Latest / PCMA Convene Podcast / Series: Designing for Attention: Play, White Space, and Movement with Natalie Nixon
Transcript
- Convene Podcast Transcript Series: Designing for Attention: Play, White Space, and Movement with Natalie Nixon *Note: the transcript is AI generated, excuse typos and inaccuracies Magdalina Atanassova: Welcome to Season 11 of the Convene Podcast, brought to you by Destination Madison. This season we’re focused on wellness and designing events that don’t exhaust people. Today my guest is Natalie Nixon — an ideas artist and one of the most original voices in creativity and leadership today. Natalie democratizes creativity, showing that it’s not only the domain of artists but an essential skill for engineers, scientists, lawyers, and anyone navigating complexity. Her global career spans apparel sourcing in Sri Lanka and Portugal, earning a PhD in design management while working full‑time, 16 years as a professor, and ultimately her bold leap into becoming a creativity strategist long before the role had a name. A Thinkers50 Radar honoree and award‑winning author of The Creativity Leap, she brings a rare blend of global perspective, research depth, embodied movement, and practical imagination. In this conversation, we explore attention as a human resource, why disengagement is the real enemy at events, and how the Move. Think. Rest. cycle can transform agenda design. We talk white space, mind‑wandering, movement infrastructure, and three creativity‑informed experiments event professionals can pilot this year to drive deeper learning, connection, and engagement. We start now. Hi Nathalie and welcome to the Convene podcast. Natalie Nixon: Hi Magdalina. Really happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Magdalina Atanassova: My pleasure. Magdalina Atanassova: You've been called an ideas artist and Magdalina Atanassova: the creativity whisperer to the C suite. So from that vantage point, how do you define attention not just as a cognitive function, but as fundamentally human resource that leaders and event designers need to protect? Natalie Nixon: Well, my first response to the way I think about attention is really about focus. And then I expanded out a bit more and I think about attention as engagement. And I know that we'll get into this idea about engagement later in our conversation and we probably have, I think we do have varying ways of how we're thinking about engagement, but attention to me and the goal of capturing attendees attention, making sure that it's sustained and maintained really happens through, through engagement. That is much more instead of it being kind of, you know, as we say in marketing, there's push marketing where a lot of content is pushed out to people. There's pull marketing which is a little creepy where it feels like oh, how did this ad note, how did this pop up ad show up suddenly and know that I wanted these shoes but really to a push pull sort of model of engagement. And that to me is the future of how we could be thinking about convening, conferencing and gathering and bringing people together. So when I think attention, it's really about engagement and engagement in a two way street sort of function. Magdalina Atanassova: That's interesting. Would you like to expand a bit more and just let's dive directly into this important topic of engagement because yeah, it's, it's not the same as you Say so go for it. Natalie Nixon: Yeah, yeah. So as I understand it, in your industry and sector, when you're talking about engagement, maybe you're, you're, you're focused on metrics that are much more like quantity based and number of attendees and number of, of workshops attended. And it's quantifiable in that way. And that's one dimension of engagement. I was really enlightened about the way I think about engagement as I was writing my latest book, Move Think Rest, when I interviewed a gentleman named Brandon Brendan Boyle, who is a toy designer. And Brendan teaches a course on play at Stanford D School. And I went out to Stanford, observed his class, met him, engaged with the students, participated in the class, and had an interview. I interviewed Brendan afterward. And as we were discussing play and the role of play in our work, the role of play in how we might think about productivity, I asked a very fundamental question. I asked Brendan to define play, and he defines play as engagement. He pointed out that a lot of the times we think that the opposite of play is boredom. But he said that really the opposite of play is when we are disengaged. And wouldn't we want our employees, in the case of PCMA, it's about engagement and it's about making sure that they are in some ways in a state of play and not, not in a way of a volleyball game necessarily, but maybe. So let's extrapolate what is happening during play. When we are at play, we are deeply curious. We have to actively listen. That prompts greater empathy. We tend to need to pull out of our brains and our hearts ways to negotiate, to cooperate. And so when you think about all of those attributes that are part of being in a state of play and also being engaged, don't we want that to happen in my focus area and the ways that we're designing work, don't we want that to happen when we are convening people for whatever sort of sector or industry event, we want people to be actively listening, to be curious, to be empathetic with one another, with the people they're learning from, to maybe there are opportunities for negotiation, hopefully opportunities for collaboration. So that's the broader way I think about engagement and how attention is a part of that. Magdalina Atanassova: I love it. And especially when you said that the opposite of engaged is disengaged, is not bored. I immediately imagined all those attendees pulling their phones and just disengaging from the content and what's happening around. Natalie Nixon: Yes. Magdalina Atanassova: This brings me to my next question. So your book that you mentioned. Magdalina Atanassova: Move, think, rest. Magdalina Atanassova: It reframes productivity as a cycle. Right. Not as a straight line. So how do you think event professionals can apply this rhythm to the agenda design so that groups can actually think and absorb and connect and be engaged in this other level that you mentioned instead of racing, you know, from one session to the next? Natalie Nixon: Yes. Instead of racing from one session to another and ticking off boxes and making sure that you. Maybe this is a CLE opportunity. Right. Or it's. It's a learning credit opportunity. What I really think matters is that at the end of the day, we keep in mind that we are designing these events for humans, and humans are imperfect, we are inconsistent, and we're actually not very predictable. But what is predictable about is that each of us has this circadian rhythm. We have ebbs and flows. We diverge and converge in terms of our attention, our interests, our energy levels. And so some of us are very energized in the morning. I know for me, that's when I do my best clear, critical thinking. And then it sort of wanes by the afternoon. Other people, they need that ramp up in the day. Other people work really well in the evening time. And so to factor that in, instead of a one size fits all sort of design, maybe an event marketer, an event designer, an event organizer could be thinking about having different opportunities of energizing moments throughout the design of the conference. Maybe a distinctive day would have a different feel, a different flow, a different rhythm from another day. I would think about making opportunities for this cyclical sort of design so that while people. So that. So that people have a bit more agency. And so if we think about the way most conferences are designed, there are keynote sessions where maybe the attendee feels a bit more passive. There they are digesting and ingesting a lot of information. There are workshop sessions, and then there are also breaks. But sometimes the breaks even feel a bit designed. And maybe the breaks are at a lunch, right. Or at a breakfast. And so what I'm suggesting is in terms of recognizing the cycle. And of course, you can't account for every single person's individual circadian rhythm. But if there are opportunities for people to opt out in an intentional way, so maybe there is a designed walk, right, that people can go on. Maybe there is a designed meditation space or daydreaming space or a zone, a cone of silence space. I was recently. I recently attended a retreat in northern Mexico in the mountains. Beautiful, beautiful place. I didn't realize how much I needed the retreat, which is kind of Funny, since it was an opportunity for me to practice what I preach. But I found myself right before I left, bristling a little bit because there was no agenda. The only thing on the agenda where I was going to be there for seven days. I had never taken a retreat for seven days like that. Well, I did design a two week writing retreat for myself when I was writing Luther Ingress. But again, it was very designed. I had writing prompts. In this case, all I knew was that there was going to be a hike ending in breakfast on one day, there was a lecture on a different day and there was a dinner. And during the evenings we would all, I was with a group, we would meet for dinners. I thought, wait, I thought this was a retreat. Wait, what, what, what else are we going to do? And of course when we got there, there were lots of opportunities that the, the property offered. And what I learned about myself is that there was such a reframe in my output of how I was processing my work and my thinking away from my work. I dove into a great book of fiction. While I was there. I took an elementary beginner beginners chess lesson. I've always been a bit intimidated about chess. I was like, let me just try this. I did a hilarious, hilarious for me deep water aerobics class. I'm a swimmer, so I thought, okay, I love the water, I love the pool. But I was so bad at it. And it was hilarious and hard at the same time. And then there were also these structured moments. Right. So I'm not, I'm not saying something exactly like that, but you get my point. Often I think at conferences we're forgetting that people are sitting next to others who are as interesting, as smart as the people who are on stage. And I'm a keynote speaker and I'm saying that knowing that I am addressing people who are brilliant, who are doing really interesting work. And so what if there were more ebbs and flows in the design, a cyclical design of the conference where we had the structure, we had the semi structure of workshops, but even designed it more of that white space for people to use as they wish. AD: Planners are embracing tier two destinations for new attendee experiences—and Madison, Wisconsin delivers. With city lake scenery, green spaces, and a safe walkable downtown, Madison will leave your attendees feeling recharged and reconnected. Enjoy urban amenities, a welcoming vibe, and coffee under forty-eight dollars a gallon. Learn more or submit an RFP at visit madison dot com slash PCMA. Magdalina Atanassova: And I love that you brought that point because my colleague Barbara Palmer interviewed you and she wrote an article which highlighted that idea of session moratoriums, which are design blocks that nothing is scheduled. And I just love it because really the intentionality of having white spaces is important, but sometimes it's kind of overlooked because you want to just cram up that space, schedule with sessions, with things to do, like you said. So what do you think of those pauses or how to use these pauses in a valuable way for the attendees? Natalie Nixon: Well, I don't know about you, Magdalena, but sometimes I engage more in the value of a new idea when I understand why it's important. So the reason why white space pausing, doing nothing is essential is because we are actually building in cognitive recovery for our mind and for our brain. The way our brain works optimally is not only when we are focused on intensive frontal neocortex work, right where we're analyzing, we are in conversation, we are making decisions. The best decision making happens when we can engage the default mode network of the brain or the dmn. And the DMN is activated in different regions and zones of the brain. And different neurosynapses are activated when we essentially tap out of the world and drop into our body. That happens through a leisurely walk, that happens through a hilarious conversation with an old friend or colleague you haven't seen in a while. You're not talking about work, you're just catching up. It happens when you, when you have those shower moments, right, where you are disengaged from the world. And then have you ever observed in yourself that then when you return to the work at hand, all of a sudden that challenge that had stymied you, that, that Excel sheet that was just driving you bananas, all of a sudden, things click into place. You re enter that zone of work with ease. And so, just as in so many natural systems in the world, there is contract release, contract release. Whether we're talking about the ways water systems in the oceans, tides work, or we're talking about the way peristalsis works in the human body so that our chewed food goes from our mouth down our esophagus. There's a contract release motion to get the food, chewed food into our stomach or the way blood flows through the body, right? Arteries have valves and beings of else, and there's a contract release. But in our work as human organisms, we contract, contract, contract, and we don't build on the release. So those white zones of space, that's why it's. It matters. So it could look like really literally even in the naming of something, right? So maybe instead of naming the. The rest a. A break, maybe it's called integration time or reflection pause, maybe you really deliberately name a room or space a zone of silence or a soft time or whatever is a cultural fit with the themes of the event, and you ask people to respect them. There's signs just reminding people, no cell phones here. Please, no speaking in this time. And people can opt in to go in and out when they need to. Maybe you have a space near a window where there's a nice friendly placard. Here's a good place to have a daydream break. You know, set your timer for 90 seconds and stare out of the clouds. You know, daydream breaks. The neuroscience research and experiments around mind wandering are really phenomenal and interesting in terms of what it indicates about when we allow more divergent thinking to happen and how it leads to greater creativity, greater reconnection and juxtaposition of new ideas, which is essentially creativity. It's the juxtaposition of ideas and things that have never been thought about before. So those are a few examples of how we might think about designing for white space, even physically. I talked about a walking map that leads to. Or maybe don't use a map, right. Get lost on purpose. Maybe you gamify things and maybe by the end of the conference there's a request as how many people you know got lost and what did you discover? How many people took, how many daydream breaks did you take during this conference? And how did you feel reentering maybe a more intensive session or that was going to have more cognitive load? Magdalina Atanassova: And you also talk about the other side. So if, if we're just sitting and daydreaming, the other side would be the movement, right, the movement infrastructure. And I just love this idea of not just adding optional wellness sessions, which we all do, but designing the physical spaces and flow to encourage natural movement. So what does meaningful movement infrastructure look like at a business event for you? Natalie Nixon: Gosh, I mean, what if you walked into a room, a session at a conference, and there were no chairs? Now, of course, we have to be sensitive to and respectful and mindful of people who are need to be seated down. Not everyone is as mobile in the same way. But factoring that in, you know, the US Navy intentionally runs a lot of standing meetings. The meetings are shorter. The meetings allow people to literally think on their feet. And by the way, the spinal cord is an extension of the brain. And the other thing that happens when we were standing is we actually are not designed to be sedentary. We actually are also able to activate our, what I call our sentient intelligence. So, for example, the vagus nerve, which is the longest nerve in the body, it's an extension. It extends from the, from the brain down to the heart and the lungs and into the gut. That gets to be activated a lot more, a lot better. Maybe probably more subconsciously when we are standing, when we are moving, maybe there's a workshop where most of the time is spent not even people seated at tables. When I design workshops, I actually as much as possible, like for the, if there's not whiteboards and for there to be easels and I ask people to stand and talk at the, at the easel of large, you know, post it paper with their team, with their partners, to think through a question prompt that I've given them. Because when I was professor, I was a professor for 16 years. The last six years I was the founding director of a strategic design MBA program. We integrated a lot of design thinking work and human centered innovation work into the ways that we design MBA classes. And so 70% of the time graduate students were on their feet talking to each other. 30% of the time a subject matter expert was delivering content. My classes became noisier. There was a lot more laughter, there was a lot more I was learning from my students, observing the ways that they were connecting the dots between ideas. So bringing in that sort of, of movement into even how sessions are designed could be interesting. Doesn't have to be for every single session, but it'd be interesting to get feedback from people about how that worked for them. Magdalina Atanassova: And again, we have to be mindful of the physical ability of people and be inclusive. But there are options for all body types and abilities, right? Natalie Nixon: Always. Always. Magdalina Atanassova: So for event professionals listening, what3 creativity informed experiments would you love to see them try in the next year to design for attention? Natalie Nixon: So the three experiments I'd love to see your conveners consider in order to design for attention, which again, I am thinking about attention as engagement. One would be to have zones of white space and maybe you start with just two. Right. You know, baby steps. But to identify what are ways that we could try to design in invitations. And again, these are invitations. These aren't requirements, but invitations for people to zone out. And maybe you even have some background information about why this will be helpful for your experience. I shared a little bit about the neuroscience of mind wandering and how our brains work best in that way. Another experiment would be to have a doodling session or to invite your conveners to integrate doodling, even if it's something they feel awkward about. The cool thing about doodling is that it is a sort of cognitive pattern interruption. Doodling also taps into the fact that as humans we are stellar at visual information. I've done keynotes where to improve that point. I've shown a series of like 20 slides and songs that are just images. Just images. Then I go on my content and maybe 20 minutes later I say, okay, we're gonna go back to some of those images, but this time you're gonna see another image possibly next to it. And I want you to just to say left or right to call out, you know, which is the image that you saw 20 minutes ago. And the accuracy rate is like 99%. There's no note taking, but we are visual creatures. So doodling has nothing to do with your ability to draw. It has everything to do with your capacity to capture, communicate abstract, complex ideas with a arrow, a Venn diagram, a stick figure. You do not need to know how to draw. You only need to know how to draw a circle, a triangle, a square, an arrow, et cetera. So playing around with, with the fact that we are, we are visual creatures. And how might you invite people to capture their experiences or their learnings in that way? Maybe you collect the doodles in some sort of space in the major convening area, have fun with it. And another experiment would be to. And I think that a lot of conferences do this already, but to figure out ways to gamify the. The learning. Because again, play is about engagement. And when we are engaged, we are negotiating, we're collaborating, we are actively listening, we are, we are being intentionally curious. It builds empathy. And maybe the gamification is around movement and figuring out a fun way to encourage people to move, to stand, to wander a bit more. Magdalina Atanassova: I love it. I hope our listeners are taking up the challenge. Was there anything we didn't mention? And we definitely should before we wrap up. Natalie Nixon: Yeah, I. First of all, I thank you for inviting me to share. I thank Kid Mean magazine for featuring my work from Move Think Rest in your. In your magazine. And I would just. A call to action for your listeners is to definitely stay in touch with me through figure8thinking.com and we now have a companion course to the move think rest book. So one of the things I know from my 20 plus years as an educator is that to go from information to embedded knowledge, we have to learn it through repetition and through experiencing it. So if people really want this to become part of the ways their teams work, check out the Move Think Rest Revolution or we call it the Motor MTR Revolution companion course. All that information and a lot of cool fun downloads can be found figure8 thinking.com Wonderful, Natalie. Magdalina Atanassova: I'll include links so people can get it quickly. It's in the show notes. Thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing a bit of your work with us. Natalie Nixon: Thank you, Magdalina, for having me. I really appreciate it. Magdalina Atanassova: Remember to subscribe to the Convene Podcast on your favorite listening platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. We want to thank our sponsor, Destination Madison. Go to visit madison dot com slash PCMA to learn more. For further industry insights from the Convene team, head over to PCMA.org/convene. My name is Maggie. Stay inspired. Keep inspiring. And until next time.