“Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbert A. Simon wrote this line in “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” published in a 1971 volume on computers and the public interest. Simon, whose work ranged across economics, psychology, computer science, and organization theory, began with a simple inversion. If information becomes abundant, it consumes something scarce: the attention of recipients. The managerial problem therefore changes. Producing and distributing more reports is not automatically helpful; organizations must decide what deserves to be noticed and what can safely remain in the background.
The insight builds on Simon’s broader idea of bounded rationality. Decision-makers do not possess unlimited time, knowledge, or calculating power. They search, simplify, and stop when they find an answer that is good enough for the purpose. An information-rich environment can intensify those limits because every message competes for the same finite capacity to interpret and act. A dashboard with one hundred metrics may contain more facts than a dashboard with ten, yet make the important deviation harder to see. Abundance without selection becomes another form of scarcity.
The quote does not imply that leaders should conceal inconvenient data or reduce complex issues to a single number. Filters embody assumptions, and a poorly chosen filter can hide weak signals, exclude frontline knowledge, or reinforce an executive’s preferences. Nor can attention be allocated only by urgency; loud requests often crowd out important work whose consequences develop slowly. Responsible filtering makes criteria visible, provides routes for escalation, and preserves access to underlying evidence when a summary needs to be challenged.
Simon’s warning has become more relevant as email, messaging, analytics, social media, and generative systems make content cheap to produce. The scarce asset is the organization’s ability to concentrate on consequential questions. Businesses can protect it by reducing duplicate reporting, limiting notifications, assigning clear decision owners, and designing metrics around choices rather than display. Good information architecture is not a warehouse filled with everything. It is a system that helps the right person find enough trustworthy evidence at the moment a decision must be made—without demanding that everyone read everything first. Teams can also name what deserves interruption and what can wait for a regular review. That agreement prevents every alert from competing at the same level and gives deep work an institutional defense. Removing stale dashboards can be as valuable as installing new ones. Every report should identify the decision it informs, its owner, and its expiration condition.
Simon presented the idea in a 1971 paper on how organizations should be designed for a world made information-rich by computing and communication technologies.
He reframed abundance as a resource-allocation problem because every new message competes for limited human attention.
More data can reduce decision quality when people cannot identify which signals matter or connect them to action.
Filtering must remain contestable; otherwise it can hide inconvenient facts, amplify bias, or silence knowledge outside formal reporting channels.
Cheap digital communication has made the production of messages nearly limitless while human concentration remains finite.
Well-designed organizations protect attention through priorities, ownership, selective alerts, and access to trustworthy underlying evidence.
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