Getting on the Same Page, Together

Imagine you’ve got a long morning meeting at work. To make it easier to get through, you and your co-worker plan to grab lunch afterward at a nearby spot with outdoor seating. But during the meeting, you look out the conference room window and see that it has started to rain. You would be understandably disappointed and might start frowning.

If you then turn to the co-worker you were supposed to have the picnic with and see them smiling, you’d wonder: Do they know what I know? If they’re smiling wryly, recognizing that your plans will be canceled, then you can be sure that they share your knowledge. But ... if they are still smiling because they don’t know it's raining, then you will realize they don't know what you know.

The Problem of “Common Knowledge”

This back-and-forth is a problem of what philosophers and psychologists call common knowledge. Common knowledge, put simply, is the state in which everyone in a group knows something and everyone knows that everyone else knows it. It’s a heady, abstract concept that can quickly become overwhelming, but as you’ll see, it matters a great deal for how we interact with clients and others.

Getting to a state of common knowledge requires a great deal of coordination. How, in other words, can I truly be sure that my co-workers, or my friends or my family, understand some issue in the same way that I do?

That’s a question that matters for coordination: Coordination often fails when people are unsure whether others are aware of the same facts or interpretations, even if these facts are publicly available.

Here’s an example you might have faced:

• You’ve got a standing Monday afternoon meeting with your team that eventually becomes unnecessary.

• Everyone realizes, on their own, that the meeting has become unnecessary.

• Everyone assumes everyone else realizes this, too.

• Yet, the meeting goes on week after week.

Here’s why this sort of thing happens:

• The information is widely known, but it hasn’t really become common knowledge.

• Each co-worker thinks something like, “The meeting is a waste of time, and I think others think the same thing. But I’m not really sure that they know that I know that. If I suggest that we cancel, and they don’t agree with me, then I might be judged negatively.”

Now consider how this sort of coordination problem could apply to an interaction between a financial advisor and a client. Imagine a case in which an advisor has discussed increasing monthly contributions to a 529 account with the client.

After the meeting, the advisor might think the rationale was clearly explained and that the client is on the same page. The client, however, might think, “I’m not sure whether I’m understanding the benefits of making more contributions (and cutting back on other spending for my kids) in the same way my advisor does, or whether my advisor realizes how I’m interpreting this advice.”

Notice in this case, it’s not that the client disagrees with the advisor’s recommendation. Rather, the client just isn’t confident that they have a shared understanding with the advisor. As a result, they may delay the decision to increase their contribution. It’s neither a laziness problem nor a procrastination problem. Here, the issue is a coordination problem arising from (a lack of) collective knowledge.

Why Collective Attention Helps People Align, Decide and Move Forward Together

Clearly, there are times when we do solve these difficult coordination problems and suddenly find ourselves on the same page as the people with whom we are sharing an experience. So, how do we do it? Before I explain the answer, let me just say that this is not strictly an academic exercise because if we can understand how solutions naturally arise, we can more deliberately put them into practice.

This is where a recent line of work spearheaded by Garriy Shteynberg comes into play. He and his co-authors seek to address the problem of collective knowledge by introducing the phenomenon of collective attention.¹

The basic idea is that rather than having to go through the back and forth of wondering if other people know what you know, collective attention occurs when people attend to the same information — at the same time — from a first-person plural (“we”) perspective. Collective attention is a shared experience in which you feel as if you and others are a “we” attending to the same thing.

If you’ve ever been to a concert where the whole crowd starts singing a song with the band, there’s no question of whether everyone else knows whether to start singing; through the experience of shared attention, it just becomes a given that you are on the same page.

Shteynberg and his team even show, through their research, that when people believe they are attending to something together, they allocate more cognitive resources to it, remember it better and align their interpretations and evaluations more closely. Collective attention matters, in other words, because we are simply more dialed in when we experience something as a “we” with others.

Let’s return to that client-advisor meeting. Now imagine a follow-up session. Instead of reexplaining the recommendation verbally, the advisor opens a live 529 projection and walks the client through the decision to make higher contributions in real time. As contribution levels change, both watch the same outcomes update and react to the same trade-offs.

The advisor might notice what aspects the client focuses on, clarify which considerations are driving the recommendation and confirm that they are interpreting the situation the same way. In that moment, uncertainty about understanding disappears.

The decision feels like one jointly owned by the client and advisor rather than one that’s simply inferred. The contribution increase actually happens this time (instead of being put off indefinitely), not because the client was persuaded, but because shared understanding became clear.

Turning Shared Understanding into Action Through Collective Attention

From a practical perspective, this means that if our goal is to coordinate action with someone else, we should put in place actions that directly foster collective attention. Concretely:

• Important decisions or meetings should be synchronous — such as in-person meetings or live video calls — rather than asynchronous, like emails or other messages.

• We shouldn’t assume others know what we know, but directly ask what they know and what they are experiencing.

• We should build in moments of explicit mutual confirmation. For instance, “Here’s how I’m thinking about this. Can you tell me how you’re seeing it?”

When I first read the research on collective attention, I immediately thought of the work I do in the classroom with my students. I’ve certainly had times when I thought I had explained a concept or assignment clearly, only to realize later that I didn’t fully understand what my students understood (and they didn’t understand what I wanted them to understand).

Fostering collective attention may seem complicated, but in practice it’s straightforward: To create action, we need to ensure that we are all actually attending to the same information, rather than just assuming we are.