Name: Keeping Your People When Budgets are Stretched and Attention Fractured
Start: 2026-09-17T10:35:00-0400
End: 2026-09-17T11:35:00-0400

Keeping Your People When Budgets are Stretched and Attention Fractured

Thursday September 17, 2026 10:35am - 11:35am EDT

Room 308

You already chose the harder path in how you build your business: better systems, more human, less, less extractive. The question is whether you're choosing it in how you lead your people, now that every choice is under more pressure.

Budgets are tight and attention is pulled in multiple directions, and work becomes more transactional — “just this one emergency,” “just until we get back to solid ground” — while the conversations that matter fall away.

People don’t leave for one reason; compensation, workload, and pressure all matter. But under constraint, what most shapes whether they stay is an intangible force that holds people together when everything is pulling them apart: Relational Gravity

This experiential lab will build your practice for building Relational Gravity, so that you can design for the conditions that retain great talent, instead of leaving it to chance.

Grounded in behavioral science and built from years of designing connection across communities, and movements, this session provides a repeatable practice you can use the next time you walk into a room of capable, scattered, under-resourced people and need them to stay connected.

Through footage from &Human’s Strangers on the Street and Traveling Table series and hands-on practice in small clusters, you’ll learn by observing real interactions and reflecting on what actually shifts connection in the moment — no new platform, no big budget, and no theory to translate later.

Speakers

Lia James

CEO / Facilitator, &Human

Lia James designs spaces where people move past surface-level exchange into something more honest and generative. She's the founder of &Human, a connection design studio working in live gatherings, film, and participatory training that help teams and communities build trust on purpose.Her... Read More →

Thursday September 17, 2026 10:35am - 11:35am EDT
Room 308

Session, Workshop

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BLD Southeast 2026

Lia James

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BLD Southeast 2026

Lia James

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