The attention-based view (ABV) offers distinctive theoretical insights into the organizational challenge of strategic adaptation to complex dynamic environments. While extant ABV research explains how top leaders' attention influences adaptation, it currently provides only limited insights into how leaders can influence patterns of organizational attention and in turn manage strategic change. We address these limitations by developing an attention-based framework for strategic leadership that explains how leaders can achieve strategic change and adaptation by orchestrating changes to organizational patterns of attention. The framework is built on five key elements—convening, narrating, curating, designating and entraining—each of which allow leaders to influence attention in distinctive ways. We illustrate the framework with an extended case study on Apple and its development of the i-Pod and close by discussing implications for the ABV itself, theories of strategic leadership, and the dynamic capabilities literature.
