What if the quality of our thinking depends less on what we think about than on how we attend to what is before us?
This is one of the provocative ideas at the heart of psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist’s work, particularly The Master and His Emissary and Ways of Attending. His argument is not that the “left brain is logical” while the “right brain is creative” but both hemispheres participate in virtually everything we do. What differs is the manner in which they attend to the world.
McGilchrist identifies two modes of attention. The first is narrow and focused attention. The second is broad, open, receptive attention. Both are necessary. The challenge is knowing when each is appropriate, and how to move between them.
1. Focused Attention: Looking at Something
The first mode is selective, precise and targeted. It allows us to isolate something from its surroundings, examine it closely, name it, categorise it, analyse it and work with it. This is enormously useful. Examples include, a surgeon needing to focus on a particular part of the body, or an engineer needing to isolate a particular problem, or a student needing to concentrate on a mathematical equation. This is the kind of attention McGilchrist associates predominantly with the left hemisphere. Its strength is precision. It takes the world apart so that we can understand and manipulate particular elements of it. It creates abstractions, categories, measurements and representations that are useful for action.
But there is a price. When we focus intensely on one thing, we necessarily exclude many other things from awareness. Examples include seeing the tree, but losing sight of the forest; seeing the problem, but losing sight of the wider system in which the problem exists; and seeing the words, but lose the meaning of the conversation. Focused attention therefore gives us clarity through reduction. And that can become dangerous when we mistake the reduced representation for the whole of reality.
2. Open Attention: Looking At the Whole
The second mode is radically different. Instead of narrowing attention towards something already identified as important, we allow attention to remain broad, open, sustained and receptive. We notice what is present without immediately deciding what it means. We become aware of context, relationships, movement, ambiguity, emotion, tone, atmosphere and what is emerging.
McGilchrist associates this mode predominantly with the right hemisphere. It is not simply “creative thinking.” It is a more fundamental way of encountering reality, one that is relational, embodied, contextual and receptive to what is not yet known.
Imagine listening to a piece of music. You could isolate individual notes, analyse their frequency and identify their sequence. But the music is not contained in the individual notes. The music emerges in the relationship between the notes, the rhythm, movement, pauses, harmonies and the whole unfolding experience. Similarly, when we listen to another person, we can attend to their words. But we can also attend to the person speaking. What is their tone? What are they not saying? What seems important to them? What is happening between us? What is emerging in the conversation? This is attending to the whole rather than merely the parts.
A useful illustration is a flower. Imagine simply looking at a flower. You experience its shape, colour, texture, fragrance and vitality as a whole. Then imagine taking it apart, petals, stem, leaves, stamen, pistil. Each component can now be examined independently.
Both ways of attending are valuable. Scientific investigation requires the capacity to examine parts. But something changes when the flower is reduced to its components: the relational whole is no longer immediately present.
McGilchrist is not advocating the abandonment of analytical thinking but that the two modes need one another. The broad mode gives us an initial encounter with reality. The focused mode enables us to examine, clarify and work with what we have encountered. Then we need to return to the whole.
McGilchrist describes a movement in which the right hemisphere grounds experience, the left hemisphere works on clarifying and making aspects explicit, and the right hemisphere then reintegrates what has been learned into a richer whole.
3. Why this Matters for Leadership
Leadership requires focused attention. A leader oftentimes makes decisions, identifies priorities, solves problems and allocates resources. But leadership also requires the ability to step back and ask: What am I not seeing because I am looking so closely at this particular issue?
Consider an organization experiencing rising staff turnover. A focused mode might examine:
- turnover statistics;
- salary levels;
- absenteeism;
- workload;
- staffing ratios;
- exit-interview data.
All of these are important. But open attention asks different questions:
- What is the lived experience of working here?
- What is happening in the relationships between staff and supervisors?
- What has changed in the culture of the organisation?
- What are people sensing but not saying?
- What is happening in the wider system that we have not yet understood?
The first mode helps us diagnose. The second helps us sense. Good organisational inquiry requires both. A dashboard can tell us what is happening. It cannot necessarily tell us what it is like to work there. A survey can tell us what people reported. It may not reveal what people are reluctant to say. A strategic plan can describe where the organisation wants to go. It cannot fully anticipate what will emerge when people begin moving together. Data matters. But data is not the whole.
4. The Deeper Leadership Practice: Shifting how We Attend
Perhaps the most practical insight is that leadership development is not simply about acquiring more knowledge. It is also about developing the capacity to shift the way we attend. At times we need to narrow. At times we need to widen. At times we need to analyse. At times we need to behold. At times we need to ask a question. At times we need to remain silent long enough for something new to appear. At times we need to separate the parts. At times we need to reconnect them.
The mature leader therefore learns to ask not only “What should I think?” but also “How am I attending?” This question can interrupt habitual patterns of sensemaking. It can reveal what our attention is excluding. And it can create the possibility of seeing a situation differently, not because we have acquired more information, but because we have changed our relationship with what is already before us.
5. From Two ways of Attending to Wiser Action
It is not that one way of attending is “right” and the other is “wrong.” We need both. Focused attention gives us precision. Open attention gives us perspective. Analysis gives us clarity. Context gives us meaning. Reduction helps us work with complexity. Reintegration helps us remain faithful to the whole. The leadership challenge is therefore not to choose between the two. It is to develop the wisdom to move between them.
Perhaps the simplest practice is this: First, step back and notice the whole. Then, focus on what requires attention. Then, step back again and ask: “Having examined the parts, what do I now see about the whole that I could not see before?”
How we attend, from noticing the whole and then the parts, and then back to the whole, can as McGilchrist reminds us, help shape the world we experience.
6. A Simple Practice for leaders
Before your next important conversation or decision, pause for thirty seconds and ask:
- What am I focusing on? What has my attention?
- What might I be excluding?
- What people, relationships, emotions, context or possibilities are outside my current frame?
- What becomes visible when I widen my attention?
- What deserves focused attention now?
- Having focused, what does the whole situation look like again?
This is a simple practice, but it can change the quality of sensemaking. It moves us from simply looking harder to learning how to see more. McGilchrist’s work invites us not merely to think differently, but to cultivate a different way of being attentive to reality.
References
I, McGilchrist (2019). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, New Expanded Version, Yale University Press, New Haven and London
I, McGilchrist (2019). Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, London and New York
