Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World
Source: https://gwern.net/doc/design/1971-simon.pdf ↗
Full text: author page ↗
The essay that quietly invented the attention economy.
Simon's argument compresses into one sentence: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Written in 1971, read it now in the middle of an LLM-enabled flood of content and the sentence lands harder than it did when he wrote it.
The rest of the essay is about what to do about it — how to design organisations for filtering, not for producing.
Any product director shipping into feeds, recommendations or search is negotiating Simon's constraint whether they name it or not.
Central argument
Simon's central argument is that information abundance does not solve organizational problems — it creates a new one: the scarcity of attention. Because human beings and organizations are serial processors that can only attend to one thing at a time, a wealth of information necessarily produces a poverty of attention, which must then be allocated efficiently. The real cost of information, Simon insists, is not production or transmission but reception — the attention consumed by the recipient — and organizations must be designed with this constraint as a first-order consideration.
Critique
Simon frames attention as a scarce but essentially measurable and allocatable resource, proposing a 'standard executive' unit as if attention were fungible and homogeneous. This mechanistic framing obscures the qualitative dimension of attention: not all attention is equivalent, and the organizational challenge is less about quantity of time allocated than about the quality and depth of cognitive engagement brought to different problems. The model also says little about how power, status, and organizational politics shape whose attention gets claimed and by whom — dynamics that are often more determinative than any rational allocation mechanism.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, Simon's framework reframes roadmap and prioritization failures not as strategic errors but as structural attention-allocation problems: when teams are flooded with data, user feedback, and stakeholder requests, the bottleneck is never information but the focused judgment needed to process it. This directly implicates decisions about meeting cadences, the scope of discovery work, and how many concurrent initiatives a leadership team can genuinely sponsor — designing for attention scarcity means actively reducing the surface area of what competes for it, not adding more dashboards or reporting layers.