written by Nathan Vanderpool

This essay draws on concepts originally developed in Joe Edelman's essay Four Social Worlds

Attention, from the Perspective of a Human

I don't usually think about how what I'm paying attention to affects my decisions and ways of being. But if I slow down and reflect on where my attention goes, it's being guided toward different things. Depending on how I make sense of a situation, different choices stand out.

Design methods usually rely on observations like: What do you buy? Where do you go? Who do you vote for? Technology is making all of that data easier to capture. But we're still blind to the reasons that a human chose to do this or that. And it matters. A LOT. I'll give you an example:

Get the Groceries, GO TEAM GO!

Tim and his friends are planning to have a picnic this afternoon. They meet up at the grocery store at 10am to buy supplies. Tim gathers everyone into a huttle outside the store, and starts to delegate tasks: Joe is in charge of fruits and vegetables, Anne will organize snack foods, Serge needs to figure out drinks, and Tim will grab the breads and spreads. GO TEAM GO!

🕵️‍♂️ "Objective" Perception

This story provides "objective data", and clearly tells me what happened. But at this point, I can only guess why. And as I'll argue below, the why is deeply important.

If we want to discover Tim's reasons for approaching shopping this way, we would have to ask him. As a thought experiment, I'll outline three different categories that those reasons might fall into: expectations, outcomes, and personal values. Then I'll show how they might interact.

💍 Social Expectations

Imagine that Tim sees himself as a leader who can provide structure. If he's good at his role, he thinks other people will follow suit, and accept him socially. So his attention is being guided by meeting the expectations that he and others have around "leadership". Being a leader could be a reason he chose to approach shopping like he did in the story above.

If Tim slowed down and put it into words, his attention was being guided by an image like this:

💍 being a leader: create a plan, and show others the way forward

📈 Practical Strategies

Imagine that Tim just hates shopping. He wants to get this over with so that he and his friends can spend more time enjoying their picnic. Maybe he was also afraid of forgetting something on the list if they all went shopping together. Those might be reasons he chose to approach shopping as he did in the story above.

If Tim slowed down and put it into words, his attention was being guided by a strategy like this:

📈 get it done: delegate tasks so that they are accomplished efficiently and thoroughly

🌳 Personal Values: Inspiration/Appreciation

Now imagine that along with social expectations and practical strategies, Tim also has ways of being that he appreciates, that inspire him, that feel intrinsically good.

If Tim put it into words, his attention was being guided by a personal value like this:

🌳 coordination: create (even arbitrary) challenges that allow everyone present to work together as a team with a common purpose

Tim's personal value fits well with the relevant social expectations and practical strategies. In other words, the different things that could have guided his attention were in ☮ Harmony. He ended up feeling that the shopping trip was time well spent. But what would it look like if his personal value hadn't fit to the expectations and strategies?

💥 Conflict! (❣️ Emotions to Values)

🌳 Personal Values vs. 📈 Practical Strategies

Imagine that rather than the coordination value above, Tim's personal value was this:

🌳 equanimity: approach your day with slow sincerity, calm and concerned about how to best respond to the moment

That could have been in harmony with the social expectations in his mind:

💍 being a leader: create a plan and show the others the way forward

But would have clashed with his practical strategy:

📈 get it done: delegate tasks so that things happen as thoroughly and efficiently as possible

This would result in a 💥 Conflict as Tim's 📈 Practical Strategies and 🌳 Personal Values compete to guide his attention. Even though 🌳 equanimity seems like the best way to approach life, 📈 get it done might win out. If that happened, the result might have been this:

Tim felt depressed because he had rushed around in the supermarket.

The strategy of getting things done made his equanimity value seem impossible to live by. The objective facts are the same as in the story above, but reasons make the difference in how Tim feels about it. Here's another example:

🌳 Personal Values vs. 💍 Social Expectations

Imagine Tim was trying to act in a different way he really believes in:

🌳 kindness: support others in discovering and enacting their best understanding of self-care

That could have been in conflict with both the social expecation that was guiding his attention:

💍 being a leader: create a plan and show the others the way forward

AND would likely have come into conflict with the practical strategy guiding his attention:

📈 get it done: delegate tasks so that things happen as thoroughly and efficiently as possible

This would also result in a 💥 Conflict as Tim's 💍 Social Expectations (+ practical strategies) and 🌳 Personal Values compete to guide his attention. Even though 🌳 kindness seems like the best approach to life, 💍 being a leader might win out. If that happens, the result could be this:

Tim felt embarassed because he had been bossing people around.

The expectation of being a good leader (and strategy of getting things done) caused him to neglegt his personal value of kindness.

In the next section, you'll learn how to work backwards from the emotion and what happened to the expectations, strategies, and values that were guiding your attention. That's a skill called❣️Emotions to Values. It's the foundational practice of the Human Systems design method.

Summing up

When it comes to human choices, reasons matter. If social expectations or practical strategies don't alight with personal values, you could end up spending time that feels upsetting and/or meaningless. But as a values-literate designer, you can rewrite games to align expectations and outcomes with personal values.

In Level 1: 🌳 Personal Values, you saw that articulating people's values is a difficult but important step in values-based systems design. Here, in Level 2: ❣️Emotions to Values, you will examine the motivations behind your own forms of attention. In Level 3: 💡Wisdom Interviews, you'll use that lens to interview other people about what is meaningful to them.