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Designing Transformation: How Experience Changes People | Claus Raasted and Paul Bulencea, Revisited
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- [00:04]
A
Growth is sometimes painful, often painful. And yet when we look at experience design in general, so often that we look at no pain as a goal, no frustration, no annoyance, no nothing. But when we look at our lives and we look at what has shaped us, a lot of what shapes us is frustration pain. And if you as an experienced designer do too much to put that lack of pain, lack of annoyance, lack of frustration as a key performance indicator, then you're going to be missing out on some things and so are your participants. This is something that we know is part of it and we try to accept instead of shy away from
- [00:48]
B
welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. I interviewed Klaus Rastad and Paul Balencia at the World Experience Organization Summit a couple of years ago. The WXOS focused on the emerging discipline of immersive experience design. It's something I think every work designer should know about, in part because it's so far away from hr. Culturally, the group is made up largely of theater people, musicians and visual artists who have moved on to designing things like escape rooms and haunted houses and Disney events. But also, how should it feel to slide into a new Toyota or to unbox a new laptop? Klaus and Paul are right at the center of the movement. They're dedicated to the art of transformation design and for many years they've run a five day immersive event usually held in a castle someplace in Eastern Europe. It's called the College of Extraordinary Experiences and it's a crucible because transformation is rarely comfortable. Klaus and Paul say that's a feature, not a bug. Klaus is a Danish entrepreneur, keynote speaker, lecturer, podcaster and transformational designer. He's spoken at over a thousand plus live events and worked for companies like Ikea, Disney, Google, Marriott, Panasonic and the Discovery Channel among others. Paul is the award winning author of Gamification in Tourism, an educator, entrepreneur, speaker and experienced designer who's worked with Fortune 500 companies and governments across the globe. His work aims to drive growth by shifting business models from services to co creative transformational experiences. In this episode, Klaus, Paul and I talk about how to build creative experiences around an object, what transformation means in different contexts, and the qualities of a transformative professor or lecturer. We also discuss how a CEO can introduce a transformative experience to a company, designing the right space to cultivate change, transformative experiences for employees, and other topics. As always, if you enjoy this episode, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I do appreciate it and it helps us grow the show. And now I bring you Claust Rasted and Paul Balencia. So we're here at the World Experience Organization event today in London and there's about 150, 200 people here. I don't know from every walk of life, from experience design. And so my show is about the experience of work and we increasingly in talking to different people about work, realizing that some of work is about great experiences and some of it is about transformation. And you are both in a corner of the transformation business or the transformation world that I've never heard of until this show. And so I want to ask you a lot of questions about it. So Paul, tell us if you would, what it is you do.
- [03:54]
C
It's very hard to describe what it is I do because I do every day completely different things. But in general when people ask me this question, I'm trying to give them an answer. So that's what I'm going to try to do here. Now on the one hand side, we're running the College of Extraordinary Experiences which is a five day event in a castle in Poland. I'm curator for that event. I used to co produce, now I'm not producing anymore, I'm curating and also one of the chief experience designers for that event.
- [04:31]
B
It's five days, it's in a castle. There's up to 150 people there. Earlier today we were talking about shopping for castles and how you shop for castles. Klaas, what's your answer to what you do?
- [04:43]
A
So I'm going to give three answers. The first is what my five year old daughter would tell you. She'd say that dad goes into his office because I have a home office and then he plunks away at a computer and then money emerges. That's her reality. The second is what I put on my business card when I'm at conferences there it says overpaid rock star consultant. And the third is what my girlfriend says I do when she wants to annoy me. She says, oh, you're just an expert at being an expert, aren't you? I say yes, I'm actually quite good at that. And she finds that very annoying. All three of these are true.
- [05:21]
B
So tell me about one of these events. I guess the right place to start is what is the objective? And then we'll work back to how does one build something, an experience that achieves that objective.
- [05:37]
A
So I think here I'll start because Paul and I disagree on what the objective of the college is. So I'm going to tell you what we tell our participants and Paul can say what he thinks is the truth. As our custodian of vision, so to speak, we tell our participants that the college is a networking event with learning opportunities, rather than a learning event with network opportunities. Yes, we have professors. Yes, they have classes. Yes, that's great. But the real magic is people meeting each other, people from different walks of life, different nationalities, different backgrounds, industries, age groups, economic situations, and having honest, open conversations about experience, design. That's what we tell our participants.
- [06:19]
C
It's really hard to describe, but I think over the past three, four years, I've been working on a new book about the topic of transformation. And I'm going to use more academic terms to describe what it is. So first and foremost, I think it's a liminal space for transformation. And it's a place where I observe three different archetypes of people that show up. And at the college, we interview every single person that comes to the event. And based on these interviews, I've noticed these three main archetypes. One is what I would call a rigid archetype, someone that has been working a long time in a very rigid environment, more like a corporate environment. And if you would ask them, do you see yourself as creative? They would say, no, I don't see myself as creative, I am analytical, etc. Etc. So that's what I would call a rigid archetype. The second archetype would be someone that maybe has experienced burnout or had an insight that what it is that they do, this rigid energy that they're in is not serving them. So they start kind of doing different experiences, exploring maybe some retreats, maybe starting doing some yoga, etc. This is what I called a flexible archetype. But they're still not at the point where the third archetype would go, which is the esoteric and the highly, highly fluid, which can transform and be anything. So when we think about creativity, I really like. What I recently discovered is, like, in the Tibetan language, there is no word for creative. The closest word that they have is natural with a similar meaning. So in this liminal space, which actually means intentional space open for transformation, these three different types of archetypes meet and collide and dance. I had someone in an interview ask them after explaining what the college is like, they said, so this is sort of like an intentionally orchestrated curveball where all three archetypes might find something new or might discover some point that might bring them to insight. So I think this is what it is, depending on who I'm talking to. So if I'm talking with the rigid archetype. I'm going to define the college differently. Flexible differently, and esoteric differently. Right. In the esoteric realm, we can talk about people that ask me, so what about the ghosts of the castle? What about the energy? What about the past that is in the castle with someone that it's in the flexible. They might just ask, so what are the courses about? Like us going deeper and learning and someone in the rigid. What are the learning outcomes? But then all of these three archetypes collide. Then there is this really deep learning and powerful community that forms.
- [09:17]
B
There is this word transformation that we're talking about. And the word transformation, I don't necessarily know what it means in this context, because when I talk to people about transformation, sometimes they say, I want to learn a new tool. Sometimes I talk to people who are interested in transformation. They want to re architect their soul. They're like going after trauma and they're trying to understand their own trauma and diffuse it. I mean, there's so many different kinds. And I would imagine that, I guess maybe those archetypes explain different objectives for people, or it might explain their different starting points for people. So which of those would you say it is? Is it. It could be one or both.
- [09:57]
A
Before Paul gives a short answer again, I'm gonna give a short one, which is we're terrible. Which is that one way I sometimes explain the college is that if you consider a pair of dice, imagine you have a pair of dice in your hand and you roll them two dice. And for each six that shows up, you have an aha moment. Whether it's professional, whether it's personal, whether it's profound or philosophical or whatever it is, you have an aha moment. Now, what we try to do at the college is instead of giving people two dice to roll, we try to give them a bucket of dice to roll. And hopefully a lot of sixes turn up. Some of them come home rethinking how they're going to be parents. Some of them come home rethinking their careers. Some of them come home with just a couple of tools and some new friends and a good couple of memories, but nothing profound. Others are looking for that. We have one Coe baby so far, so that's the exception. But it has happened. American businessman went, met a Polish lovely woman who was in different sort of business. And they met at a castle in Poland and they're now married and have a kid together. But that's the exception, not the rule. Just so people don't think it's a Dating Castle. But it's about this aha moments to me at least. And the different archetypes Paul talks about have different moments. Some of them they're looking for, some of them they're definitely not, but they happen all the same.
- [11:23]
B
So then the question is because a lot of people do come to work to transform and they get 16 that rolls once every five years or something. And so then the question becomes, how does one design a bucket full of dice?
- [11:39]
C
I love that question. I think I really like this definition of magic saying that magic is directing attention. So I think it's not that hard. I believe it's not that hard as long as you have the knowledge on how to direct attention to what it is that is important in the moment for people. And the more intention you have about actually being present about what's going on, the easier it is to get a 6. I think the reason why people don't roll a 6 is because the environments that they go every day back to or that they're part of, they're quite stale and they're not dynamic. So I think just making them dynamic and introducing always elements that will challenge your thinking and the way you move in the space, the things that you eat, for example, the clothes that you wear, etc. So these are kind of simple examples, but I think at the deeper level, and I think someone here also mentioned it at the wxs, is that you cannot have an experience truly if you're not present in your body. So to me it's about the nervous system. And this is also what I personally see at the college. I'm not sure if Klaus sees the same thing, but what I see at the college is we go through a process of CO regulation, emotional CO regulation. We have a good number of people that can self regulate the nervous system to be present and calm and be able to notice their environment and notice what's going on. And some people that don't have the ability to do so, but by being in the presence of the others, they get to the same level of presence by the people that can self regulate, they co regulate the others. So I would say also like being able to be present and then absorbing, having the intention and having the diversity of ways of doing things on a daily basis.
- [13:34]
A
It's about conversation. At the end of the day for me, a lot of changes happen because of conversation. Conversations that opens doors, conversations that close doors, conversations that restructure experiences we've had and makes us look at them in different ways. And one of the things we try to do at the college and are usually decently successful at is making those conversations be open and vulnerable and honest very fast. Barnett Bain, one of our previous alumni, said very nicely, Hollywood filmmaker said, for him, it was the speed of friending that was exceptional. That conversation went from being surface level to extremely deep and vulnerable and rewarding very, very fast. And of course, some people then have experiences that they need to talk about or they want to talk about. And suddenly some stranger or somebody who's now a friend, but who was a stranger 3 days ago will reframe that experience for them. Will say, but did you consider this? Or what about if you look at in this light and suddenly one of those dice rolls over and turns out to be a 6?
- [14:38]
C
Just something came to me when you said that, because it's also the culture that we have. I think the college can get very overwhelming. And even with this culture, it is overwhelming. But I think having a culture of being able to opt out and seriously opt out, if I don't feel comfortable, I'm opting out. And then also having mechanics of, like, really have this one where you say, I got to go. So if you're in conversation and you feel, for example, disconnected, or you need to go to the bathroom, or you need to talk to someone, or you're just not in the mood, you just say, I got to go. And then you just leave that conversation. And then maybe next time when you show up and you're in conversation, you really want to be there. And that's why it's happening, because people can opt out and just leave the conversation, leave the experience. And when they are in conversation, they truly want to be there. So they're both present and they're both, like, opting in.
- [15:35]
B
It's interesting because on the one hand, it sounds like making it safe for people to opt out and to go. But on the other hand, they need that because they're being exposed to things that might extend them beyond where they're comfortable. And so what's in the curriculum, what's in the order of events? Like, what are the things that you bring to the table that are putting people into that state where they might actually want to opt out, we don't know.
- [16:05]
A
And part of that is a little bit of mystery. Another part of it is that what we build is structure and what we create is culture and facilitate people. Then they fill it out. We don't know what our professors are going to be teaching in their classes. We don't know what's going to happen in the evenings at the college because that is open to co creation by any participant who wants to. We don't know some of it. We know. We know the feel, we know the vibe, we know the atmosphere because we do our very best to co create that. But we don't know what conversations they're going to end in. We don't know what workshops they're going to be at. We don't know what experiences somebody's going to put on that are going to touch them. And we don't really call it a safe space, but we do our best to call it a brave.
- [16:53]
B
On work for humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11fold.com
- [17:34]
C
yeah, and we just kind of really draw attention to the fact that about the Brave space, it's impossible to call something safe from my perspective because you never know what's going on in someone's subconscious. And usually the nature of this liminal space where it's. You're a bit more intentional but you also increase the intensity, is prone to bring up something and we don't know what that is. But we do bring a lot of awareness of the fact that if you feel uncomfortable in your body or your thoughts, then maybe it's a point where you want to sit a bit longer, but if you really can't be there or can't sit there, it's okay to just opt out. And I think this year we're also, I'm personally looking a little bit more on if someone gets triggered. How do you address that? And I've been giving it a lot of thinking and one of the things that I've noticed is like in our culture we tend to talk a lot. Oh, this happened to me because of past, etc. And you just go in this loop and we have this culture of holding space for that to emerge, which I think is beautiful. But I started questioning, is it truly transformational or is this more soothing? And I cannot say, but I'm leaning more towards soothing. And I was like, okay, how can we do it in a different way? And then when I reached I was like, we just embody. We just feel. It's. There's this thing called somatic experiencing. So I think this year, compared to other years, we've introduced much more movement and also, like, silent mornings where no one is talking, so everyone's eating, having their breakfast in silence. And a lot more time for people integrating in their own ways, but then also showing different ways of. Like, if something uncomfortable shows up, maybe you just need to stretch or maybe you just need to move in this way or breathe in this way, rather than talk with someone for five hours about it.
- [19:27]
A
And we also have a respect for the fact that growth is sometimes painful, often painful. If you go out and ask college alumni, some of the people who've been there, some of them who've been there once or twice or several times, and some of them will say it was amazing. And then they will tell about how on day three, they were ready to drown us in the river, but on the evening of day three, they gave themselves in and suddenly it changed. We have several of those stories that I know just off the top of my head, and I'm sure there are more that we haven't been told. And yet when we look at experience, design in general, so often that we look at no pain as a goal, no frustration, no annoyance, no nothing. But when we look at our lives and we look at what has shaped us, a lot of what shapes us is frustration, pain, annoyance, things that go bad because there's learning there. And if you as an experienced designer do too much to put that lack of pain, lack of annoyance, lack of frustration as a key performance indicator, then you're going to be missing out on some things, and so are your participants. And of course, it also gives us a good alibi for when things go really wrong. We can say, no, you'll learn from it in five years. But all jokes aside, this is something that we know is part of it and we try to accept instead of shy away from.
- [20:52]
C
I just find it really funny because I was just thinking, I recently went with a friend, common friend of ours, David Wolf, tracking, and he gave a very interesting reflection after, like, we've been hiking on the mountain, and he always had to just, like, be mindful of how he's stepping and he was reflecting is like, how stupid was it that I was thinking to sue someone because there was a dent he. In the sidewalk in the city, and I fell and hurt myself. So, you know, even in the design of cities, we have flat surfaces. So we even removed friction from our walking. And that's even like a main cause of our disembodiment.
- [21:31]
B
You said professors. What do you look for in professors? Now the way it's coming to my mind is that you're mixing soup and you're cutting up carrots and potatoes and you're. And you're throwing them in together. So who are the professors and what do you look for in them?
- [21:48]
A
We're looking for the chilies. We're looking for the weird bat thing that you didn't even know was edible. We're looking for people who are exceptional, who stand out in some way. And if they can bring something to their classroom, they don't have to be professor professors, they can be anyone. But as long as they bring something that 90% of the people there say, huh, I didn't know that. And 90% of those say, huh, I can use that, then we're pretty happy. That's my simple guidelines. There's more. Right. But the simple way of it is that it doesn't so much matter what it is, as long as it's interesting, new and useful.
- [22:30]
C
We're looking for diversity and also different ways of looking at experience or experience design. Just to give you an example, I think this year we have someone who is 16 generation samurai from like a deep lineage. We have someone who's a wilderness tracker and also works a lot internationally for like anti animal trafficking. We have someone who is a rock star and works as a judge at the voice talent show in India. We have someone from Meowulf. We have this interesting mix of like, okay, let's look at embodiment, let's look at business. But then also let's look at different lineages of experience and experience design. And let's use different ways of looking at the same thing.
- [23:22]
A
And as long as they bring something different to the table. One of the other professors we have this year is a ritual designer. Now, it would be tempting to have five people who do the same thing, five people who are from the industry. But one of our core beliefs on experience design is that it's not an industry, it's cross industry. There's quite a bit of a difference between being a samurai and a wilderness tracker and a ritual designer. But we think all three of them have something important to add to people's lives and hopefully make them go, huh, I didn't even know what I didn't know. But now I can use that.
- [23:58]
B
This is something that I'm learning about this college as you go forward, is that the people you bring, they do share a common thread. Around experience, design. So a lot of them are artists, designers of different kinds. Is that right?
- [24:12]
A
No. But the moment they walk in the door, they are experienced designers. Some of them know it to begin with. Some of them come to that realization during their stay there, whether they're lawyers or shoemakers, or do immersive theater productions, or are dancers or Chaos Pilots, which in Denmark is a real education. They may not know their experienced designers when they arrive, but when they leave,
- [24:38]
B
they should know what's a Chaos Pilot.
- [24:41]
A
So the Chaos Pilots, one of them is my little brother David. The Chaos Pilots is an education that was formed in Denmark, I want to say, about 30 years ago, 25, 30 years ago, and is a business degree with a focus on practical application. So instead of theoretical classes, all of their teachers are people with practical experience. And the school rents out its students for projects that help fund the school. So as a Chaos Pilot, you'll go through three years of paid education and they will take you to different countries and you'll do different projects that have been sold by the school, whether it's helping do 100 activations of civil society in Bolivia, or it's helping do interesting things with a hospital in South Africa, or do something else entirely. It's a school that teaches its students by letting them do things instead of sitting classrooms. We kind of like them.
- [25:43]
B
That's fascinating. Let's say I'm a company, I'm a CEO. There's a proportion of my company that wants an experience of transformation. What would you say to that CEO about how they might introduce that into an environment that is most of the time not about transformation?
- [26:04]
A
I think we'd say very different things. Of the two of us, Paul is by far the more philosophical, the more spiritual, and I'm the more crass commercial culture designer. And that means that depending on which one of us they pulled in, then we'd give them different answers. But we also do, as the college, we do projects with companies that are not just coming to the event. The event is one thing, but we also do consulting work on projects both big and small and on things that we will happily talk about for hours and things that are sadly NDA'd, which we would love to talk about for hours.
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B
What's an example of one that you could talk about?
- [26:45]
A
Extraordinary center, ikea. You want to take it away?
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C
Yeah. So actually, also to answer the previous question, this was Jens from ikea, IKEA Centers. IKEA has also, like a shopping mall component. So not just the furniture, but also shopping malls. And I was hired by them, to help them move from a shopping center mentality to becoming an experience center by
- [27:12]
A
their global head of innovation at the time.
- [27:13]
C
Yes. And you know, I just gave a talk about a concept that they could do and then Jens saw that I'm also doing the College of Extraordinary Experiences. He's like, oh, that's really interesting. I want my team to be innovative and think differently. So he just booked six tickets. So in this way it just came that I presented a concept and they joined as part of that. Now because they joined at the college, what happened was when you go to the college, it's really hard when you go back to the company to talk about the experience. It's like going to a vipassana and then coming back home or to your company like, so how was the experience? So usually, you know, William James talked about these experiences have two attributes. One is ineffable, not being able to describe it. Maybe if you write the poem or dance about it or like use more artistic ways. And the other one is Noetic. Something changed, but you cannot actually put your finger on what is it exactly that changed. So I think five or six of them came at the college. And then what was really interesting was that when they went back to the companies, they stayed really glued to each other as a team. So it created very powerful bonding because it was hard to explain to others. But then also because they were bonded by the experience and because they saw the magic that we do, they could also then tell to their CEO, trust us, we should work with these guys because they can actually help and build something truly unique. So that's kind of the process. And then we started working with them and did a pilot on transforming a 300 square meter space in Bratislava in a shopping center from the traditional shopping experience to more like an experiential center. We took a space that used to be a store, we just covered it with like bookshelves and then we created an entrance for like a wardrobe that looked like sort of like the wardrobe to Narnia. Then I think we got about, I don't know, 2,000, 3,000 cardboard boxes to create a layout of a shopping center, a mini shopping center. And the idea was rapid prototype, so to be able to move and shift it very fast. And then we worked with local students and creatives. We hired them and we got six or seven teams and six or seven different experiential shops. And they had to create something unique as an experience. Give you an example, there was someone who created like a fingerboard skate park. So you can just go and skate with your finger. Someone created a theater play that with time. And as the people were entering this space, they constantly had to change them. So we pushed them to iterate. Iterate, iterate. Sort of like in software development. But this is an experience design, including every night we were destroying the entire layout of the space and we had to build it up from scratch. That after seven days we had in the middle of a crazy spiral sculpture of cardboard boxes, the whole space with madness. And then at the end, we brought in the whole global team of IKEA centers, we put them in and we destroyed the whole space. And we told them, you have 20 minutes to create experiences inside. And we kind of iterated and iterated and iterated. So that's kind of an example of a project.
- [30:28]
A
And one of the things we did there, we split that group into two. So half of these leadership, heavy hitting leadership team, half of them would be designing and creating experiences and rapidly prototyping and the other half would be going through them. But what we didn't tell them was that we also slipped in real paying customers who were just guests at the center. And afterwards when we told them and when they played around and they'd had fun and they'd had this, oh, we can quickly go from idea to practice and we can iterate and we can get feedback and we can build on things at a speed we didn't even believe was possible. Because they felt safe. They were in their cocoon, said, you know what we also had in here? We had actual customers who walked through that door, who paid to go in, who didn't know what was going on, but who paid for the experience you created. And they came out smiling and seeing those executives go, because we suddenly told them again, safe spaces. We suddenly told them that the space they were in wasn't as safe as they thought, but that made it way more transformational. That was fun.
- [31:30]
C
And also the pressure of them, like not talking, because people talk a lot, but it's like, okay, just do the thing. And we had this at the college. It's like, do not talk. So just move the boxes, move the props. The props were all like IKEA stuff. So you can actually create really powerful experiences with not huge budgets.
- [31:47]
A
And I think if we're going to put it in a broader perspective, the IKEA thing was a fun example from some years ago. But in a broader perspective, what we sometimes get called in to do is to help people massage that muscle for thinking outside the box is to help them develop that skill set. Of trying and instead of thinking in 2x or 1.5x or 3x, thinking 10x and 100x. And that sometimes requires a little bit of pain, but also some outsiders and a bit of craziness. We are sometimes that crazy sauce.
- [32:25]
B
What was so interesting about that is I didn't expect, based upon the College of Extraordinary Experiences, to hear this very practical example of experience design that brings in the ability to break up assumptions, but then turns it into something that's commercially viable. And I've had people on the show before who talked about the importance of play and how hard it is to do that in a company where everybody's supposed to be serious. And yet you were able to set that up and have it interact with the customers in that particular case. It's a powerful idea. I'm still a little confused by whether the answer to this is going to be yes, both. Whether the College of Extraordinary Experiences is about showing people how to create extraordinary experiences, or if it is providing extraordinary experiences. In other words, are people going there for an extraordinary transformational experience? Yes. Are people going there to learn how to create such extraordinary experiences? Which one is probably the bigger thing?
- [33:31]
A
Yes, both.
- [33:33]
C
Yes, both. But in terms of how, we're not very explicit. So to me, the way it works, the how is in the integration is in the reflection of the thing.
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A
It's in the people.
- [33:43]
C
It's in the people. And I mean, what actually happens in the how is that people create really strong bonds and someone who might be from the corporate might meet someone who's from the esoteric. And that creates a very powerful bridge for them to have weekly one on ones afterwards and then slowly start collaborating. So it reduces the distance of, oh, let's say if I'm hiring a ritual designer, I don't know anything about the ritual designer, I'm hiring them. There's another thing where you feel like, oh, I'm friends with the ritual designer, so now we can actually talk at a different level and then we can have a different relationship and we can easily insert that magic in my environment and vice versa. I can work with a corporate guy and bring him or her or them in my environment.
- [34:32]
A
And I had somebody during one of our application interviews this year say something very, very nice that I've since shamelessly copied. Because that's how we are. We like to be copied, but we also copy others. And what was said in this interview was, ah, so it's a place where you teach people new languages. I said, yeah, thank you for that. At least. Snippets of them.
- [34:54]
C
Snippets of languages. Not the entire new language. No, many snippets of many different foreign languages. That's what you're gonna get. And then you have the relationships to help you become proficient in any that you choose afterwards.
- [35:06]
B
I'd go a little farther. I would actually say that you're activating different parts of people's brains, of which there are dozens. And they all, many of those parts of people's brains can't talk to each other very effectively. And by the way, we keep talking about, let's say I bring in a ritual designer as if there's lots of them, they're not very many. It just so happens that there's one sitting next to us, which Tio de Haan, who I also had on the show, because a creative person is using a different part of their brain and a visual artist is using a different part of their brain than a writer or than a musician or something else. And so bringing those people who have these dominant parts of their brain in the presence of each other and making them friends, it's a powerful idea.
- [35:52]
A
And then there's also the fact that once you have learned these different snippets of different languages, different mindsets, then you take them with you into what else you're doing. One of the things I do professionally is I'm a pricing expert and I work with pricing. And that's very non sexy and non esoteric. It feels so corporate. But it means I take some of the thinking in. And one of the things I talk to people about when I introduce them to kind of the first basics of pricing is just agreeing on how to price something, what unit it is in. Imagine you invite me for a job interview and you say, klaus, I'd like to pay you $200 an hour. And I say, well, I think I should be paid per mile because the longer I walk, well, the more I must be doing for you. And you're like, what? What? Or if I say I think I should be paid per kilo, or I should be, which would be very good for me, or I should be paid per megabyte of our digital conversation that's downloaded. And all these things are weird because people, no, we don't do that. We pay by the hour or by the unit or by the whatever. Even in something as simple as pricing that if you can get a little bit of different thinking in there, then suddenly somebody will say, oh, so what you're saying is that one of the most successful computer games out there of all time. World of Warcraft, they said instead of paying per unit, you paid for the computer game and you were done. They made it into paying per month as a subscription. And that's allowed them to become one of the biggest games in history. Oh, oh, now I see how that makes sense. This different thinking in the world of pricing, huh? And that sort of thing can be applied, cross industry, cross function, whatever, that once you have this way of these different lenses, taking a new lens to a space makes it a different space.
- [37:40]
B
Why is it five days? Why is it not 30 days or two days?
- [37:46]
C
Why is it five days and not five years? It's actually not five days, it's five days in how we measure time. But as we know, time is not how we measure it by the clock or by the calendar, day by the hour. So it actually feels like I would say five years of college in five days.
- [38:06]
A
And for some that's good and for others that's bad. Hopefully it's mostly good.
- [38:11]
C
But I think what expands time is the intensity of experience. So I would say the college is, in terms of intensity, is very intense. And that's what doesn't make it five days. I think it just makes it as long as it needs to be.
- [38:27]
A
In a way, there is a certain amount of time that we can be away from our lives. Most of us, kids, jobs, organizations, dogs, bosses, universities, whatever it is, for most of us, there's a certain amount of time we can be away from them. And that means that it's harder for people to go on 100 day cruises or 100 day retreats than it is to do weekend ones. On the other hand, we also acknowledge that if we want depth, whether it's a football training camp or it's a music festival or it's an experience design event in Poland, then Longer has something to say. So why is it five? Because five works. And if it was six, we would say exactly the same thing. And if it was four, we'd say the same thing. It's five because it's five.
- [39:19]
C
And also I think the advantage that we have at the college, unlike traditional conferences, is that everyone is in a venue, sleeps in the same venue, and they don't just like walk in the city or go in another place. Like, for example, here at wxs, we are in a venue, we don't sleep here. We just like you build up energy and that energy disperses. While at the college the energy is just like circulating and amplifying day by day by day by day by day, which also intensifies and expands time.
- [39:52]
B
I completely believe in the live in event completely. Which is the best. Conversations happen late at night, couple of people around a fire. I've never been to one that was 150 people because that's. Where do you even start? Like the really deep ones I've gone to have been 30 people. And then you get very close to each other over a three day period. Because I've never talked to anybody who shops for castles. What do you look for in a
- [40:20]
A
castle when you shop for castles as we do, the first thing we look for is not actually a castle. It doesn't matter that it's a castle. It's a little bit random that it's a castle. What we look for is an extraordinary space that's somewhere else that nobody is at home in, but everybody's excited about. And castles just happen to fit that bill very nicely. Is very few of us live in castles, especially nice ones in Poland. Very few of us are at home in castles. Most of us have some sort of connection to them, whether we watched them in movies or maybe visited some as tourists. But getting to have a castle that feels like home for a couple of days is a feeling that is new to most of us. But it's something we want. Sure, we could do it in a conference hotel, but it wouldn't be the same. We could do it in a parking lot with tents, but that might lead to some practical difficulties. So it's a mix of the unfamiliar and the exciting and also the doable. I'd love to do conference on an airship, but we're going to have to wait a couple of years for that.
- [41:24]
B
So now I'm going to design something for a corporation that is not thinking primarily about some output that they're going to create, but they're thinking about, you know what. Employees are coming to us because they want a transformative experience. And this is what I've heard you say. One, get out of the standard space. Get someplace alien. I've known people, Betsy Burroughs, who does innovation events on a train where she gets the executive and a bunch of other people into the dining car of a train and they travel for two days. So get out of the regular space. Get someplace sort of extraordinary, maybe a little magical wouldn't hurt, but meaningful. Bring very diverse thinkers together. So diverse they may not be relevant, but they're deep in what they do. Great food. Great food. And it needs to be something where people wake up together and talk over breakfast if they want. If you don't have a silent morning that's actually another thing. So I was at the Carl Gerasi Institute as a Fellow in fiction. So this is a live in institute. Six weeks or more. I mean, it's a lot. But you basically sit alone all day, except for meals. So you're doing your art, whatever it is, whether it's dance or painting. That was spectacular because in that particular case what you wanted was to be alone. You know, you wanted to do your work. So I can see that being a useful model too in a different situation. Is there anything else that if you are designing that experience that I haven't really described?
- [43:01]
A
We humans want to do things differently. We want to take risks, we want to be gentle. We want to be loving and kind and trusting. Sometimes we also want to be mean and destructive, crazy and weird and vindictive. Alibi. If you can create alibi for people, if you can give them alibis that work for them and you can bring out both their better natures. It was somebody who told me to do it. Brings out their bad ones, you have permission. Brings out their good ones. So one of the things we're strong believers in is creating alibis for interaction. Because that means that people get to be their best selves or the version of themselves that they'd like to experiment with. Where so much of the time in our lives we're held back by all sorts of constraints, all sorts of rules, all sorts of demands, all sorts of things that you can't be the same thing to everyone if you say one thing. It's one of our problems today with social media is that everybody's always watching. So I can be one person in a conversation with Paul and I'll be different in a conversation with my daughter. That's reasonable. But if everybody can see everybody at once, it's pretty hard to just be. And it's even harder to experiment. So we try to give people this alibi to experiment alibi to do things that they want to, to give in to, whether it's ideas or plans or conversations. And we curate and we do the things you said, but we also try to provide alibi, to take chances, to take risks. So at the castle we have people who play spirits who are essentially playing a role playing event inside the college events. And that means that they take on characters as spirits of the castle and they're playing their own closed event for their own sake as characters. But when they meet participants, the participants treat them like they're real to a certain degree. Of course, they know they're just people in makeup and costume, but they treat them like they're real. And that means that if a spirit of the castle invites you to go on a spirit quest in the forest, well, suddenly, if you are up for it, you might be going on a spirit quest in the forest with the spirit of the castle. Even though both people know one is pretending to be a spirit, one is just pretending that the other is a spirit, the spirit quest is real, and
- [45:25]
C
the person has the alibi to all of a sudden talk spirit language, which is basically gibberish. So then they're gonna go explore that rabbit hole. I think in addition to alibi, I would also add group ritual. It's important to have everyone's voice or body or like, what a presence feel and seen in a collective opening and a collective closing. That's really important because. Really important to acknowledge the presence of everyone. But then also the, you know, if I. If I would go in deeper, but the presence of, you know, the land where we're at, or, you know, the food that we're eating, etc. Because it's not just us humans, it's more than that. And then culture. How do we interact on the train? Do we have. I got to go. Do we have. You know, when we did some of our games, if you just, like, put your hands in a certain position, that means you don't want to be disturbed or you don't want to interact. You just want to observe. So what is the culture that we're also building to help you navigate the space? Because the college is quite. It can be quite overwhelming. But if you have the mechanics to be able to traverse the space and actually go for the exact experience that you need or want or wish for, then that helps a lot to have these mechanics.
- [46:40]
A
Conscious design of social spaces. If we're going to put it in
- [46:43]
B
simple terms, I like that it's a neighbor to willing suspension of disbelief. Right. It's putting you into a frame. It's changing your frame. Which ritual is good for you. Change the frame in which somebody is functioning so that the range of accepted behavior for them is different, and it allows them to exercise parts of themselves that they would normally never do because of the normal frames that they're in. Yeah, I can completely see that. That's a craft. The craft of creating that new frame that allows people to do that. We're close to the end here. There's a question I ask everybody on the show at the end, which is, what job do you hire your job to do for you? Your job hires you to do something for it. What do you hire it to do for you?
- [47:32]
A
I try not really to have a job as much as I can. I try to just do things I find interesting. Help people. I found I like helping people. It's good for my consulting soul that I'll hear people and their issues and I'll say, ah, but what if you thought about it this way? And then once in a while some money leaves their pocket and ends in mine, which is also nice. I do so many different things and I'm constantly reinventing myself both when I want to and when I don't want to, when I have to, that I don't think I could answer that question in a meaningful way. So I'll have to do it in a little bit of a joking way for me.
- [48:12]
C
It's interesting because I recently talked with a friend of mine and was just talking about a project that I was working on and I was quite having a ride, a tough ride on that project. But then he said, you know, you're aware that we're all doing the same project. So basically what I noticed is the more present I am in my body, more like I invest in self awareness. I realize that whatever it is that I'm engaged with is helping me on that task of self awareness and it's helping me be more of service. So whatever it is that my job brings in my way, it's a way of me to further grow and develop and then be of service.
- [48:52]
B
What does it cost you?
- [48:54]
C
I don't feel like I'm giving up anything.
- [48:57]
A
I feel I am, but that's mostly because of my economic reality, which is rather harsh compared to most people's. That's a whole nother chapter that we won't get into. But I live in the strange world of being both an overpaid rock star consultant and doing, doing interesting things for work, but also having an extremely shitty economic situation with insane amounts of debt from some years back that I'm clawing myself out of. And that costs me, that does cost me. But the weird part is that I rarely let money get in the way of what I'm doing. So one thing it doesn't cost me is that that I'd probably do a lot of the same even if it wasn't work. And I've done that for most of my life, which has its ups and its downs, but a lot of ups.
- [49:47]
B
You both answered those questions differently from anybody else. But part of the reason for that is I really feel that you were very actively crafting your experience your own experience. And so it's not something that happens to you, it's something that you're creating as you go forward. And so a, in some cases it doesn't cost you as much because you've designed it that way, which is fascinating. Where can people learn more about you and where can people learn more about the university?
- [50:17]
A
So if people want to learn more about the college extraordinary experiences, then they can go to extraordinary dot college or they can just Google college of extraordinary experiences. We're the only one around so far. And if they want to learn more about us, both Paul and I have names that are hard to spell, but we're the only ones who have them. So google either of our names and it will lead you down rabbit holes of immense proportions because we have solid digital footprints that go in all sorts of weird directions.
- [50:46]
B
Thank you very much for coming on this very impromptu interview. This was 10 minutes ago before the show. We decided to do it and we did it. And so thanks. Thank you very much.
- [50:57]
A
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
- [50:58]
C
Thank you.
- [51:02]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.