Target Fixation

I think we have become lazy.

It is now easier than ever to bombard our target audiences with all manner of automated or semi automated messages. To use our websites and social media feeds as vehicles for the equivalent of carpet bombing their attention, in the hope that something will stick. It's easy to be thoughtlessly efficient.

Target fixation is a well known attentional issue. We become so focused on what we are targeting that we lose sight of anything else. We lose our "peripheral vision" and become oblivious to what's going on around us.

I find it interesting to notice that in sectors where vocational drives are high - medicine, teaching, science - the dominant leadership and management discourse remains money. Budgets are they key performance criteria for the managers, but not for the practitioners. How often do we hear in response to criticism of performance that "we are spending more and more on this". As though the money is the only thing.

Alfie Kohn writes fluently in Punished…