A team’s strategy is not defined by what’s written down on those beautifully crafted slide decks, but by what the team pays attention to together, consistently, over time. Yes, you’ve got it: I hate those slide decks.
Call it rhythm, alignment, focus. Or better yet, the attention map. The unwritten pattern of what people bring up, follow through on, measure, and revisit. And that map, not the slide deck, is where execution actually happens.
A strategy might start in a workshop or a leadership retreat, with those overworked slides and metrics and themes. For a moment, direction is clear. On the next day, real life takes over. Again. Priorities blur. Messages pile up. A deadline shifts. Someone’s out. Attention scatters, and worse, sometimes it doesn’t come back.
This drift doesn’t signal disobedience. Most people genuinely want to stay aligned. Attention, though, is fragile, and even a strong plan can quietly erode if the team’s collective focus begins to scatter. It’s not enough to declare priorities. What matters is what the team keeps returning to, and whether anyone helps bring that focus back when it slips.
The most effective teams don’t execute perfectly. They build small rituals that preserve focus, repeating the same goal in weeklies, checking the same metric without fail, asking the same question that keeps the group honest. These little habits form the shape of shared attention. And over time, that’s what turns strategy into action.
As Julian Birkinshaw put it in Harvard Business Review, attention is “the scarcest resource in business.” That feels exactly right. In an age of nonstop pings and shifting priorities, attention isn’t a byproduct, it’s the battleground. When you treat it as something you can shape and defend, you start to see how your team actually runs. What I call an attention map is just a name for that shared pattern, what gets revisited, tracked, followed up. It may not be formal, but it’s real. And it reveals more about execution than any dashboard ever could.
It’s easy to overestimate the power of clarity and underestimate the force of noise. As Oliver Burkeman writes in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, we’re not just short on time, we’re drowning in inputs. You can be completely aligned at kickoff and still drift apart by week three. That’s why managers have to manage attention. They don’t do it through micromanagement. They do it by returning to what matters, again and again, until others start doing it too. When attention fragments, it doesn’t just slow the team down. It quietly eats momentum.
We all know that Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But execution is what gets eaten all day, bite by bite, every time a team’s attention splinters.
Most execution gaps aren’t about competence. They’re about disorientation. The strategy may be fine, but no one is looking at the same thing anymore. That’s when momentum stalls, quietly, invisibly, and often without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
Sustaining shared attention shouldn’t be about pressure. It should be about discipline. Not the performative kind, but the kind I wrote about here, the habit of returning to what matters, even when it’s quiet, unglamorous, or inconvenient.
You don’t need to chase your team. You just need to help them look in the same direction, long enough for the work to take shape. Because strategy doesn’t live in the slide decks it lives in what people return to when no one’s presenting.
That’s the real leverage. That’s Fieldcraft.
Further reading
One book that reframed how I think about attention and execution is Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It’s not a playbook, it’s a mirror. And it reminds you that the real constraint isn’t strategy or resources. It’s your willingness to choose, and keep choosing, where your time, and your team’s, really goes.
Florin Branici 
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