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Touching other people during a meeting? Probably not a good idea. But physically manipulating objects during a discussion is a great idea. Moving yourself and moving tools that you can hold in your hands provides a platform for interactions between people and ideas (see Figure 2.7). It’s another great input mode for creating understanding between people on complex ideas in less time.

FIGURE 2.7 Using manipulated objects, or manipulatives, is another effective input method.

The meeting tactics that (are) the most reusable are easy to follow and tactile, requiring manipulation of things in physical (or virtual) spaces.

—JAMES BOX AND ELLEN DE VRIES DIRECTOR OF USER EXPERIENCE, CLEARLEFT LTD (BOX) & CONTENT STRATEGIST, CLEARLEFT LTD (DE VRIES)

The most common example of an easily manipulated object, or a “manipulative,” is the sticky note. These notes provide the ability to create and absorb information structures more easily by arranging ideas in physical space. Sticky notes work well in meetings because they engage the part of your brain that interprets meaning from spatial relationships. So . . . move things around in your meetings! The act of getting moving applies Baddeley’s working memory model into the conference room. When you arrange sticky notes on a wall or modify a physical, cardboard prototype with scissors and glue, you are building the “visuospatial sketchpad” in the real world (see Figure 2.8).

FIGURE 2.8 A simple, made-with-scissors-marker-and-paper kindergarten-style prototype from Amy Mae Roberts, Product Designer, Microsoft.

Visualizations in meetings are living records. Continued interaction with those records will create better memories. While extending Baddeley’s research, Logie posited that the visuospatial sketchpad is broken into two different parts.⁹ A “visual cache” stores information about form and color, while the “inner scribe” deals with movement and position in space. Different parts of the brain are working together to do a better job of committing things to your memory, using a visual metaphor.

Getting ideas into your brain effectively therefore also means moving them out of the meeting, as a shared public record, so that you can continue to act upon those ideas. Unlike meeting notes you take on a laptop, visualized records of a conversation can be revisited and iterated upon after the meeting is over. That continued engagement with a visual record will pull more of the brain into the work. The more engaged each of these parts of the brain become, the more likely that successful memory creation, synthesis, and application will happen. The stuff discussed in a meeting gets done, and it gets done correctly.