Change is Hard: Adaptation under Attention Scarcity

Complexity and the Challenge of Adaptation

The greatest threats we face today cannot be engineered away—they require us to change ourselves. An adaptive challenge is a complex problem that demands learning, adaptation, and shifts in behavior to overcome. Climate change, health care, inequality, gun violence, migration—all require fundamental changes to our norms, behaviors, and institutions.

Of course, this is a simplification. We could list major technical challenges—vaccine development, battery storage, space exploration, carbon sequestration—but even these often contain adaptive elements that block investment, delay deployment, or create unintended consequences.

The Covid vaccine offers a vivid example. Within a year of the outbreak, scientists developed an effective vaccine that reduced hospitalization risk by 90 percent, saving millions of lives. But the harder part—access, distribution, and uptake—was deeply adaptive. Inequitable access, misinformation, and skepticism all reduced usage. Millions more died. Worse, the technical miracle has been memory-holed, and a vaccine skeptic now runs Health and Human Services, systematically dismantling our ability to prevent, detect, and respond to future pandemics.

As societies grow in size and complexity, their systems often become more rigid, making adaptation harder. Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies, argued that we solve simple problems first because they’re cheaper and yield obvious benefits. The harder, more complex problems that remain offer smaller incremental returns, and their solutions require increasingly elaborate structures—laws, bureaucracies, technologies—with rising marginal costs. Over time, the very complexity we’ve built begins to inhibit further adaptation. When a shock occurs—invasion, disease, a change in climate—the society collapses.

Tainter’s theory has its critics, as all metatheories do. But decades after I first read Collapse as an undergraduate anthropology student, his argument still resonates as a lens for understanding our current adaptive paralysis.

The Adaptive Challenge of Traffic Deaths

Even as we solve technical problems at accelerating speed, we seem unable to marshal the imagination, attention, and will to adapt to our most pressing existential threats.

Take traffic safety. Roughly 40,000 people die in traffic crashes in the U.S. each year—the second leading cause of death for people under 44, after drug overdoses. Surely this should be a national priority.

It’s not inevitable. We know how to design roads and vehicles that protect everyone. We can limit speeds, improve enforcement and emergency response, and give more people alternatives to driving by investing in transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure. Every transportation leader claims safety is their top priority—so why do fatalities persist at this scale?

Two reasons. First, we are dealing with legacy systems. Even with strong policy shifts, turning over the vehicle fleet and redesigning roadways takes decades. Second, and more importantly, we struggle to adapt our norms, values, and behaviors to match our stated goals. While the Safe Systems Approach has brought many transportation officials toward a more holistic paradigm, we still see fealty to outdated priorities and political resistance that undermine progress: roadway projects that prioritize vehicle speed, vehicle designs heedless of pedestrian safety, rejection of proven technologies such as speed limiters and automated red-light enforcement, and the hollowing out of rural health systems that provide critical emergency care. Changing American habits around driving and road design requires sustained attention, coordination, and a shared sense of responsibility we have not yet achieved.

Source: New York Times, The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths, November 27, 2022

Attention: The Constraining Factor

Ron Heifetz, who coined “adaptive challenge,” emphasizes that these problems require sustained attention. Yet our capacity for collective focus is eroding. Today’s information ecology is complex, fragmented, and overwhelming. We have fewer mechanisms—both individually and collectively—for holding focus on what matters.

Chris Hayes, in The Siren’s Call, describes our era as one of information overabundance and attention scarcity. Digital technologies and the decline of mainstream media have fractured the “attention regimes” that once allowed societies to focus together. Social media commodifies attention, fragmenting it into viral bursts. Engagement-maximizing algorithms reward outrage and spectacle. The cumulative effect is informational overwhelm.

Witness the news cycles of the past six months. It is almost impossible to discern this administration’s priorities. We bounce aimlessly from DEI to trade wars to conspiracy theories. There is no strategy—only a series of ploys to survive each day’s headlines.

When our attention is pulled in a thousand directions, we can’t focus together long enough to act. People drift instead toward escapism, cynical resignation, or comforting but simplistic narratives. Through this open door steps fascism:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist. – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950)

In today’s Republican Party, Donald Trump functions as an “attentional regime” unto himself—absorbing oxygen, defining discourse, and pulling focus through impulsive, chaotic performance. Whether you find him entertaining or simply can’t look away, he monopolizes attention. Meanwhile, the real adaptive challenges go unaddressed.

Adaptive problem-solving demands shared facts, common ground, and sustained attention. Without agreement on the challenges—let alone the solutions—we cannot adapt. In the emerging AI-driven economy, we must learn to cope with information overload. That means building new norms for information consumption, new practices of discernment, and tools for synthesis. AI could help us navigate complexity—or it could deepen our epistemic and relational crises. We are at an inflection point.

As leaders and individuals, we must find ways to reclaim and reprioritize our attention while building meaningful relationships grounded in trust and shared purpose that enable action. In the deluge of artificially generated content and algorithmic attention-seeking, we need to create communal reefs of humane creativity, islands of shared meaning, and vessels of discernment capable of navigating the rising seas of complexity.

I’ll leave it here for now. In future posts, I’ll return with more concrete ideas on how to build those reefs, islands, and vessels.