But these capabilities do not arise in adrenaline-soaked schedules. They need intentional cultivation.
The Cost of Drift
There is a dangerous illusion at play: that focus can wait. That we can defer deep thinking until the next leadership offsite, the next budget cycle, the next quarter. But by then, the drift will have set in. Teams will fracture, innovation pipelines will stall, and decisions will be driven by noise, not insight. Focus is not a luxury, it is the antidote to strategic entropy.
Ask yourself: are you the lighthouse or just another frantic boat in the water?
Urgent, but Not Rushed
For HR directors and senior leaders, this is a call to re-engineer the conditions in which focus can thrive. That might mean creating rhythm for reflection in leadership cadences, building psychological safety to encourage spacious thinking or reducing the systemic theft of attention that undermines long-term priorities.
We don’t just need more resilience training. We need to rewire our working lives to stop living in a permanent state of cognitive firefighting. As Hari warns, attention won’t be handed back to us, it must be reclaimed.
The question is not whether you can find focus.
The question is: can you afford not to?
Reclaim leadership focus. redesign the way you lead.
Discover how to create the conditions for clarity, creativity, and deep strategic thinking before distraction becomes your default.