Organizations rarely fail for lack of talent; they fail for lack of focus. Productivity and actual value creation is lost in constant firefighting, endless meetings and zero recovery for teams. The real challenge for leaders today is to protect the Zone of Focus or risk losing performance altogether.
In recent years a lot of research made one thing clear: deep focus is not an abstract idea, but a concrete driver of sustainable performance.
A 2023 analysis covering 113 studies and over 60,000 participants confirmed that work-related flow is positively correlated with performance, well-being, and job satisfaction. It showed the strongest association with proactive behaviors that create lasting value (Liu et al., Antecedents and outcomes of work-related flow: A meta-analysis).
On the other hand, a 2024 daily study found that high levels of multitasking during the workday significantly reduce the likelihood of entering flow, resulting in lower perceived performance. (Pluut et al., Frontiers in Psychology).
We have clear and scientific evidences that says that deep focus is measurable, trainable, and directly linked to performance. And yet, we still fail to proactively design organizations that protect focus time.
For senior leaders, this raises a critical question: How can deep focus shift from being a rare individual experience to a systematic organizational condition?
What deep focus really is
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as the state where challenge and skill meet in perfect balance, generating total absorption in the task at hand.
In earlier work, I explored how focus scales across teams in agile contexts, see Flow@Scale 1^ Part: How to speed up your Agile-Digital Transformation and Flow@Scale 2^ Part: Prepare your Agile teams for scaling.
Csikszentmihalyi identified some key ingredients to enter this hyper-productive state, which we summarize here below.
The interesting fact is that it’s not just intense concentration; it is a qualitatively different state that can transform how much people produce and, contemporarily, how well they do it.
We believe that a new leadership model needs to be adopted – we call it Flow Performance Impact Leadership
It promotes that focus must be definitely distinguished from busy work (the endless activities with arguable value); focus, as the statistics above report, actually leads to true sustainable performance.
It is the core of athletes’ Zone 2 (low-to-moderate intensity that helps creating aerobic base and makes endurance possible) that in business translates in a space where decisions of quality are made, where creativity emerges, and where lasting value is created.
For executives, enabling Zone 2 means building contexts where teams can generate real value at their full potential without burning out, sustaining both performance and resilience.
The Traps of Zone 3 and Zone 5
What mistakes organizations do? Sports science gives us a useful analogy.
And then comes the consequence: organizations produce what we call “Organizational Lactate“.
Paradoxically, while organizations demand agility, innovation, and resilience, they design ways of working that systematically block the very conditions that would enable them.
Just as lactic acid builds up when muscles are over-stressed, cognitive load accumulates when people spend too much time stuck in Zones 3 and 5. The result is mental fatigue, reduced creativity, slower decision-making, and ultimately a decline in overall performance. We wrote about it in this post: Organizational Lactate: How Managing Cognitive Load Unlocks Flow.
What leaders can do
The role of leadership is not to push harder but to design for focus. Here are strategic levers:
- Protect Zone 2: Block time for deep work, introduce no-meeting slots, and guard against constant interruptions. These are not luxuries—they are strategic resources.
- The 2×2 Rule: Two hours of high-intensity focus, followed by two hours of lighter or low-cognitive work. This cadence prevents overload, maintains clarity, and makes space for deep focus to emerge.
- Manage intensity and recovery cycles: As we explored in Beyond the Tyranny of the Quarter, leaders can borrow from sports periodization – macro, meso, and micro cycles of load and recovery – to turn pressure into sustainable performance by strategically plan cycles according to business targets to achieve.
- Reduce organizational lactate: Leaders must attack the root causes of cognitive fatigue such as too many meetings, endless context-switching, fragmented calendars. Removing these drains is the only way to unlock real focus.
- Build a culture of focus: Shift recognition away from “busyness” and toward impact. Redefine productivity as value created, not hours filled.
- Leverage AI to step out from Zone 3: AI can become an ally in protecting focus, automating low-value, high-distraction tasks and freeing energy for Zone 2.
Closing
Craig Lambert (essayist, former Harvard Magazine editor, and author of Mind Over Water) describes the Swing in rowing: that magical moment when individual rowers stop forcing their own rhythm and the boat moves in perfect unison. Suddenly, it feels as though the shell is flying across the water, propelled by harmony rather than strain.
That is what deep focus feels like in an organization. A shift from isolated effort to collective flow, where the whole becomes far greater than the sum of its parts.
👉 If you don’t design for focus, you’re designing for fatigue. Which one are you choosing for your teams?
