There is much talk nowadays of attention led by people such as Linda Stone, and Stowe Boyd.  The premise is that Continuous Partial Attention is a new and trainable way of thinking. 

I like the way JP approaches it in this post, relating the tools GenM use in comparison to the tools corporations use.  More importantly the implication that I read into it, is how use of the old MS Office tools, and especially Powerpoint provide adequate opportunity to control, manipulate and interpret information, into conclusions.  The obvious result is the classic, “information is power”.

OLD
More on visualisation and flight patterns and Generation M | confused of calcutta

We’re still stuck in a world of PowerPoint presentations of scorecards and dashboards and RAG indicators, fed by Excel spreadsheets and simple databases, and with considerable manual intervention. Considerable use of derived data. Considerable throwing away of useful information. Considerable scope for sins of omission and commission when interpreting the derived data.

NEW

Generation M, with their mobility and their multimedia and their multitasking skills, have an innate ability to leapfrog us. They haven’t been infected by Office. They don’t think that way. They’re already used to non-hierarchical ways of looking at things, at tag clouds and cluster maps and fractal images. They’re already used to seeing lots of atomised fast-moving information and making sense of it. They’re used to better simulations, better virtual worlds, more decentralised ways of behaving, quicker decisions, less pigeonholing, faster networking. They’re different. And God bless them.

GenM on the other hand, being expert multitaskers can quickly synthesise disparate information into conclusions naturally.

He finishes with what I believe is a sound conclusion, that board room decisions will not turn on their head overnight, but that there is enormous capacity to save time and effort within companies.

I’m not saying that boardrooms are going to turn into 21st century air
traffic control units overnight. What I am saying is that we waste
enormous amounts of time and effort using tools that aren’t fit for
purpose

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