You Can't Hack Attention Without Hacking Trust First
"If there's one thing I would like people to remember, it's really about connection. If you wanna make impact, especially in large groups, it's really about connection over everything else."
Deepthi Bodupally said this near the end of our conversation, and I realized she'd been demonstrating it the entire time. Not through slides. Not through frameworks. Through stories about third-graders in slums, screensaver faces in boardrooms, and her father—an OG connection master—who once got a table in a fully booked Mumbai restaurant through sheer human wizardry. Connection isn't a soft skill you sprinkle on top of facilitation. It's the operating system. Without it, your brilliant content is just noise.
I've watched Deepthi walk into rooms full of strangers and, within minutes, turn skeptics into collaborators. She doesn't do it with charisma or charm or any of that motivational-speaker nonsense. She does it by reflecting people's reality back to them in ways that make them feel seen. Not flattered. Not manipulated. Seen. And that's the difference between facilitators who hold attention and facilitators who beg for it. The former know that attention doesn't follow novelty—it follows emotional safety. The latter keep adding more balloons to the workshop, hoping eventually someone will care. They won't.
The First Few Minutes Are a Job Interview You Didn't Apply For
When you walk into a corporate classroom, participants are sizing you up with one brutal question: Do you know my reality, or are you here to waste my time? Deepthi learned this the hard way during her first few sessions with Gen Z participants. Her usual metaphors—Indian parenting, husband-wife dynamics, middle-manager misery—landed like inside jokes to an audience that wasn't in on them. She adjusted. She brought in games. She leaned into the one thing that works across generations, hierarchies, and personality types: tangible play that lets adults stop performing competence and start being human again.
The corporate world loves to pretend workshops are about "upskilling" or "capability building," but that's marketing copy. What actually happens in those rooms is a negotiation of trust. Participants didn't volunteer to be there. They were nominated. Voluntold. Sent by managers who needed a checkbox ticked. So when Deepthi opens with self-deprecating humor—admitting she was late, joking about her curly hair, sharing her own failures—she's not being casual. She's building psychological safety. She's saying, I'm human, you're human, let's stop pretending this is a TED Talk. And that's when the guards drop. That's when attention shifts from passive compliance to active engagement.
Flow Isn't a Buzzword—It's a Tightrope Walk
Deepthi once taught third-graders in a slum, and she had to create three different lesson plans for one classroom. Some kids were bored by grade-level math. Others were overwhelmed. The middle group—the movable middle—needed just enough challenge to stay engaged without checking out. This isn't a classroom problem. This is a facilitation problem. Adults fall into the same bell curve. Some participants will engage even if you do a bad job. Some will disengage even if you bring circus acrobats. But the people in the middle? They go where the energy goes.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow model—skill versus difficulty—isn't just theory. It's a live diagnostic tool. If the task is too hard, people give up. If it's too easy, they check out. The facilitator's job is to keep everyone in that narrow band where challenge and competence balance out. Deepthi does this by designing for the last bencher—the person least likely to engage. If they lean in, everyone else follows. If they zone out, you've lost the room. This is why metaphors work better than frameworks. This is why Indian parenting lands harder than situational leadership quadrants. People remember stories. They forget jargon.
Games Are Trojan Horses, Not Icebreakers
When Deepthi brings balloons or trading cards or blindfolds into a corporate workshop, participants think it's a fun distraction. It's not. It's a precision instrument. Games bypass adult defenses and surface behaviors people don't know they're exhibiting. A game about trust reveals who hoards information. A game about collaboration exposes who competes even when cooperation would benefit everyone. And because participants are having fun, they don't realize they're being observed. They're not performing competence. They're being themselves. That's when the learning happens.
Corporate L&D loves to talk about "experiential learning" as if putting people in groups and giving them a task is revolutionary. It's not. What's revolutionary is designing games with intentional constraints—information asymmetry, resource scarcity, role conflicts—that mirror real workplace dynamics. Deepthi's games don't have win states. They have revelation states. Finance versus marketing? That's not a metaphor. That's a dual-reporting nightmare. Husband versus wife mismanaging expectations? That's not a joke. That's situational leadership in action. And when participants see the parallel, they don't argue with it. They recognize it. That's the bridge from play to insight.
If Your Workshop Needs Coffee to Survive, It's on Life Support
Energy dips are inevitable. Post-lunch comas. Late-afternoon existential dread. The screensaver face—that glazed look where someone's nodding along but mentally grocery shopping. Deepthi's learned to spot these moments and deploy countermeasures: movement, group work, energizers, coffee breaks. Not as band-aids. As design choices. If participants are sitting too long, they're not engaged—they're enduring. If the content is too heavy, they need social pressure to stay present. If the energy flatlines, you need humor to jolt it back.
One participant once admitted to Deepthi that he zoned out for 15 minutes and thanked God for the coffee break. That's not a failure. That's honesty. And honesty is what happens when connection is real. Facilitators who pretend everyone's always paying attention are deluding themselves. The best ones know attention is cyclical, contextual, and earned in real time. They don't blame participants for being human. They design for it.
TLDR — Because Attention Spans Are a Myth and Also Real
- Stop mistaking participation for engagement. They're not the same.
- Connection over correction. Always. Build trust before you build lessons.
- Design for the last bencher. If they lean in, everyone else follows.
- Flow is a tightrope walk between boredom and overwhelm—keep everyone in the band.
- Games aren't icebreakers. They're behavioral mirrors.
- Movement, humor, and group work aren't soft tactics. They're survival tools.
- Context dictates everything. A six-year-old and a middle manager need different entry points.
- If your workshop needs coffee to survive, it is not facilitation—it is life support.
How I Use This at PutThePlayerFirst.com
Everything Deepthi described—connection, flow, games as revelation engines—is what I design for. When I build simulations, I'm not creating training modules. I'm creating conditions for people to surprise themselves. To see their own behaviors reflected back in ways that bypass defensiveness. To realize collaboration beats competition not because it's morally superior, but because it's strategically smarter. And when participants walk out of a session saying, "I didn't expect to feel that," I know the design worked. Not because I told them something. Because they experienced something.
This is what serious games do. They don't explain empathy or trust or leadership. They make you bump into the edges of your own habits and assumptions. And when that happens in a space where failure is safe, where humor breaks tension, where connection is already established—that's when change becomes possible. Not forced. Not prescribed. Possible. And possibility is the only thing worth designing for.
Watch the full conversation here: