The two modes of attention

Summary: The foundation of science-based positioning is ’the hierarchy of attention’ which explains the two major approaches to B2B positioning in tech.

Every year, tens of billions of dollars in venture capital are invested in companies — and founder visions — where folks are trying to stake out a meaningful, compounding, competitive position in the SaaS market, be that classic B2B SaaS, data infrastructure and security, or new AI-first startups.

All this money is poured into what are essentially bets on how founding teams direct their attention. And at the heart of that attention is a fundamental conflict. For example:

• Should founders pour a lot of attention into building a fat (per Keith Rabois) or compounding (per Parker Conrad) startup and go big, launching with a bang?
• Should they instead go lean, build an MVP, and test and iterate as they go, applying their attention piece by piece?

Or what if we just focus on the founder’s vision and go-to-market (GTM) strategy. What should a founder do? Should they:

• Create a category?
• Focus on a niche?
• Build a brand?

These are all quite different things! Yet a startup’s entire GTM motion and sales approach — and, perhaps, their fate as a company — hinges on how that question gets answered.

I’ve seen folks waste a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of opportunity because they picked the wrong answer to that question.

And yet, we’ve also all seen the big successes that seemed to pick the right answer to that question at the right time, and absolutely kill it. Startup X that really did create a killer brand, company Y that really did create a category, or founder Z who really did start out in a niche…

What’s going on?

I found this quite baffling. There was no shortage of folks preaching about what founders should do, based on their particular experience. This often felt like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone was accurately and confidently (so confidently!) describing the part they could feel — maybe it’s a trunk, leg, or tail — and telling everyone else they were wrong.

Given we’re all on team Let’s Get Cool B2B Tech Products To Market, you’d think there’d be more attempts at synthesis, but there really wasn’t, because folks had (ironically) picked a niche position they wanted to defend.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t help founders or investors know which way to move. And it didn’t help me as I tried to deliver work and advise my clients.

So I set about doing something about it.

Attention is (almost) all you need

There’s been a breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamentals of attention in recent years that not many folks are aware of. It’s a little controversial, but it’s fundamental to science-based positioning because it gives us the why for what the best folks are already doing when it comes to positioning.

When I came across this theory, I couldn’t believe how neatly it matched — and resolved — the seemingly conflicting startup advice out there.

It explained just about… everything. Here’s the theory in a nutshell. (For a longer treatment of this theory, check out my big book on the topic, Positioning Playbook.)

The hierarchy of attention

This modern theory argues our divided brains generate two different modes of attention, and that dictates how we fundamentally ‘attend’ to the world around us.

This is Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s ‘hierarchy of attention.’ I talk about it a lot (as you’ve probably gathered), and this is where we’re going to start getting McGilchrist-pilled.

(We’re going to discuss right-brain/left-brain theories here, and if that triggers your neurobabble detector, I get it. But trust me when I say this is not a rehash of the old, debunked split-brain theories from the ’60s and ’70s — this is new territory, so stay with me.)

Unlike the old theory, it turns out both sides of our brain are involved in everything all the time, but — and this is an important ‘but’! — each hemisphere appears to have quite a different ’take’ on the world.

Think of a bird, for example (to pick an illustration McGilchrist likes to use), and particularly its vision (vision being our topic of interest). It basically has two jobs: to eat and not be eaten. (Or, ’to get without being got,’ as McGilchrist puts it.)

To eat, it uses its focused, narrow attention to pick out seeds on the ground, to grab sticks and build a nest, and otherwise use its ’tools’ to engage with what’s literally down in front of it.

But the bird must also keep an eye out for predators to avoid getting eaten (and look out for potential mates to pass its genes on). This requires broad, open, vigilant attention to change over time and what’s ‘out there’.

It seems that birds, and indeed just about all animals, have evolved with split brains for a reason, and that includes us humans, too, as McGilchrist documents in exhaustive detail in both 2009’s The Master and His Emissary and 2021’s magisterial The Matter with Things. McGilchrist’s command of the scientific literature on the divided brain is, as far as I can tell, without peer, as the hundreds upon hundreds of references he provides makes clear.

That is, this modern hemisphere hypothesis isn’t just the off-hour musings of some rando with a science degree; it’s the product of decades of painstaking work from one of the most important thinkers of our time.

How do we use this profound theory for the somewhat less profound job of selling software?

What do customers need to see?

What if, instead of talking about what startups “should” do, we could work backwards from what customers actually need to see to adopt or buy a new product?

Maybe all they need to see — to start, at least, in the very beginning — is a custom spreadsheet that reports on the data relevant to them in a way only your tech can produce? That’s pretty lean. Or, maybe you’re going up against an incumbent that’s used in a critical workflow and customers aren’t going to give you the time of day unless you’re polished and ready to go on day one? That’s a much ‘fatter’ approach.

For years, people have debated the merits of one approach over the other, despite neither being the one true ‘correct’ approach. But what we have now, however, are new fundamentals — new first principles — that help us think through what customers actually need to see.

To know what customers need to see, we need to know how they see. And that’s what McGilchrist’s hierarchy of attention gives us — a new way of understanding how we all see as humans, including those of us running startups and those of us buying from startups.

Now, I’m no neuroscientist, so I like to simplify these two ways of seeing to:

• Right-brain ‘radar’ attention.
• Left-brain ’laser-beam’ attention.

Radars and laser beams. They’re the two metaphors I want you to keep in mind. And if we have two modes of attention, it stands to reason we need two types of stories to address them. I call these stories:

• ‘Story 1’ — change stories for right-brain ‘radar’ attention.
• ‘Story 2’ — focused stories for left-brain ’laser-beam’ attention.

(That’s a riff on “system 1” and “system 2” from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

These two story types come together, to varying degrees, in everything you do, simply because this is how we ‘attend’ to the world as humans.

Attention preferences

Once you understand that these two modes of attention exist at a fundamental, how-our-brains-evolved level, and that some people, and some situations, tend to operate more in one mode than the other, you start to see this pattern everywhere.

And that has big implications for how you translate your vision into your positioning and sales narrative.

For example, in your sales narrative, you might lean more on one or the other story type, depending on your audience:

• Executives and outbound folks are usually open to more story 1-style narratives about change over time, i.e. what’s happening ‘out there’.
• End-users and inbound folks are usually focused down on the tool in front of them, and have narrow, story 2 questions about how things work.

I saw this play out at The Unicorn where hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent on a very ‘story 1’ approach to narrative. The narrative worked with executives, as you might expect, but it tanked with end users. Or so I thought. I then listened to outbound sales calls and found it did sometimes resonate with end users. The prospects it tanked with were coming inbound. The prospects it resonated with were being contacted outbound. Whether you were an inbound or outbound prospects meant a different mode of attention and changed what narrative worked!

These attention preferences play out in broader discussions around positioning, too. For example, it explains:

• Niche positioning, and why some folks think you should focus on a niche (that’s left-brain laser beam attention at work).
• Narrative approaches, and why some folks think you should create a category or have an ambitious strategic narrative about external change in the world (that’s right-brain radar attention at work).
• Fundamental mismatches, and why some folks — founders especially — get caught in the middle of attention mismatches, with their investors pushing for the big right-brain story and their users, for example, pushing for focused solutions on how they use the tool.

This reality affects everyone in the B2B sales process, especially in venture-backed startups.

Prospects, as discussed, can go either way — they might come into a sale late when they’re highly focused on story 2 (how you use the tool and the exact problem it solves), or they might be unaware of the problem and need a new story 1 concept put on their radar, one that matches something they’re seeing ‘out there’ on the horizon. (AI being the obvious example.)

Investors, on the other hand, tend to be very story 1 focused, as they’re in the business of looking ‘out there’ on their radar — that’s literally their job.

Founders, can show preferences for one or the other — perhaps they’re big on the grand vision, or they’re very detail-oriented — but being able to connect and move between story 1 and story 2, between their radar and their laser beam attention, is a rare skill.

Finally, consultants and advisors who may have had success reaching one mode of attention or the other, may strongly prefer that approach. Again, that can work, but being able to move between both is better.

It’s turtles attention preferences (almost) all the way down.

And this gives us a powerful, high-leverage approach to positioning that can drive your GTM approach, your leadership, and maybe your product direction, too.

New first principles

Until now, this involved a lot of confusion and, at times, superstition, because we didn’t have the language to describe this phenomenon. And when it came to founders taking their vision and translating it into a position for their product or company, they’d be bombarded with conflicting advice.

But now we have the language and tools to do this properly. We can work backward from the nature of attention itself. We can diagnose narrative mismatches, we can identify when and where a category or narrative-driven approach might work vs. a niche approach, and we can leverage new and old fundamentals — like categories, niches, and brand — to better understand the “market” in “product/market fit.”

In more practical terms, we can also build better pitches. The key place this manifests is, as you might have guessed, in your sales narrative, especially in giving you the flexibility to meet folks where their attention is at.

The hierarchy of attention is, then, at the heart of science-based positioning, because it’s at the heart of how we attend to the world around us.

If we’re going to create a position in folks’ minds, then from a first-principles point of view, we’ve got to start with attention. I’ll cover how that plays out in your narrative as well as specific strategies (including brand and memory), but next let’s examine the other two areas of science in science-based positioning as we look at our three areas of science.

First published: September 2024 · Last updated: November 11, 2024