Attention Futures Contract: Buy, Sell, and Reserve Executive Time as a Strategic Asset

Core insight: executive attention is not only scarce—it is allocable, contractible, and therefore a lever you can design. The Attention Futures Contract creates a small internal market for guaranteed executive time: teams buy short, non-transferable credits to reserve slots, earn priority by posting evidence or risk reduction, and sell back unused minutes to fund other pilots. In ten minutes you get the exact Contract token you paste into requests, three market rules that prevent gaming (cost schedule, non-transferability, refund runway), enforcement moves that preserve relationships (soft‑bridges, a public ledger, and one‑click dispute flow), and two constrained AI patterns to price requests and draft minimal context packets. The episode closes with a 7‑day pilot: allocate a small attention pool, require contracts for priority asks, run one-week auctions or grants, and measure change in decision velocity and noise. Actionable, low friction, and designed to treat attention like capital so your highest returns get it.