Poko manifesto · 12 October 2026
From strategic attention to cognitive stewardship
A research agenda behind Poko — and what remains to be proved
The question underneath the company
Why do people and organisations repeatedly fail to carry out good intentions—and how much of that failure comes from the design of attention, work, information and decision systems?
There are longstanding literatures that make this question tractable: bounded rationality; executive control and working memory; organisational attention; behavioural strategy; decision architecture; job demands and resources; socio-technical systems; distributed cognition; human factors and resilience.
Dave Morris's contribution is an integrative research direction, connecting those literatures to measurable decisions, functional outcomes and system design at multiple scales.
The academic centre: CEO attention and strategic renewal
Dave's University of Wollongong PhD Research Proposal Review, dated 29 October 2025, is titled Temporal Dynamics of CEO Attention and Decision Architectures after Strategic Renewal.
The proposed study examines whether a relationship between CEOs' communicated attention and the decision architecture described in public company records is associated with the persistence of strategic renewal across time. It considers decision rights, gates, cadence, monitoring, forums and the procedural qualities voice, transparency, reasons and reviewability (VTRR).
The specified method is an event-anchored, filings-only, multiple-case design with roughly a 36-month observation window. Examples used to establish data feasibility include the Alphabet restructuring and Salesforce's acquisition of Slack. The analysis is careful to distinguish what is visible in public documents from the internal neural or causal mechanisms one cannot infer from those documents.
This is a concrete strategic-management study. It does not prove that all organisations are 'brains' in a neurological sense or establish the wider Attention Physics theory.
The five-year proposed arc
| Proposed research year | Research problem | Example deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Mechanism | How attention and structure become decisions and action | Strategic bandwidth, organisational architecture and a mechanism study |
| 2 — Capability | How cognitive capabilities are developed, conserved and redeployed | Adaptation and load-management concepts; neuroprofiling research proposal |
| 3 — Firm | How individuals, teams, centres and governance form a working cognitive architecture | Firm cognition and Shared Network Organisation studies |
| 4 — Design principles | Whether common constraints and failure patterns scale across larger systems | Candidate design laws, cognitive entropy, smart-environment research |
| 5 — Stewardship | How large cognitive systems should be governed and made more just | Cognitive stewardship, institutional design, cognitive-cities research |
The source plan sketches twenty potential papers and five longer empirical streams. These are targets and hypotheses, not publications or committed multi-institutional studies. Scope, funding, ethics, feasibility, data access and scientific results will determine what can actually be undertaken.
The candidate theories
Strategic Bandwidth
A proposed organisational capability construct: how much a firm can meaningfully attend to, process and turn into decisions and actions at one time. The challenge is to operationalise it independently from generic capacity or performance measures and show what it predicts.
Attention–Architecture Fit
A conceptual link between the issues leaders and employees attend to and the processes, rights and routines through which organisations make decisions. This is closest to the formal doctoral centre and established attention-based organisational literature.
Sustainable Systems / the Slack Thesis
A conjecture that systems dependent on bounded processors require load–capacity fit, useful feedback and adequate adaptive slack to remain sustainable over time. Research must specify boundary conditions and discriminate this from related queueing, resilience and job-demands theories.
Shared Network Organisation
A proposed organisational design in which human-scale centres operate as cognitive nodes, each contributing internally and creating external value. The design explicitly treats autonomy, fairness, meaningful work, decision rights, cognitive fit and commercial discipline as architectural variables. It remains a model to be piloted and assessed, not a demonstrated superior universal structure.
Attention Physics
An exploratory framework using attention budgets, event ledgers and cross-scale maps to represent the movement and constraints of attention from persons to teams, organisations and wider networks. Some proposals borrow from conceptual geometry, information theory and quantum cognition. Those mathematical formalisms require operational definitions and independent comparison with simpler competing models. Quantum-like mathematics must not be confused with a proven physical mechanism of thought.
Cognitive Stewardship
A longer-term normative and operational proposal: leaders, professionals and institutions should regard the distribution of cognitive load, attention, agency and decision capability as design and governance responsibilities. This connects to psychological safety, cognitive liberty, administrative burden, human factors and responsible technology.
How research turns into products
Research can influence Poko in four testable ways.
Better models of where difficulty arises: e.g., separate unclear tasks from poor memory support, overloaded schedules, environmental misfit or clinical concerns.
Better interventions: choose, adapt and combine appropriate training, compensatory methods, environmental redesign and professional supports.
Better measures: distinguish outcomes from functional cost, and whether gains remain when conditions change.
Better system design: translate patterns of demands, handoffs, decision rights and recovery into software tools and eventually physical environments.
The path from conceptual paper to product should always include the question: Does this perform better than an appropriate alternative in the real situation?
Scientific discipline, risk and independence
Poko's research philosophy should remain close to the research philosophy: formulate bold hypotheses, invite criticism, identify predictions that could fail, compare with rival accounts, revise rather than protect weak claims and document the evolution.
Important boundaries:
- The existing literature supports many component principles but has not validated Poko's entire proprietary integrated framework.
- A PhD proposal is not a completed thesis or peer-reviewed finding.
- The planned five-year programme is not evidence that any named future studies have started or will be completed.
- Neurotechnology data must not be used to infer individual mental states beyond the evidence; workplace applications require special scrutiny over coercion and surveillance.
- University-related research, company-owned IP, consent, data governance and commercial interests must be separated and documented.
A serious research programme should be willing to be wrong
Possible decisive tests include:
- Does attention–architecture fit predict change persistence beyond conventional strategic or governance indicators?
- Does a 'strategic bandwidth' measure yield reliable predictions after controlling for staff capacity and process design?
- Do geometric or quantum-like attention models outperform simpler statistical, network or queueing models on independent datasets?
- Does redesigning an environment improve functional outcomes and reduce cost for users who actually occupy it?
- Does additional sensor data materially improve a recommendation over low-tech observation and self-report?
- Which interventions help whom, in which circumstances, and with what burdens or unintended effects?
Negative findings would narrow the roadmap rather than invalidate the company's obligation to build useful products.
Explore the source library for the scholarship behind this agenda. The research proposals describe intended work, not completed findings.