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Essays

Cycles of Attention

Sean Moore

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

My interest in Congress and U.S. government – truly, the only thing in the whole of the process that I find the slightest bit interesting – lies exclusively in the reelection cycle. The minute after being sworn it seems, senators, president, congressmen and women especially, go to work ensuring their incumbency. Fundraising, lobbyist appeasement, voting for a future ballot count rather than on character or principle, all of it is in service to wind up in the exact same spot, two or four or six years later.

There are parallels to this in the software engineering realm as well. Scrum cycles, sprints, all varieties and flavors of iterative development all focus on these small turnovers, making small changes that can fit within the scope of the time-box so you can wind up, all over again, at the start of another cycle, ready to make more small changes.

Corporations, second son and citizen of this great nation, are no more immune to this orbit. The shareholder demands, the stock price expectations, and the desire to see quarter after quarter of meeting or exceeding projections of analysts causes decisions to be made causes expectations to be made causes more demands to be made.

There are things in this world that have cycles of attention. We don’t like to complain when they serve the purpose of making sure the right people (and only our right people, of course) stay in power. We don’t complain when they keep adding whiz-bang features to the apps we keep in our pockets. And we certainly don’t complain when they grow our retirement nest egg.


Positive feedback can be a good thing. Positive feedback is a good thing. It keeps us alive in innumerable and unimaginable ways.

But there is also a great danger to incentivizing the wrong things in the feedback loop, or when the the feedback loop becomes corrupted to serve an entirely different purpose. The election cycle wasn’t meant to keep congressmen campaigning every day, but rather that to ensure that constituents remained satisfied with their elected representative. What started as a good and proper feedback loop for good governance has devolved into a way to make sure those in power remain in power until death do them part.

Once this cycle has aligned itself around the feedback, what can you do? What incentive does a House member have to back a bill that would benefit the health and safety of his constituents, but is currently unpopular in his district? What incentive does a software company have to spend a good long while implementing security on their platform when there are all these glittering features in a pile, just waiting to be built? What incentive does a company have to embark on a strategy that may initially eat into it’s bottom line but ultimately grow the company?

I’m not saying that congressmen or software engineers or companies don’t do these things; in fact, against better judgement, they still often will. But these cycles of attention make the choice difficult by incentivizing the wrong things.


How do we incentivize what’s right? Can we incentivize what’s right? Do we know what right is? That’s a judgment call that neither you, nor I, nor anyone, are qualified to make for the rest of the world.

Maybe instead we can pull ourselves out of the cycle.

Before it turns into a death spiral.