Game designer Jane McGonigal on how we play. Brand consultant Sally Hogshead on how we feel. Molecular biologist John Medina on how we think. Three different speakers will interweave those threads during one Convening Leaders 2012 general session.

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal was a stage manager turned theater-studies grad student when she went to work for a startup company - The Go Game - that was working to bring video games played on smartphones into the real world, using San Francisco neighborhoods as game environments. McGonigal was so impressed with the games' ability to create lasting change in the emotions and interactions of the people who played them that she switched her research at UC Berkeley to focus on games.
That was a decade ago, and since then, McGonigal's confidence in the power of games has only grown. Now one of the world's leading researchers on game design and the director of game research and development at the Palo Alto-based Institute
for the Future, McGonigal has helped design collaborative games, including ones aimed at addressing the world's most com- plex problems. "We can no longer afford to view games as separate from our real lives and our real work," she writes in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. "It is not only a waste of the potential of games to do real good - it is simply untrue."

Do you think there needs to be a new understanding of gaming?

Yes, absolutely. One of the things I have been talking about recently is, we need to stop thinking of games as just escapist and start thinking of them as "returnist" - this idea [that after playing a game] we return to our real lives and the real world with a different way of feeling and thinking.

How can games improve meetings?

The Institute for the Future has a number of annual meetings with large corporations to help plan for the future and understand future trends. One of my roles was to develop games for these events. What I've often found is that when you have people convened for a live event, that is something special that can't happen online: a face-to-face opportunity to share ideas and brainstorm.
What we always try to have toward the end of the event is a live, kind of brainstorming, future-looking game you could play to process what you learned. There are lots of ways to do it. You can use online technology. We developed a simple plat- form, where you could tweet or post a message online. At the end of an hour of game-playing, you might have 4,000 ideas about the conference that attendees could then go home and share with their companies or colleagues.
You can also use face-to-face events around a table. One of our most successful games was this idea of a giant Connect Four board. In order to get a space on the board, [people] had to come up with an "epic win" for their organization or project based on something they heard a speaker say, or an idea that had been triggered. We were able to generate thousands of really concrete next steps. Which was great, because then you are really taking value away from the event. A lot of times we attend and we share great things, but we don't necessarily follow up or implement what we have learned.

Is there an affordable way to add games to meetings?

What we fail to see a lot of people successfully doing is just using regular social media as a platform. You can do a Twitter game using a hashtag; Facebook groups are running games. You don't have to have a full-featured video game.

You talk in your book about harnessing the power of games to solve real-world problems. How do you do that and retain the element of fun that makes games appealing?

That's really a challenge. There are a few secrets we really like to draw on. One has to do with a kind of ethics goal - one of the things that makes games so engaging is the sort of heroic quality, where you are saving somebody or the world. We like to make real-world games have a kind of epic promise, that you can change your life, or help achieve something extraordinary. In the "Find the Future" game I did with the New York Public Library this year, they wanted to bring young people to the physical library, because young folks use Wikipedia and that's it. And so our design team thought, what would be the most epic win that a young person could possibly have at the library? We decided it would be to actually write a book and have that book become a part of the collection - that would be an extraordinary accomplishment. We made a game where winning the game means you have written a book. The library took the work of the first 500 players to play and entered it into the rare-books collection.

There are 183 million active gamers in the United States, but younger people play video and computer games more than older people. How do you overcome the gamer vs. non-gamer divide?

We are seeing that divide get closed, thanks to parents and their kids and grandparents playing. What I try to emphasize is that games had a long history before they were digital. Almost everybody can identify with a game like golf or bridge, or Scrabble for people who don't play digital games.
When we sit down at a bridge table or around a Scrabble board, what we are really doing is agreeing to spend time together and focus all our attention and social energy around a challenge. We help each other get better at the challenge, and compare strategies, and we get better ourselves, by playing with each other. When you think about it that way, it is usually easy to connect with folks, even if they feel like they don't have a lot of interest in digital games or video games.

Some people have played "World of Warcraft" for a decade. Is there value in creating games for meeting communities that they might keep playing beyond a conference?

The benefit of a short-term game is you get everyone to focus their attention and you really get a critical mass [of players]. You don't always need the long term. But what can happen if you have longer-term games is that you tend to have more creative ideas or stranger strategies as you go on through the game.
At the Institute for the Future, we find that when we ask people for their first idea, usually they will come up with something that is kind of boring or standard. Their second idea may push it further, but it is not until the third idea that they have a kind of unusual insight. Having prolonged engagement can really help provide a platform for people to keep talking with each other outside the game.

Sally Hogshead

It used to be okay to be just okay, says Sally Hogshead, a global creative director and brand consultant who's worked with some of the world's most iconic companies, including Nike, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks. But no more. In an increasingly competitive and distracted environment, individuals and companies need to know how not just to get attention, but to be captivating.

Hogshead has always understood that "if people were not connecting with you and connecting with your message, you would fail," she said. But beginning in 2006, Hogshead began a systematic, multidisciplinary search to uncover the secrets of what makes individuals and ideas so compelling that they fascinate others. Her book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, distills her research and her methods for leveraging "The Big Seven," which, according to Hogshead, are passion, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, rebellion, and trust.

What changes have you made in your own work based on your research?

Superficially, instead of working directly with clients on helping them figure out what makes them fascinating, what I have personally become fascinated with is working with individuals, and helping people understand what are their natural hardwired strengths that make them most fascinating.
My company has shifted focus from exclusively dealing with brands to now applying it to how can [individuals] become more fascinating within their organizations and to their customers. What we have learned is that there are very specific ways you can predict exactly how someone can most effectively persuade.

One of the most common complaints against meetings is that they are boring. Are there things that every meeting organizer should be doing to make their conferences more compelling?

If you want to make a meeting more fascinating, you should use the passion trigger. Think through the whole experience from the emotional perspective of the participant - think through flavored coffee, the lighting, the ambiance. How does somebody feel when they walk into the room? What is the emotional journey that they are going to go on? How can they have the best sense of instant emotional connection to the speaker and the theme of the event? How can you create a bond, not with brochures, not with data, not with statistics, but a bond where people can kind of almost fall in love with the event, so that they feel like they are caught up in something that is bigger than a rational process?
You would use the prestige trigger if you want people to respect the event. To elevate the standards of an event, find just a few particular ways to dramatically raise the expectations of how the event is executed - a couple of ways to really sur- prise participants with developing what I call " the ultimate." It might be that the chairs have some sort of cushion on them, so that the seating experience is elevated. Or it might be that there is a tier of VIPs that get something that nobody else gets. Think through every single aspect of the event, and find just a couple of ways to make something really extreme. You don't have to do it with the whole thing and you don't have to be fancy, but create an ultimate level of something.
Attendees have a pretty set idea in their mind of how a conference works. You show up, you check in, you get your badge, you get the brochure. After registration, there's a cocktail party; and the next morning, the keynote starts at eight o'clock, you have coffee, you sit in a big room. To activate the rebellion trigger, strategically pick just a few ways that you are going to tweak expectations to creatively reimagine how the conference works. People are going to break out of their regular expectations and say, "Wow, there is something really different going on here, I better pay attention." Their brains are going to be more captivated, because there is something novel going on in the environment. One way to do it is by finding a non-traditional location, but you can also do it with something small: How can a nametag be reimagined to become part of the experience?
One way to effectively apply the power trigger is to build up the authority of the speakers, and really make sure that people understand the gravitas and experience of each speaker. Event planners give more power to their message when they give more power to the speaker who is delivering it. It's about making sure that the messages of the conference - the speakers, the theme, the overall takeaways - are presented in a way that it is like giving attendees the keys to the kingdom. It's not about con- trolling attendees - it's about making sure a message is heard and acted upon in a powerful way.

If somebody did a couple of things strongly, could they be as fascinating as someone who hit on all the triggers?

Yes, absolutely. You don't need to use all seven triggers - in fact, you shouldn't. [It's like] when little kids are playing with fingerpaints and smush all the colors together - they stop being colors and start being a mush. The triggers can operate the same way; if you try and apply too many, you stop having a clearly directed message. You should choose the trigger to use based on the response that you want to create.

Your research has shown that triggers operate differently for different age groups. How can you fascinate a multigenerational audience?

Here is the good news. Fascination is deeply hardwired inside our brains - it has nothing to do with trends, it has nothing to do with age groups. Different generations are fascinated by different things, but the triggers for how you create fascina- tion are all instinctively hardwired within us. You don't need to make radical changes when you have multiple generations [in an audience], because human beings respond the same way when you are dealing with instinctive triggers. A newborn responds the same way as an 80-year-old.
That said, there are different degrees of response. Participants aged 35 and under respond most strongly to the passion and rebellion triggers. They want to feel as though they are deal- ing with new ideas, which is the rebellion trigger. They love cre- ativity, they love change, but they also love to feel things viscerally with emotion; that's the passion trigger. At the other end of the spectrum, senior executives respond more to the power and trust triggers. Power is about authority, and trust is about consistency and dependability.

What is the difference between individuals within an organization vs. the organization itself becoming more fascinating?

Organizations can choose which triggers they use in order to build a connection. An organization could choose to utilize prestige if they want to raise the price of their product. They could use passion if they want to whip up advocates, get them buzzing on social media. Organizations can consciously do those things as part of a marketing plan.
But individuals are different - we have hardwired into our personality certain strengths. You can't artificially bolt triggers on the way an organization can. I want to help participants understand what is their natural, hardwired personality strength and how can they use that to become most fascinating. And that is what this system is all about.

John Medina

Molecular biologist John Medina, speaker and author of the best-selling book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, didn't set out to become a media star. But he got so fed up with encountering myths about the brain - that you use only 10 percent of it, for example, or that there are right- and left- brain personalities - that he once threw a magazine across a seat on an airplane. (The flight, he notes, wasn't full.) "So I decided to write Brain Rules," Medina said, "as an attempt to say, ‘Look, here's what we do know, here's what we don't know, here are a few things you can try that might have an application in the business world - and the meetings world as well.'"
Not that Brain Rules will tell you how the brain operates. "We don't know squat about how the brain works," said Medina, who has focused on brain research for nearly three decades. He added: "I don't know how you know how to pick up a glass of water and drink it. But we do know the conditions that [the brain] operates best in, even if we don't know all the ins and outs of that operation."

Which of the 12 Brain Rules has the most impact on meetings?

Well, probably, the biggest one would have to be about attentional states. This rule is very simple: People don't pay attention to boring things. So if you really want to have a lousy meeting, make sure it's boring. If you want to have a lousy classroom, make sure it's boring. And if you want to vaccinate against the types of things that really do bore the mind, we have some understanding of that.

So how do you design a good meeting?

Here are the top three "brain gadgets" that probably have a bearing on the question. First, the human brain processes meaning before it processes detail. Many people, when they put meetings together, actually don't even think about the meaning of what it is they're saying. They just go right to the detail. If you go to the detail, you've got yourself a bored audience. Congratulations.
Second, in terms of attentional states, we're not sure if this is brain science or not, but certainly in the behavioral literature, you've got 10 minutes with an audience before you will absolutely bore them. And you've got 30 seconds before they start asking the question, "Am I going to pay attention to you or not?" The instant you open your mouth, you are on the verge of having your audience check out. And since most people have been in meetings - 90 percent of which have bored them silly - they already have an immune response against you, particularly if you've got a PowerPoint slide up there.

How do you then hold attention?

This is what you have to do in 10 minutes. You have to pulse what I just said - the meaning before detail - into it. I call it a hook. At nine minutes and 59 seconds, you've got to give your audience a break from what it is that you've been saying and pulse to them once again the meaning of what you're saying.

What is the third "brain gadget"?

The brain cycles through six questions very, very quickly. Question No. 1 is "Will it eat me?" We pay tons of attention to threat. The second question is "Can I eat it?" I don't know if you have ever watched a cooking show and have loved what they are cooking, but you pay tons of attention if you think there's going to be an energy resource.
Question No. 3 is highly Darwinian. The whole reason why you want to live in the first place is to project your genes to the next generation - that means sex. So Question No. 3 is "Can I mate with it?" And Question No. 4 is "Will it mate with me?"
It turns out we pay tons of attention to - it actually isn't sex per se, it's reproductive opportunity. [It is also] hooked up to the pleasure centers of your brain - the exact same centers you use when you laugh at something. Oddly enough, I think that's one of the reasons why humor can work. If you can pop a joke or at least tell an interesting story, it's actually inciting those areas of the brain that are otherwise devoted to sex. You don't become aroused by listening to a joke. I'm saying those areas of the brain can be co-opted. You can utilize them, and a good speaker knows how to do that.

What are Questions 5 and 6?

"Have I seen it before?" and "Have I never seen it before?" We are terrific pattern matchers. There is an element of surprise that comes when patterns don't match, but the reason why that happens is because we are trying to match patterns all the time.

Is there a Brain Rule that addresses whether you should try to control the use of laptops and phones during a meeting session?

I have this rule response, based on data, and then I have a visceral response, also based on data. In other words, I'm about ready to tell you a contradiction. Are you ready?

Yes, I am.

Alrighty. I do believe what you can show is that there are attentional blinks. The brain actually is a beautiful multitasker, but the attentional spotlight, which you use to pay attention to things, [is not]. You can't listen to a speaker and type what they are saying at the same time.
What you can show in the laboratory is that you get staccato-like attentional blinks. Just like you come up for air: You look at the speaker, then when you're writing, you cannot hear what the speaker is saying. Then you come up for air and hear the speaker again. So you're flipping back and forth between those two, and your ability to be engaged to hear what a speaker is saying is necessarily fragmented.
At the same time, if your speaker is boring, you could have checked out anyway. So you see, in many ways it depends upon the speaker.

How so?

If the speaker is really compelling and is clear and is emotion- ally competent, and has gone through those six questions, let- ting you come up for air every 10 minutes, I've actually watched audiences put their laptops away just to pay attention.
I have a style that is purposely a little speedier. And the rea- son why is that it produces a tension that says, "I need to pay attention closely to him or I'm going to lose what he's saying." I don't make it so fast that it's unintelligible - at least I hope I don't. But I do make it fast, and occasionally I see comments that say, "Great speaker, but you know, you were too freaking fast."