Thinking (1)

A study published in Nature* this week found that the brain’s capacity for sustained attention is undiminished across contexts, but that environment and habit are the determining variables. So what changes isn’t ability; instead, it’s the conditions under which that ability operates.

The distinction matters for anyone leaving a long institutional career.

When people step away from firms or organisations, certain losses may be expected: status, daily structure, peer validation. I’ve already covered some of these in previous Reflections. What perhaps isn’t always anticipated is the loss of the cognitive environment. Of the rhythms and conditions that so often shape how we think and work.

I’m not suggesting that this is about institutions being better. Many of the clients I have worked with at Milestones have found institutional environments constraining and exhausting. And they are invariably politically fraught. Nonetheless they provide something, whether you value it or not - meeting rhythms that create thinking space, colleagues who challenge ideas, deadline pressures that focus attention, problems that require solving, and audiences who care about solutions.

Remove all that scaffolding and you’re left building something new. Doing this is entirely possible- and most people do it successfully - but it requires adjustment. It is that which is not always anticipated.

So, while I have had clients who have thought carefully about what they will do next, and who have planned activities and projects, what they haven’t always considered is how they’ll recreate the conditions for focused work. Not the work itself, but the environment that supports it.

Some discover they think better outside institutional constraints and that what felt like structure was interference. Others find themselves struggling to concentrate without external rhythms. Neither response is wrong, but both require adjustment.

And as always, the trick is recognising this will happen. That your cognitive environment is changing alongside your professional identity and that you will need to establish new patterns: morning routines, regular commitments, self-imposed deadlines, conversations with people who challenge your thinking. 

Creating these conditions is straightforward enough once you know they are needed. The difficulty comes when you do not anticipate this and simply assume thinking ability is entirely portable - and discover that the environment matters more than expected.

Not because you can’t think independently but rather because how you think - the rhythms, the triggers, the conditions - was shaped by an institutional context that no longer exists.

*Adam, D. (2026). Are attention spans really shrinking? What the science says. Nature 653, 20-22. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01407-w