Film 02 · 19 min
Attention Is the Work
Filmed across three working days inside institutions building Gelephu, following what actually consumes a senior leader's attention and what that leaves for the decisions that matter.
Who appears
Karma Tshering
Director of Programmes, BGLI
Sonam Dorji
Deputy Director, Planning, GMC Authority
The thinking behind it
The film starts from a boring observation: by the time a difficult decision reaches a leader, most of its quality has already been determined by what they noticed in the preceding weeks.
It follows three decisions backwards. In each case the failure mode is not bad reasoning at the table. It is a signal that arrived early, was seen by someone junior, and never survived the journey upward.
That reframes the leadership question. Not how do I decide better, but what conditions in me and around me let information arrive intact.
The Bhutanese framing here is not decorative. Governing from a settled mind is a claim about institutional design as much as personal discipline.
Sources
Simon (1971), Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World
The origin of attention as the scarce resource.
Edmondson (1999), Administrative Science Quarterly
Psychological safety and the upward flow of information.
BGLI cohort decision audits, 2026
Anonymised, with participants' consent.
Transcript
TSHERING: Show me your calendar and I will tell you what you will decide badly in March.
DORJI: The thing we got wrong, somebody had written down eleven months earlier.