Why I Wrote A Book

On the gap between knowing and doing that made a book feel necessary

My first ever book went live yesterday. That’s right.. May I Have Your Attention Please? is out in the big wide world. It sounds pretty straight forward, doesn’t it? Writing a book. Have some thoughts, write them down, job done. Except it isn’t quite like that. There’s something genuinely strange about putting a thing you’ve been turning over in your head for months, years… shaping and reshaping… second guessing yourself at odd hours… into a format that other people can now just… have. And read. And form opinions about. While eating their lunch or commuting or half-watching something else on another screen.

It’s really bloody weird. And the weirdness of it made me want to write this article properly. Not as a summary of what’s in the book. Not a highlights reel. But the actual reason I wrote it. So here goes…

It started with a question I could not stop asking. Not a very complicated question. Not even an original one really. Just a question that kept producing an answer nobody in the industry seemed to want to sit with.

Why does the knowledge not persist?

Why does the person who passed the quiz click the link three hours later? Why does the team that completed the module completely freeze when something feels wrong in a real moment? Why do capable, intelligent, well-meaning people… people who know better, and will tell you they know better in the debrief ten minutes afterwards… keep making the same kinds of decisions in the same kinds of moments?

I have spent years watching this happen in rooms. The clock starts. The pressure arrives. And something shifts. The person who had all the right answers in calm conditions starts rushing, skimming, filling in gaps with assumptions. Not because the knowledge left them. Because under pressure, knowledge is not what the brain reaches for.

It reaches for instinct. For pattern. For whatever it has rehearsed. And most organisations… without meaning to and without noticing… have spent years delivering training that rehearses the wrong thing entirely.

So.. here is what I mean by that…

We run an escape room scenario, Elementary, that gives participants a piece of paper and a set of instructions. Follow the steps, fold it correctly, and you reveal the code you need. It is not difficult. The instructions are right there. Simple origami.

And yet… under time pressure, almost nobody completes it cleanly on the first attempt. Maybe not even the second or third.

Not because they can’t follow instructions. But because they rush. They skim. They jump ahead. They decide after two folds that they have understood the pattern and stop actually reading. Small errors creep in… compound… and the whole thing just collapses. And then in the debrief, the recognition is instant. I knew that. I could see what I was supposed to do. I just didn’t slow down enough to do it.

The knowledge was there. The conditions made it unavailable.

And the reason I find it so useful as an illustration is that it reveals something most training never does: not what people know… but what they actually do when the conditions change. When time is short and the stakes feel real and the brain shifts into a different mode entirely.

The paper isn’t the problem. The knowledge isn’t the problem. It’s the conditions that make everything unravel.

Which brings me to engagement. And to why I think it is the most misunderstood word in our industry.

Engagement gets treated as decoration. The fun layer. The thing you add to make training more palatable, more modern, more likely to generate a decent satisfaction score. And if that is how you are thinking about it, I understand why it feels like a nice-to-have rather than a strategic priority.

But that framing gets it almost exactly backwards.

Our brains don’t store what they don’t care about. That’s not just my opinion, it’s been proven by neuroscience since the 1800s. (Check out Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve). Humans forget roughly 50% of new information within an hour and up to 90% within a week without reinforcement. You can pass a phishing quiz at 9am and hand over your credentials to a convincing stranger by 3pm… not because you forgot what you learned, but because knowledge and instinct are not the same thing, and only one of them is fast enough to operate when a real moment arrives.

What actually changes instinct is experience. Emotional arousal. (Don’t laugh.. that’s the real science word for it). Novelty. Pressure. Stakes that feel real even when they are not. The brain responds differently to situations where something seems to matter… where decisions carry visible consequence… where attention is not requested but earned. It encodes those experiences differently. Files them somewhere sturdier than the usual mental junk drawer.

Engagement is the mechanism by which any of it actually works. Strip it out and you are left with information, delivered efficiently, to a brain that has already decided it is not important.

That is what the book is about.

I want to be honest about where it came from, because I think context matters here.

The book came from observation, not theory. It is not an abstract model constructed at a careful distance from reality. It is a collection of observations from years of watching real people make real decisions… in escape rooms, in tabletop exercises, in immersive scenarios, in the debrief conversations afterwards where the honest stuff comes out. We have seen what happens when the clock starts ticking. Where people rush and where they hesitate. What sticks, what gets ignored and what falls apart when the pressure is on.

And what became impossible to ignore, over time, was this… the organisations getting the best outcomes were not the ones delivering more information. They were the ones designing for attention. For emotional engagement. For experiences the brain treats as worth remembering. They were building instinct and not just knowledge.

The book is an attempt to put language around that. To explain the neuroscience without making it feel like a textbook. To make the case that engagement belongs in the same conversation as endpoint protection… a genuine risk control. And to give the people responsible for security culture something more useful to take into their next planning conversation than another set of statistics about why their current approach is failing.

So… if you want to get your hands on the goodies… I’ve made a free PDF version because I’d really rather you read it than not. Or you can send me £18 of your finest English pounds and I’ll send you the paperback. Either way, let me know what you think.

Download / purchase here: https://www.cyberescaperoom.co/attention-please/