№ 01The Faculty
Dr Aisha Okonkwo.
Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London School of Economics.
On attention as the central discipline of senior work.
Most organisations do not have an information problem. They have an attention problem dressed up as one.
The work
Aisha runs a small graduate seminar at the London School of Economics, twelve students per intake, that has become the best-known door into a particular kind of practitioner research. The seminar is called Attention in Large Organisations and the reading list runs to thirty-eight items. Outside the seminar she keeps a quiet research practice: a quarterly note, a handful of advisory conversations with chief executives who pay for an hour of her time on the understanding that the answer will be more disappointing than they expect, and the chairing work for Think Professionally. She does not consult on retainers and she does not write a newsletter.
Background
She trained as an experimental psychologist at Ibadan, where she ran cognitive load studies on hospital triage decisions, and then at Nottingham, where her doctoral work was on the cost of context switching in legal partnership offices. The Nottingham years are when she stopped being a laboratory researcher and started being something else, something for which the profession does not yet have a clean name. Embedded researcher is close. Practitioner is closer.
Between 2011 and 2017 she sat inside two FTSE 100 organisations as a research fellow attached to the chief executive’s private office. The brief was simple and the access was unusual: read everything, sit in everything, write a twelve-month report. The reports are not published. The methodology, in outline, is. Her name comes up in five doctoral theses on chief-executive workload that she did not supervise.
Signature contribution
Aisha is known, in the small world of people who know her, for two things. The first is a structural argument about attention that she has been making in print and in lectures since about 2019, which can be summarised in one sentence and is the pull quote at the top of this page. Most organisations do not have an information problem. They have an attention problem dressed up as one. Around that sentence she has built a body of work that has been cited in two select-committee reports and one Bank of England staff working paper.
The second is her chairing. She chairs the way her doctoral supervisor at Nottingham chaired, which is to say she does not let a session settle for the easier conversation. When a panel begins to converge on a comfortable consensus, she breaks it. When a question is hedged, she takes the hedge out. When a speaker is being too generous about their own work, she says so, on stage, politely, in front of the room. She has been doing this at our flagship conference every October since 2022.
In practice
If you ask Aisha what the work looks like on the day, she will say it looks like reading. She reads board papers, transcripts of executive committee meetings (when she is allowed to), and the internal memos that don’t make the official record. She underlines. She writes a single A4 sheet for the chief executive at the end of each visit. The sheet is normally one paragraph long and contains one observation that the chief executive will not want to hear. Two of her A4 sheets are framed in private offices in the City. She does not know which two.
A chief executive who is reading the second memo is doing the work. A chief executive who is reading the first memo is doing what was asked of them.
Outside the work
She is a trustee of a small adult literacy charity in south London and chairs their reading panel. She lives in Forest Hill and grew up in Lagos and Ibadan. She reads a great deal of nineteenth-century memoir, plays the piano badly, and is the only person on the faculty who will admit, on the record, to owning a television.
The point of a graduate seminar is that twelve people read the same thirty-eight things and disagree about which one mattered. The argument is the lesson.