On attention, timing, and how decisions form before we notice them

Design is usually talked about as a way of making things. Products, interfaces, services. Things you can see, evaluate, and improve once they exist. That association makes sense. Making is tangible. It gives teams something concrete to focus on and something visible to react to.

But it also means that much of what design actually influences tends to sit outside that frame.

Long before anything is built, direction has already begun to take shape. Assumptions start to settle. Certain questions gain traction, while others quietly lose momentum. By the time work reaches execution, many of the most consequential choices have already been made, often without anyone explicitly acknowledging that they were choices at all. They happened through attention, not through decisions.

How attention starts to form

Every organization develops a particular way of seeing. Some signals surface easily, while others struggle to register. Certain topics reappear in meetings, while others never quite enter the conversation. Over time, people learn what is worth raising and what is likely to be brushed aside. They learn which observations will be explored and which ones will be treated as noise.

This rarely happens deliberately. Quarterly rhythms train attention toward specific indicators. Dashboards favor what can be measured cleanly. Escalation rituals define when something becomes serious enough to matter. These patterns help organizations operate in complex environments, but they also shape perception. Attention becomes more efficient, and at the same time more selective.

Once these patterns are in place, they feel normal. Questioning them can feel unnecessary, even disruptive. After all, they have worked reasonably well so far. Until they start to miss what is forming.

The stretch before response

Most organizations are very capable when it comes to responding. When urgency becomes undeniable, things move. Decisions get made. Resources shift. Momentum appears. This is not a failure of leadership. It is competence showing up when it is required.

Yet there is almost always a period before that response kicks in. A stretch of time where something feels slightly off, but not yet clear enough to name. A conversation that lingers longer than expected. A pattern that doesn’t quite align with the usual reports. A sense that something is changing, even if no one can yet explain how or why.

That period doesn’t last long. It sits in an uncomfortable space between noticing and deciding. There is no clear problem statement yet, no shared language, no obvious owner. Staying there can feel inefficient, especially in environments that value clarity and forward motion. So most organizations move through it quickly. They frame what they are seeing in familiar terms, name the issue, and move on.

When clarity arrives too soon

Clarity offers relief. It creates the feeling of progress. Meetings advance. Plans take shape. The discomfort fades.

Sometimes that is exactly what’s needed. But when clarity arrives before understanding, it also narrows the field. What might have been explored becomes something to manage. Other interpretations quietly fall away. The organization shifts from sensing to responding without fully understanding what it is responding to.

Later, someone will often say, “We should have seen this coming.” By then, the issue is rarely a lack of intelligence or effort. More often, it’s that noticing was not given time to deepen. The situation hasn’t just changed. The range of possible responses has already narrowed. What remains is action, not choice.

Attention as habit

Most organizations don’t struggle because they fail to act. They struggle because their attention arrives late. This isn’t about individual blind spots. It’s about habit. Attention is shaped over time by what has mattered before, by what has been rewarded, by what has been allowed to take up space. Gradually, this becomes the default way of seeing.

What gets airtime matters. What is treated as an exception matters. What is dismissed as temporary noise matters. These small, repeated choices define the edges of what the organization is able to notice. Once those edges are in place, they are difficult to see, and harder still to question, until change begins to take shape faster than attention can adapt.

Design, seen differently

This is where design, understood a little differently, becomes relevant. Not as a way of making things, but as a way of seeing. As a practice of staying with what’s present before it becomes urgent. Of allowing tension to exist without rushing to resolve it. Of letting understanding mature before decisions harden.

This isn’t abstract work. It shows up in the quality of conversations, in the questions that get asked, and in what is considered relevant before commitments are made. It doesn’t replace leadership judgment, but it does influence how that judgment is formed.

Design doesn’t introduce a new responsibility here. Leaders are already shaping attention every day through what they ask about, what they prioritize, and what they move past too quickly. Design simply makes that responsibility more intentional.

Where adaptability really takes shape

Adaptability is often described in terms of speed, the ability to react quickly, to pivot, to respond decisively. Those things matter. But they’re not where adaptability begins. Adaptability takes shape earlier than that. It forms in what an organization allows itself to notice before urgency takes over, in whether there is room to stay with something that isn’t yet clear, and in whether leaders are willing to sit with incomplete understanding long enough to make more deliberate choices.

Most challenges don’t arrive suddenly. They develop gradually, just outside the frame of habitual attention. Design, at its core, offers a way to widen that frame. Not by adding more process or slowing everything down, but by changing how we see what is already there.

The question, in the end, isn’t how fast an organization responds once urgency arrives. It’s what has already been shaped, decided, or overlooked before that moment ever comes.

This piece is part of my ongoing work with the Possibility Principle of Design. If you recognize that moment, the one where something is shifting but not yet clear, and feel the tension between what’s changing outside and what your organization is built to handle, you’re in good company. Many leaders are sitting with the same unease. What matters is not having the answer yet, but noticing the question that’s starting to form.