Temporal Balance and Attenuation

If you were to take a guess... what percentage of the time would you estimate your attention is on the past; what percentage is your attention on the future; and what percentage of the time is your attention largely within the unfolding present? How about your team or organization's attention?

(image from "Design Unbound", depicts processes and manner of engagement with the past and future as opposing hinges affecting action in the present)

There is likely no circumstance in which we aren't alternating between all three of these at some rate, but over the last few years, this framing of focus being held to past, present, or future in specific activities has showed up for me in interesting places. For example in the study and facilitation of futures practices, in the study and execution of strategy and sensemaking methods, in facilitative practices for design, innovation, and organizational learning, and in exploration of the experience and drivers of psychological states and conditions (e.g. how depression inhibits future vision, how suicidality is associated with stuckness in past-orientation (and how future orientation can be therapeutic), how entrainment due to past experience inhibits/affects perception, how mindfulness relates to temporal awareness and grounding in the present, etc...).

In my experience, even within the scope of a single workshop, one should be very deliberate about where to focus attention in phases. It can be useful to focus on them separately (as we would separate divergence and convergence through time-boxing). A good example can be found in Dr. Jabe Bloom's "Ideal present" activity, which alternates deliberately between present and future. I learned this framework from Ben Mosior and use it often in my work.

Another example of balancing temporal attention is Simon Wardley's Wardley Mapping, a strategic sensemaking method which separately and effectively focuses on present context, climate, dependencies; anticipated/desired futures and evolutionary potential of the present. I also learned this method largely from Ben Mosior.

In my daily writing practice the other day, I was reflecting on my relationship with playing indoor soccer, my favorite sport, which I sadly had to give up in my early 20's due to injury. One interesting experience of playing active sports is how it affects attention during the course of play. Attention attenuates into (mostly) the unfolding present with rapid alternation— bursts of future-focus—imagining and evaluating possible futures and selecting (consciously or unconsciously) futures to (attempt to) enact. To play a game with anything less than near complete focus on the present would be foolish. But *some* degree of attention on the past and future play a part of overall strategy (in planning, learning, training, etc...), and even in the decision-making of players responding to the unfolding present. It's just that the balance and timing has to be right for the context.

So what is your present temporal balance? Is it what it should be, and how would you know?

I have for several years now thought about the efficacy and strategy of teams and organizations through this lens of how much we pay attention to past, present, and future, in turns. How often we look backwards, how often and effectively we perceive and integrate information about the present, how often we anticipate and collectively imagine desirable and undesirable futures… these are all measurable and extremely impactful aspects of any effort, team, or organization.

I shared these thoughts on LinkedIn the other day and the responses were wonderful. I can rely on a few friends to keep me motivated to keep sharing there through their encouragement and reflection in response to my reflections.

Side note: the downside of LinkedIn is that due to the amount of noise, it does not reliably reach the people I most want to reach or hear from, which is one reason I write here, which is why I’d like you to push this button:

Nate Schwagler shared with me that Philip Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame) had done a Ted Talk about orientation to past, present, future. Zimbardo’s framing feels interesting and useful, though slightly different than what I was talking about (Zimbardo’s being about a person’s overall posture rather than how we deliberately choose temporal focus through activities). As Nate put it:

Another great response came from my friend

Ethan Eagle

. Here is our brief exchange, which really helped me develop out my thinking here:

My view on which of these frames we most frequently fail to sufficiently attend to has vacillated wildly over the years.

• I remember learning agile practices, specifically the tool of retrospectives and becoming firmly convinced that in general we give the recent past too little attention, and that’s why we need these regular rituals.

• I remember being introduced to futures practices by my friend

  Austin Wiggins
  and becoming firmly convinced that it was the possible/probable/desirable future we needed to attend to so much more than we currently do

• I have also become increasingly convinced by complexity theorists that it is the present we most fail to attend to. We are caught up and distracted by false visions of the past based on retrospective coherence, and/or hypnotized by our hope for a different future, so much that we fail to attend to the patterns which are emerging in the present from which we can glean its evolutionary potential (which is in theory much more strategically useful than some desired future which is just too far outside the adjacent-possible)

I would like to conclude that we fail to attend to all of these sufficiently, because we fail to be deliberate in our selection and attention to frames in turns, in logical sequences—as we find in practices like Wardley Mapping, ideal present, and futures. When we aren’t deliberate about attending to these frames with intention, we might be simply carried along by the tides of our own temporal orientation (as described by Zimbardo)—locked in ruminating longing for a past which will not return, or fully detached from the present by daydreams about what could be, often fully unaware of and failing to attend to the present.