← Work For Humans
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- [00:04]
A
Why should business leaders care about experience?
- [00:07]
B
It's how we interact with the world. We experience the world as our conscious stream of attention. So when we pay attention to something, we have an experience and then our brains chunk it and does stuff cognitively with it. But this means that regardless of what an organization does, whether they provide experiences as their primary economic offering, like a hotel or a professional sports team, or they make widgets, all of that are countless numbers of experiences. The experiences that a customer has interacting with someone in a store or online, or an employee as they park, all of these are experiences. And so I think businesses that have an experience lens or paradigm, the sandbox is a lot bigger to make improvements.
- [00:55]
A
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. We experience the world through what we pay attention to, what we notice, and then how we feel about it and what we remember. Yet most organizations still anchor on the design of products, not the experiences they create and the attention that they draw. Many previous episodes of Work for Humans have been about the art of experience design. This one is more about the business. My guest today is Matt Durden. He's the Department Chair of Experience Design and Management at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University. He's also the co author of Designing Experiences with Bob Rossman. Matt's research focuses on what makes experiences memorable, meaningful and transformative, and how storytelling, design and reflection shape human connection. In our conversation, Matt and I talk about what it really means to design an experience and how to understand the difference between a memorable experience, a meaningful one, and transformative experiences. We explore why reflection is an essential part of co creating experiences, how hardship can make some experiences more powerful, and how shared experiences create connection and belonging. We also talk about what the experience of a Bach cello concerto shares with a river rafting trip, what designers of work can learn from studying leisure, why experience design is about systems rather than isolated moments, and how organizations can build experience playbooks that bring brand, culture and design to together into one coherent story. All right, if you enjoy the show, follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now here's my conversation with Matt Durden. Matt Durden, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:59]
B
Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here.
- [03:02]
A
So you lead a department at BYU on experience design? I don't really know of any other experience design programs in the nation. I think there might be something at San Luis Obispo in California just based upon something on the back of your book. But how rare is this program and how did it come to be?
- [03:25]
B
Yeah, I think we are a unique program, especially to be situated within business school. There are a variety of, I would say, sister programs around the country and around the world. But because experiences happen everywhere, they have business relevance and they have relevance in our personal lives. And so there's programs around that will focus on different aspects of experiences or particular industries. So I think the program you mentioned at Cal Poly has a focus a little bit more on the event side. And then there's a program at Bentley University, which is a private business school west of Boston. It's a little bit more on the human factors of information design. And even though we teach a lot of similar content, but they're interested more on the UX side of things, in Europe, you'll find a lot of service design programs. And then there's a good number of programs that will have an emphasis on more of the design process side. Our take is that experience design is an umbrella set of competencies and frameworks and approaches and umbrella discipline, so to speak. And then there's contextual applications, whether that's in designing work experiences or designing patient experiences, or hospitality experiences, or customer experiences. Even though the contexts are different, a lot of the approaches and tools are similar.
- [04:58]
A
And you have a PhD in leisure studies.
- [05:01]
B
I do, yeah. Yeah.
- [05:02]
A
And you refer to leisure as the gold standard of experience design. Why?
- [05:10]
B
Leisure studies is an interesting space. It's a social science interdisciplinary field that really developed in the 1960s when there was this concern that because of automization and other technological advances, that the work week was going to shrink and people would have more free time than they knew what to do with. Obviously that didn't play out, but people were really concerned from a policy perspective. How do we understand how people spend their time in most effective and generative ways. This is something going back to Aristotle when he wrote the Nicomachean Ethics. He was talking about what does a good life look like? What are the pursuits that lead people to thrive? And of course, positive psychology and other disciplines of played with this question. And if you think about our leisure experiences, they're characterized by positive affect. You know, if we can choose the things that bring us positive emotion. But there's also a sense of perceived freedom. We're choosing to do something and it's connected to intrinsic motivation as well. And so even though my background as a social scientist started studying leisure experiences, really started looking at out of school time experiences that impacted positive youth development. And there's a whole sort of backstory how I started there. But what I found as I dug into that space and then also became more aware of Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore's thoughts about the experience economy. And my own professional background is that what makes an experience work in one context usually can apply in another context. We could take those lessons as generalizable takeaways. And I think there's a lot of contexts where we just don't think intentionally about the design of experiences. I cite an Australian management scholar, Boris Kabanoff, in a bunch of different places. He wrote an article in the early 80s that was about designing work experiences. And he said, I think if we want to learn how to design better work experiences, we need to actually look at people's non work experiences, because that's often where they're performing and thriving and bringing their whole selves to their experience. I think that was an early thing that I read where I was like, yeah, like how do we generalize across these contexts? I mean, I consider myself a social scientist. First and foremost. I'm interested in people and how they react in different settings. And then you bring in design, you bring in management, and you can have this interdisciplinary framework to think intentionally about how we design experiences really in any context.
- [07:49]
A
And do you find, I guess I would say your students or the field primarily populated by artists or people with a scientific engineering bent or more of a business bent, but the other way to say it is how much is this discipline art, science or business?
- [08:05]
B
That's a really great question. There are master's programs in experience design and you'll see some that are like an MFA that are more on the Masters of Fine Arts and you'll have some that are on more of a MBA in customer experience focus or a Master's of science really digging in. It just depends across context. I really think you need a little bit of all of those perspectives to understand. Just because as humans, when we engage with an experience, there's a lot of different evaluative things happening. We're impacted by the aesthetics of an experience, but we're also impacted by the design of intentional touch points that have targeted outcomes that are just ordinary. Right. That are seamless service experiences. Those are important to us. Right. And ultimately, from a business perspective, if something is not feasible and viable, then it's not going to be a sustained experience over time because it's just not operationally working. Right. We have to know how to. How do you stage and manage these things? And so that's why from our perspective and our program's perspective, you got to have a little bit of each of those spaces now in Terms of students we see coming into our program and also sort of the professional field. We started thinking about building this program 2012, 2013, launched in 2017. So we're a new program. But I think what I've always found about the experience space is that regardless of what industry people are coming from, there's this shared language around experiences. I'll tell you a quick story. In I think 2013, we hosted a little proof of concept conference here at BYU where we got about 30 professionals and academics together. We spent two or three days and the basic structure was, hey, we're going to come together and talk about experiences. And we just want to see if you guys can talk across industries. And I remember this conversation. We had somebody from the Forest Service, an administrator from the Forest Service, and we had an administrator from financial services sector. And I remember them having this really fruitful conversation about learning from each other's experiences and how they think about someone visiting national forest and coming into a credit union. And for me it was just like this is sort of a gathering place where people can share these cross fertilized ideas. And so I would say in terms of our students, what sets them apart is there's a real interest in people and understanding how people think and people experience things. And some might come with more of a quantitative bent, filling in those pieces to give them a holistic toolkit.
- [10:49]
A
Why should business leaders care about experience?
- [10:53]
B
It's how we interact with the world. We experience the world as our conscious stream of attention. So when we pay attention to something, we have an experience and then our brains chunk it and does stuff cognitively with it. But this means that regardless of what an organization does, whether they provide experiences as their primary economic offering, like a hotel or a professional sports team, or they make widgets, all of that are countless numbers of experiences. And it's usually the experiences that a customer has interacting with someone in a store or online, or as they open a thing, or an employee as they park and then go to a meeting and then get feedback from a supervisor. All of these are experiences. And we often think about, here's the product, here's the thing that people pay for, and we have the economic exchange here and don't recognize that we live within ecosystems of experiences. And there's a lot that are functioning fine and there's others that with sometimes minimal and other times more expansive efforts could be better designed and also measured and managed right. And so I think businesses that have an experience lens or paradigm, the sandbox is a lot bigger to make improvements that they're in.
- [12:18]
A
How do you define experience?
- [12:21]
B
This is a great question, because experience has become a hot topic. And so you see all the time people saying not only customer experience, but flying experience and patient experience. We provide the best learning experience. And it's really hard to design something if you can't define it. And it's one thing to say, oh, I'm going to design a table, right? Which we all have sort of a general idea of the concrete nature of a table, of what that looks like. But when you say, I'm going to design an experience, it's a lot more abstract. It's an abstract phenomenon. And even in English, we have different ways we use the word experience. Whether I had an experience at work and I have work experience. This goes back to even before Bob and I started working on our first book with colleagues here at BYU and other places. John Dewey talked about this and Aristotle. I mean, people have been talking about experiences for a long time. But for us, the way we think about it is that there's an objective part of every experience and then there's a subjective part of the experience. And so we're having the same conversation on online platform, right? We're having the same objective experience, but we'll both walk away with a different story for our subjective reaction to this experience, because we have different roles and we're in different places and we're going to do something different after this. And so there's that subjective part, and that's really the part that matters, because I have to pay attention to something to have an experience as the participant. If I'm the designer, I've got to design something. We talk about this as an experience scape that somebody's going to pay attention to. So there's a person paying attention to an experience scape. That interaction then produces the subjective reaction of them saying, I liked it, I didn't like it. That was worth my time. That was a waste of time. So I think first and foremost, objective, subjective, and it's interactive. And then you can dive down. We do in the book saying that every experience we can think about, there's an anticipation, participation and reflection phase. You have a macro experience that is like my podcast experience. And then there's all of the little moments in between, or my experience working for this company that spans 20 years. And you have all kinds of experiences. So it depends the elevation you're designing at. But I think that, you know, if you can first and foremost, just think about the objective is important. What you can see and observe but like what people like internally, how they're responding to an experience.
- [14:50]
A
I want to go through some of these specific words. In the definition of experience design, it is the process of intentionally orchestrating experience elements to provide opportunities for participants to co create and sustain interactions that lead to results desired by the participant and the designer.
- [15:13]
B
There's a lot of words in there.
- [15:14]
A
I love every word of that. First of all, you chose the word orchestrate, intentionally orchestrating experience elements. So you could have used the word build, orchestrated, even create, but you use the word orchestrate.
- [15:30]
B
Why? We spent a long time on this definition and thought really carefully about the different words. And in the book we talk about this idea. I mentioned already an experience scape akin to a landscape. If I'm a landscape designer, I have certain building blocks that I use, right? I maybe have some turf and hardscape and plants and water features, right? To create some type of space that people are going to enjoy. And so same as an experience designer, we think about the experience scape and that there's six unique elements of any experience. There's a people in the experience, both those who are participating and those who are providing. There's the relationship among those people, whether it exists or doesn't exist or needs to be developed. The place. This could be the physical place or the virtual place. Also, the place in time and experience in the morning is different than the evening. Summer versus winter. There are the rules that govern that experience. Those could be legal rules or also just social norms or rules that you develop. Some of our most cherished experiences are just a book of rules that tell us how to play basketball or pickleball or the rules of debate. And then there's the objects in the experience, right? These can be the physical objects, but also symbolic objects like logos and things, and then the blocking of the experience. How do you move people through things, through space? So if you've ever been stuck in a line, right, let's pour blocking. So if these are our building materials, as an experienced designer, we're sort of orchestrating how we use each of these elements and recognizing that we can't just force somebody to pay attention to something. I mean, we can, right? And this is the issue with social media being built upon the principles of addiction science, trying to force people to sort of give up their volition and pay attention to things. But we're orchestrating. If we think about why we love music, we love the variety and we love the highs and lows and the different speeds and arrangement of different instruments and voices, right? So we have this palette that we're designing with as experienced designers, and when we recognize what those elements are, we can think about, okay, how do I orchestrate and set up an experience scape that somebody's going to engage with not just momentarily or as a distraction, but for a sustained period of time? John Dewey wrote a lot about experiences, learning experiences, artistic experiences, and he talked about this idea of koate versus inchoate experiences, basically meaning it doesn't count if you're just momentarily paying attention to something and you're distracted by something else. You can't say you had an experience with a piece of art if you just sort of going through the gallery really quickly. Right. It takes sustained engagement. So as an experienced designer, I've got to think, how do I orchestrate an experience scape that people are going to want to pay attention to long enough that it actually produces memories and reactions?
- [18:33]
A
It's interesting. In the preface, Joe Pine mentions that he and Gilmour used the word stage experiences. And he said he likes the word orchestrate. He thinks it's a good word. I like it too. And the reason I like it a little better than staging experiences is that staging sounds fake. It sounds like it's pretending and orchestrating sounds like assembling, but not with a ton of control. I'm going to bring these things together, these different elements, but there's only so much you can do. You can bring them together, but there's, at some point the participants have to pick it up and carry it to the right level for them. And later in the book you mentioned that everybody can learn to be creative, everybody can learn to be a better experience designer. It's not something that's innate necessarily, but I often wonder if there's a skill to being a co creator as a participant and if that can be learned.
- [19:38]
B
Yeah. So I love that. In fact, Bob and I are about 90% of the way there on a second book manuscript. I was just talking with him this morning before this call. So I've got about like a chapter and a half to draft and then we've got our full thing done. One of the things that we're talking about in the book is sort of talk about experience, design as a discipline. What's the paradigm and process strategies and competencies and management and the strategies and competencies. We talk about this idea that, yeah, like as an experience designer, there's strategies that you can use when you're orchestrating the design of an experience. But we also have to recognize because it's co created, that the competencies that our participants have are equally as important. We can't just assume that everybody comes in at the same level playing field. And there's all kinds of factors, demographic, psychographic and also competencies. One of the ones, just as an example that we talk quite a bit about, and that is a core part of my current research, is thinking about storytelling as an experiential competency. Because I think, and I think our research and others support this idea is that people who are better able to tell stories to themselves and others about experiences that they've had are more likely to be impacted over time by those experiences. As humans, we're just not naturally reflective. There's a small percentage of us that journal every day, for example. But if memories are what we take away from certain some of our experiences, just because we have those memories doesn't mean they're going to stick with us or impact us. We've got to be able to reflect on those and extract meaning and then turn that meaning into some type of narrative Anyway. So this is the topic that I'm thinking a lot about right now is recognizing if it's co created. We've got to be intentional and strategic. But we also need to think about what are competencies that people currently have, what are ways that we can help promote those competencies and just recognize we also live in a world where the way we engage with and spend our attention has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades, which may have enhanced or decreased some of our abilities to have experiences. I think it's an important thing to consider.
- [21:55]
A
I'll tell you how I've been approaching it a little bit. It's completely true in the work arena that there are some people who come to work with no expectation of an experience for them and they haven't really thought about it. If you say what do you want from work? Some proportion of the population doesn't know or can't articulate it. And a lot of our work is on the side of how do companies become a platform for staging experiences essentially or for orchestrating experiences that are co created. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans wrote Designing your life. What that whole approach suggests is that it's a design activity. In other words, that the competencies that somebody has to have to be a co creating participant is design curiosity, willing to test stuff out. You know, there's a bunch of different things. So that's increasingly where I'm turning to understand those competencies.
- [22:57]
B
I totally agree. Right. I think in the book we're talking about this idea of what is experience intelligence. And the way that we're defining it is the ability to intentionally design, deliver, stage, orchestrate and also engage in experiences. Right. So if we think holistic experience intelligence, you've got to be able to because we should all be designing our own experiences plus those that that's our professional role. And it's not just designing. You've got to go through sort of the project management and delivery and make the thing happen in the real world, but also about being able to intentionally engage in experiences, decide what we're paying attention to, what we're doing with those memories, how we're creating a rich portfolio of the types of experiences we're having. So yeah, I think it's a super interesting topic and is just the other side of the same coin.
- [23:50]
A
Yeah, your definition, which you quoted almost exactly by the way of experience intelligence, it's the ability to intentionally design and engage in experiences. I think it's super interesting. And it says that the concept refers to a designer's or participants competency in understanding and enhancing the impact of experiences. I spoke to the CEO and the co founders of a company called Tenduo and They provide fractional CIOs and their product as a work experience. Product is new college grad to CIO in five. So it's this massive transformational offering. And what he talks about is guiding people into formative experiences. It's super interesting to see that some people, well, they focus a lot on essentially work as a service and then work as an experience. But this is a company that has a product line and their product, their niche is we're a transformation offering. And then the question is how do they recruit people who are capable co creators?
- [25:01]
B
So I love this for a couple of reasons. One, you know, we traditionally think about market segment research and attracting customers and things. But what if our perspective was how do we attract the best co creators for the experience this particular experience? Because rather than just getting a bunch of people through the door, what if we got the right people through the door who could take the most away from the experience with them?
- [25:27]
A
Yes. And not all experiences are this way. Many experiences are experienced individually, but many of them are participant to participant. And so when you're assembling a cruise, for instance, you talk in the book about assembling who's going to be at a cruise. Well, you get people who are going to like each other if you can, who share common interests and can. It's really co creation. You create the platform, but they're co creating it with each Other to this.
- [25:56]
B
Point, I think, increasingly as an educator. First, the definition of transformative learning that I love. Kevin Pugh is a higher education researcher, and he defines transformative learning. I'm paraphrasing, but it's future intrinsic use of content that leads to better outcomes.
- [26:15]
A
Okay, I need to part that out. Future intrinsic use of content, right.
- [26:22]
B
So it's like, oh, I learned this thing in a setting, and I'm now going to go out of that setting and use it or apply it. And then the final part is it leads to better outcomes. So whatever I'm doing, it's made that thing better. So as an educator, I know if. Great, you got 94% on the test, good job. But what I really care about is a year later, are you doing anything with the content from this class because you want to. And it's making whatever you're doing better. And if that happens, that's transformative learning. And so our offering is CIOs after five years. If they're able to deliver on that, that's transformative learning. And then the other piece you brought up is the research on learning communities. I think is pretty clear that the more people know each other in a learning community, the better they're able to learn. And so I found, and I think Covid forced me to think more about this. I taught online for a semester, and that was the first time I had done that. Like, how do I continue to build the relationships? And I spend more time on getting people to know each other in the classes that I teach than I ever have before. And I'm totally fine giving up content to make space for that, because I know they're going to get way further down the road together than individual learners.
- [27:45]
A
Yes. And two comments on that. One is those are their future colleagues. In many cases, that's one thing, but. Right. It's transformative if later on you can actually use it to create outcomes. We had Matt Bean on the show, who's a UCSB faculty in technology management, and he said a skill is not being able to hit the golf ball. It's being able to hit the golf ball in the mud, on a hill, in the rain, in the dark, because it's always contextual. And so it's very similar to. To what you said. It's being able to do it in reality, in the world. I have a question that's totally out of sequence.
- [28:25]
B
Good. I like it. I love this conversation.
- [28:27]
A
Totally out of sequence because I'm so curious about it. This is a question specifically for you, Matt. How is a Bach cello concerto like a river rafting trip?
- [28:39]
B
Okay, I like that. Okay.
- [28:41]
A
And we should give a little background on why I asked those two questions.
- [28:45]
B
So my professional and familial background is in whitewater outfitting. My dad started a company about two years before I was born, 1977, still operating the same company, my siblings and I spent our summers on the river. I started guiding when I was about 14. And that's I think really where an interest in experiences was sparked. Because on these five to seven day trips, wilderness, self supported people from all over the place, all kinds of different walks of life, I would just see, even as a teenager, just recognize like, wow, the way people are interacting and forming relationships. And just this community that we build over these five days feels a lot different than other spaces. And what is it about this particular experience that leads to these outcomes? Right. I didn't know that this is something I could study or even that I'd still be thinking about this 30 years later. So I love the Bach cello concertos. I listen to them almost like my work music often. Right. And I think our brains love variety, they love novelty. It's hard to pay attention to something that doesn't change unless you're really trying to have a meditative experience. But I think we are hardwired to pay attention to novelty. And I think in music you have those highs and lows and the tempos and the different sounds and there's just so much to pay attention to. And that there's some type of intentional journey that a good composer takes you on and that there's emotion and it evokes emotion or memories. Right. And you know, a river trip is pretty similar. There are moments of in the rapids and adrenaline and energy. And that's I think a lot of times what people think about with the whitewater rafting, right? It's that, that's just the rapids, but really those make up a very tiny portion of the experience. Right. There's oftentimes just like floating in very calm sections and you're just chatting without the distractions of everyday life. And then I think the beauty of a multi day trip is that each night you get to a campsite, you set up your camp and you have the rest of the day to just talk. And it's often to reflect about what happened over the course of the day. I think that's actually the magic, right. Most experiences we don't design in intentional moments for reflection. And I think for me, as I listen to the Boccello concertos, Over and over. They're just layered with memories of other times that I've listened to them. And I've listened to them so many times, too. It's often just like I can sort of have them in the background, but I'm also sort of reflecting on what that I'm doing. And so I think great experiences have ebbs and flows, and they have moments of intense concentration and moments of reflection, and they have opportunities where we might even feel some negative emotions and then we have some positive emotions. So I think that variety exemplifies sort of that connection. And I love that question, by the.
- [31:38]
A
Way you mention in the book the importance of memory as it relates to experience. And you asked the question, what are your top 10 most memorable experiences? Two thirds of mine were bad when I wrote them out. It doesn't mean they weren't beneficial. It doesn't mean that they weren't transformative. But what made them memorable was anguish, for the most part. And so I'm very interested in the difference between an experience and a transformative experience. Do most transformative experiences go through discomfort?
- [32:12]
B
I'm not speaking from data. This is just more personal insight and thought. I think there's always some degree of struggle in transformation, whether that's what causes it at the beginning or it pokes up along the way. There's research, for example, that looks at how people do after experiencing a spinal cord injury and losing some degree of mobility. Right. A horrible, horrible thing to have happen. But at least in research that I've read, the vast majority of people are actually doing psychologically, on psychological measures, better two years down the road than they were before the accident. And this is not to say that they wouldn't want their mobility back, but what they've learned through the struggle and the process has changed them. And that is often those parts of themselves that have changed, that they come to value those parts.
- [33:11]
A
That's interesting.
- [33:12]
B
That's an extreme example. Right. But I think it does speak to sort of what you're talking about.
- [33:16]
A
We've asked a thousand people, what job do you hire your job to do for you? And many of them say to spend time with friends. And how were friends established? Well, one way is through hard time shared. And so think of the structure of a project, and you all form together as a project. You live through that project till its conclusion or its failure as a team. And those hardships are like rapids, like going through rapids. There was this moment of fear that we shared together. There was this moment of relief that we shared together. Mary Fell out of the boat and then we had to haul her back in. We couldn't find her for a second. You know, there's all these things very much like projects I've been on. And so I actually think it's an area for future research or maybe it's been done, which is how those relationships are formed through shared experience.
- [34:09]
B
I am super interested in shared experiences. I think that's how we're hardwired as humans to have shared experiences. I mean, we've been gathering around campfires for as long as we've been able to figure out how to make fire. Right. Solo experiences are important too. I'm as much of a introvert as I am an extrovert. Right. And so I think those are important, but for a lot of the outcomes that you're talking about. And part of it too is as we go through the project or the rapids, we're creating the shared reality over time. And when we gather with those people, part of what connects us is these stories that we can tell and that we feel immediately understood because we were all there and there's this shared narrative. And those shared narratives are really powerful. I'll give you a quick example. So going back to the river example, my dad has always wanted to get all of us, siblings and other people who have guided for him and do a rafting trip on the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, because that's where he started. He has like a hundred trips through the Grand Canyon. And some of us have done this trip on our own at different times, but we've never done it all together. And so he made it happen. He turned 76 and we did it last month and had 27 of us on a seven day Grand Canyon trip. It was awesome. And what was interesting is on one part of the trip, my sister was saying, man, like, dad is just spending the whole time with the guides on the trip he loved, you know, because he was like reliving his glory days and they were letting him drive these big motorized boats down the river. And then he'd love telling stories with these guides. And I said, it makes total sense. He's been telling us Grand Canyon stories our whole lives, and we've understood through his perspective. But to be able to sit and talk with other guides who know exactly what he means when he's like, well, mile marker 142.5. And all of these things that they're part of this community, even though they've guided at separate times, those shared stories combine them together. And so I think one of the reasons why struggle is important is because it's always the most interesting part of stories. Right? We're interested in stories where there's a need and there's a complication. I've got a friend, Lais Gluck, who's an amazing experience designer in Brazil. She talks about designing for intentional friction. And I think that's a really important thing to think about as experienced designers. It's not just about making everything easier.
- [36:39]
A
That's something Klaus Rasted said when he came on the show. He said, don't design out the pain. What was the name of the person who wrote about friction?
- [36:49]
B
Lis glue. It's L, A, I S G L U with a umlaut ck. I'll give you another example of that. I took students to Scandinavia for an experience design focused study abroad program this summer. And we went to a place in Copenhagen called Folkusit Absalon, which is the founder of the Flying Tiger stores, which are all over in Europe. He sold that. And then he's really interested in community building. So one of his efforts, he bought this old church and turned it into what he describes as Copenhagen's living room. And the whole purpose of this place and the experiences they provide is to make people who come there more open to meet strangers. So they design in all of these obstacles that forced you to have to meet strangers. They have these big communal meals which are sort of their signature event. Right. And everything is family style. You don't get to choose where you sit. You're seated randomly dispersed out. So you're meeting people. And it's because it's family style. You're having to ask people to pass plates and things and you clear off your thing. But one of the other things they do that I really love is that they don't have signs on anything. And so, for example, if you need to find the restroom, you have to ask somebody because there's no signs on the door. Right? So it's an example of intentional friction that's don't make things hard just to make things hard, but intentional friction that's designed or connected to an intentional outcome.
- [38:16]
A
That's interesting. It reminds me of at Zappos. They made it so that the only way you could get into the corporate headquarters was to through the front door because you would have to run into people. And they didn't want people coming in through all the different doors and never talking.
- [38:31]
B
Yeah, you miss all those serendipitous conversations.
- [38:35]
A
When we used to track how people felt about their work, I said Was your work fun? And the teams that we worked with said that's the wrong word. They said rewarding. And what they meant was fun's too much like sugar. Rewarding is more like protein. It doesn't have to be easy or light or leisure. Like we want a dose of hard in there. We want to feel like we're lifting weights. That's rewarding. So I have a question about the role of memory. Some memory is the kind of memory we can recount. And some memory lives someplace deeper. I know, for instance, that there are conference rooms at the companies I've worked at that I don't want to go into anymore. I don't remember why, but they have bad mojo. And the reason is I didn't like the meetings that happened there. Or there's this 50 square foot piece of ocean that I'm absolutely terrified of because I saw a shark there once and that doesn't make sense at all. You shouldn't be scared of a 50 foot square piece of ocean. Sharks can swim. And yet there's a part of me that's way subliminal. And so this has a little bit to do with Brand, I think, which is, is there more than one kind of memory that we form, I guess. Hi everyone. Here are some gift ideas inspired by guests on Work for Humans. For the people in your life who like a challenge, try the exquisite puzzles of Stump Craft's Jason Robillard, who told us all about the essentials of great puzzle design. For something seasonal, you might like Mistletoe Market, but my favorite is called Queen Bee. If someone you know is taking work way too seriously, help them to lighten up with Greebroff's shiny new book. Today was fun. If you have a friend who's at sea in the pace of change, I recommend Embracing Uncertainty. It's the latest book from Margaret Heffernan in which she tells us the techniques that writers, musicians and artists use to thrive in an unpredictable world. And the one that I'm definitely going to put in my own stocking this year. Joe Pine's new book, the Transformation Economy is now available for pre order.
- [41:10]
B
I work with cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, but mainly just learning from them. And so not an expert on this topic, but I would say yes, I think there's, you know, and we talked about short term and long term memory and those types of things, but it makes me think that we do imprint memories on places. I also believe that there's spaces that have historical significance too, that just have a different feel to them. If you're aware of the history, you know, you can go and see some monument or go to some historical place. Not know much about it, but if you do, there's a whole host of sort of emotions depending on sort of what that historical space is. I think going back to this fact that reflection is so important. If we can develop that ability to be better reflectors, I think our memories are more accessible to us. I think we're often from a consumer perspective, like, just consume, consume, consume. Have an experience, move to the next experience, pack it all in. And if we're not creating space for reflection between experiences, I think the vibrancy of memories is lost. And I think our memories change over time too. Right. Something could feel like totally tragic in the moment, and we look back and like, wow, I'm really grateful for that. Or vice versa, like, this was amazing. And then after a while you're like, man, it's actually fine.
- [42:39]
A
First of all, one of the things I think you're pointing toward is that reflection is a capability of a co creator. Yeah, definitely an experience.
- [42:50]
B
You know, we talk about the difference between memorable, meaningful, and transformative experiences in the book and in other work that we do with a variety of colleagues. And just this idea that, yeah, when we experience emotion, it triggers our brain to remember something and we have a memory and it's become memorable. But whether or not that experience becomes meaningful is tied up in the degree to which we reflect on it and then extract insights from that, like, why was I sad? Or why was I happy? Or why did this impact me in this way? And what did I learn about myself or other people or the world around me and just extend beyond that. If those insights become the building blocks potentially, of the stories we tell about who we are and why we do the things that we do and how we think about the world. So if we're able to then tell stories to ourselves and others, I think that's the gateway to transformation. The stories undergird everything that we do and think, whether those are explicit stories we tell or implicit. Hans Hansen is a management scholar, wrote a book called Narrative Change, and he makes this case about stories undergirding anything. If an organization wants to change something, they've got to be able to articulate the stories under that. And he says, even whether we brush first or floss first before we go to bed, there's a story that we're telling ourselves that undergirds that behavior anyways. So, yeah, memories, reflection, insight, meaning, storytelling, transformation, change. I think there's a progression there.
- [44:20]
A
I've noticed that one of the big mediating things in how people experience things is the story that they think they're in. And so is this the story of the hero? Is this the story of the helper? Is this the story? You know, what is this? We did a thing once where we put out a survey because we were checking whether or not the change that we were introducing into the company was landing. And so we sent out something that said, did you hear about it from the newsletter? Did you hear about it from your manager? Did you hear about it from the CEO? Did you hear about it from. And 20% of the people said that they heard about it from the CEO, which he never said anything about it. And so we're like, you know what? We don't even have to do that. We can just manufacture these memories and it's almost as good. It makes me think that fake histories of locations or enhanced histories of locations might be a really powerful tool.
- [45:12]
B
And I think people are doing this. We talk about this a little bit in the book. Right. But IKEA has histories of each of the rooms that you walk through. There's a fam. This is the family who lives here, and the dad does this and the mom does this, and the kids are this age and this. So they have all of these and they're not displayed, but they are very much influenced the design of that experience. We think about. Themed entertainment is very much sort of a separate industry, but those principles of creating a story that builds this world and then drawing people into it, and I think they create this shared reality that is important to us as humans of how we build communities and groups. And so whether that history is explicit and at the forefront or just sort of backstage, I think can be useful in both situations.
- [46:03]
A
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think it can be quite subtle. Like reading Tolkien, you often feel the Silmarillion, even though you might never want to read it.
- [46:13]
B
Yeah. And you try and you're like, I can't understand it.
- [46:16]
A
This is. Nope, cannot read this.
- [46:18]
B
Yep. Tried.
- [46:18]
A
But you still feel it that there's a history behind the books that are later in the sequence.
- [46:24]
B
I love that analogy. I think that's a great way to think about it because it influenced everything that he wrote, that source material, as if he was drawing from these historical documents.
- [46:34]
A
Right. It was a landscape that manifested history. The kings, God, you know, the two kings in the river that are just standing there from some ancient age. So I want to talk about the business part of this and in particular, how experience design informs business strategy and vice versa. There's a sort of a question here of directionality for me, which is, do I have a business strategy and build the experience, or do I have an experience in mind and build a business around it? I suppose it can go both ways, but what is that relationship and who's doing it? Great.
- [47:13]
B
There's a couple ways to sort of address this, but maybe we can just jump in here. Most organizations are going to have some type of brand style guide, right? And it's really clear what typeface we use and what are the colorways. And you put the logo on this place here, but we've got this other one you use here. So it's really clear that visual identity of a brand. And I think brands should also have an experience guide. If we're talking about a customer experience, regardless of the channel through which I interact with a brand, it feels like the experience is the same. I remember talking with a group of executives about this idea and somebody's like, oh, yeah, I wish I could fly with this airline, but use this other airlines app, because I don't like this one. And I think we experience that all the time, right? And I think there's some brands that have, in part, just because I think the story around, whether it's a Disney or an Apple, I think we just feel like, oh, these are all similar experiences across these channels, whether they are or not. And what would it look like for a brand to have a brand experience guide? But I think you would start with the organizational sort of identity documents. What are we saying about who we are and what we're trying to do? I think if the brand has done any sort of experience design work and experience mapping, are there already sort of targeted outcomes that they have? And then being able to put together a systematic guideline to say, hey, regardless of the channel, within our organization, we're always going to make sure that we do these things. We're always going to make sure that we're designing for these particular reactions. We're always hoping that people walk away saying these particular types of things about who we are. And so I think that's a part where you can have the strategy and experience design interact. I mean, that's a very specific example, but I think that's one way that we can think about how brands can strategically incorporate experience design. But again, I think this is hard because people are like, well, what's an experience? I know what a font is, so I can pick the font, and I know on a color Wheel. We can pick these things. But being able to say, okay, what is an experience? What are the elements? How do we orchestrate this intentionally and strategically?
- [49:24]
A
There's one place where you were talking about in the book about journeys and what memory do you want people to form there? What do you want people to remember from that step at each point? I'm looking for, though, the Color Run. Is that what it's called, the Color Race?
- [49:41]
B
Oh, yeah, we do talk about the Color Run. Yeah. So I mean, the basic sort of backstory is the Color Run started as a timed non competitive 5k race. The idea being that there was people who wanted to have a competitive race experience, but not to get a pr, but just to have sort of this social experience. So they thought, and really it stemmed out of the original. People were running sprint triathlons and they'd have serious triathletes come up and then they'd have other people show up wearing tutus and bikes they got at Walmart and they were just there to party, right? And they're like, this is so weird. Why are these people repurposing our event? But then they thought, actually maybe we can do something for them, right? So it was 5K. We're going to throw colored powder at you. And guess what? Instagram just launched. And these are great pictures. And so within a two year period, it went from this couple of guys running this thing bootstrapped to the largest event series in the world. And I think one of the reasons was Instagram. It was very Instagrammable. But I think John Connors, who's a good friend of mine, who is one of the folks originally involved, is a really brilliant, experienced designer. And he really honed in on this idea of like, what do you want people to say at the end of the experience? And he said, we're running these events around the world. We're working with a lot of temporary staff who are just coming in for a couple of days. We can't train them on everything, but we can train them to say, hey, when people leave this experience, we want them to say that this was a well run event and it's the happiest 5k on the planet. Those are the two things. So regardless of what you do in your role, make sure that you're targeting those two outcomes. So I think that's very simple. Strategic experience design and other organizations do this, right? Disney does this, Chick Fil A does this. Other places do this. But I think whenever I start a design project, that's always my first starting point. Whether this is for myself or with the organization. What do you want people to say when they're done with this? Then we just reverse engineer from there.
- [51:51]
A
I found the framework here, which is what do your customers want? First step, what do we want customers to say? What is our experience saying? And what are customers actually saying? So it's a loop. So it goes from what do they want? What do we want them to say? What is our experience saying? What are the customers actually saying? What's so interesting about that is it's all about memes. No wonder it got to be the largest run in the world. So the color run, as you're running, people can throw color at you, right?
- [52:27]
B
Yeah, it's like color powder. So by the end of the color powder, it's covered with like. Yeah, exactly. And that's where they got the idea.
- [52:34]
A
And so beautiful and colorful and great photography, but also great for the participants throwing stuff, which is this whole other customer. For this particular run, there was a race in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when I was a kid, and there's a river or a lake there. And so everybody would build their own boat, mostly kids. And then they would race the boats that they'd built. But as you went under bridges, people could throw stuff at you.
- [53:03]
B
Sounds amazing.
- [53:04]
A
It was. Well, I was five at the time, and I'll tell you, it was a peak experience.
- [53:11]
B
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.
- [53:12]
A
I was like, can I drop a watermelon on them? They said, no, you can't drop a watermelon.
- [53:17]
B
I love that. One thing I just want to point out about that cycle. You know, John really drew upon insights from Walt Disney in building that. And Disney said, everything speaks in an experience and you want it to speak in harmony. Right. And Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore play off this idea too, of how do you harmonize elements within an experience and get rid of things that aren't in harmony? So if you know, you want people to say something, but your experience is saying something different, whether that's explicitly saying things or it's their trash cans are overflowing everywhere. And you're like, this is not a well run event. Right. It's just sort of these technical factors of the experience. Just basic service promises. Right.
- [53:59]
A
In the book, you mention that even the asphalt, even the ground in a Disney experience, it's a touch point. How it feels under your feet.
- [54:08]
B
Yeah. That it harmonizes. The ground is different. Right. The surface that you're walking upon is different whether you are in Tomorrowland or Adventureland. Because Disney said, this is the way people are Going to spend the most time interacting with the park is what they're walking on. And I love it too. I was with my kids in Disneyland a couple of years ago, and when you go from whatever the Star wars land is called and you walk out of it, you walk under a bridge and you can hear all the sound and you're walking on one thing and you go under this bridge and it's sort of just this liminal space that's not themed. And then you come up and you're in this other space. Right. They're just so intentional about those transitions and the elements that harmonize between them.
- [54:53]
A
This is related to the business question. When Disney builds one of those transitions, it's built forever. So there's a way in which there's an investment that went into a structure which will continue to generate experiences forever. And sometimes when we talk about let's invest in experiences, it feels like we're investing in dreams or one off, Just one off things. One off things. And so there's what I think of as degrees of structure or durable structure in different experiences and service systems design. So when people talk about service systems design, I guess what I'm after here is, is there a part of the investment discussion that has to do with the durability of the capital being invested in? And I'll tell you exactly why I'm asking this question. If you say, hey, I want to invest in employee experience, the problem is employees come and go. If I invest in the experience of an employee and they leave tomorrow, I've just lost that investment. But if I invest in the service system that can actually generate the experiences, then I'm investing something that's going to be here no matter which employee is there. And so there's a way in which it's a more durable investment. And I'd like to make that argument, but I'm wondering if it's an existing argument.
- [56:13]
B
Well, I think two points that come to mind, and I think this is a really excellent question, actually. Three points. So the first being, if you're providing employees a great experience and for some reason they go, are they leaving? As an advocate and saying, that was awesome, or like, man, I couldn't wait to get out of there. So even if they do leave and if you've done a good job right, you've got somebody out sort of preaching for you. The second point is, I think when companies talk about employee experience, or just not even employee experience, but just what's our experiential strategy? I think it will often 90% of the time, be around experiential marketing, brand activation, things which serve a purpose. But they tend to be those pop up experiences, things that are just momentary and you know, you're hoping that they get picked up on social media and they have some sort of lifespan beyond that. But it tends to be like, okay, there's just these one off experiences. And so I love the way you're framing this question is what are also. Yes. And what are the durable experiences that are structured and are going to occur over time that are influencing the work? Product.
- [57:20]
A
Yes. The product work.
- [57:22]
B
Yes. The product work. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Semantics matter. So, for example, I think we've seen this back and forth between how we design workspaces. Like, okay, everybody's in cubicles now. Okay, no, everybody's in open workspace. And a lot of the times those decisions haven't been made super intentionally. Even though there's good research to show, for example, the importance of people being able to focus and especially knowledge workers to be able to sort of focus and do their work. But they also need the serendipitous interactions. Right. And there's social network research. I remember a study showing that you can look at an apartment complex and the people with the most robust social networks are the ones that live next to stairs and elevators just because of the structure. They're the ones that most likely bump into people on a higher frequency. So if we think about who in the organization do we need to make sure that they've got the most deep work structure, time, and those that need more of the social network or how do we do the things we were touring on this study abroad. One of the biggest property management companies in Scandinavia is Core. So he went to their new headquarters. It's their headquarters, but it's also sort of a floor model for companies to come in and see, like all the different things that they could bring into their corporate space. Right. So one of the things that they do on the top floor, they think about two vibes they're designing for in the layout of the space. On one side, this more of sort of a focus vibe, and then the other side is more of a social vibe. So if you're coming to work and you want to be social, you can go to one side. If you need to focus, you can go to the other side. But the coffee is all in the middle. So they know everybody's going to need coffee. And we want people who are sequestered and social to come together. So this is the intersection point right And I just love that intentionality of saying, hey, people need to do different things at work at different times. But we always want social interaction to be threaded throughout.
- [59:23]
A
It reminds me of something that Christopher Alexander said, and I can't believe I've probably gone almost 30 episodes without saying Christopher Alexander. He said, great architecture is characterized by the events that keep on happening there, and that's because that catalyzes those events. But the question is, let's take leisure as an example. The service system has a durable piece to it, which is the physical space. But there's the service system, which exists in the minds of the staff or in the rule set. Like you say in the book, not as visible. It's still something we might spend money and as a company and own as an asset, which is essentially something beyond the physical. That's all I got on that. But there's this thing there, right? It could potentially be no building all people or, you know, just pointing out rules.
- [60:20]
B
Right. If we go back to experiencescape elements, investing in intentionally structured rules, and a lot of times think like rules, do this and don't do that. But just thinking about, can you codify the type of interactions that you want to have in this organization? So I'll give you an example. So in the Marriott School of Business, our dean is Dean Bridget Madrian. She was University of Chicago and Harvard, and then came to us in 2019, and has just, I think, done a really excellent job as the dean of our business school. And one of her primary goals when she came in was to have the establishment of a vision mission values that we actually did stuff with. And I think the college has, I mean, has always had some sort of vision mission values. It was on a plaque someplace. But Dean Madrien has been really intentional about one crafting it in a way where it was aspirational. It was connected to the organizational mission of the university. The faculty and students were bought into it. And then she has actively used it in almost every context. Like, if you have a question for the dean about something, this policy, or how do we handle this? All through Covid, she would continually go back and say, well, let's look at our values. What are our guiding values? And how do they inform this conversation? If students come to her with some sort of issue that she's just one really disciplined to like, bring it back to the vision mission values. But I think she's so consistently done that over time that as faculty, when we're having our department meetings, that will. It's like, well, one of our core Values is centered on students. And so what do we do in this situation or another? You know, so we'll talk about those things. And it's this intangible piece of the college that a ton of resources and time have been invested into. And then it's been continuously implemented and modeled.
- [62:19]
A
And it starts to be self replicating at some point, which is that so much of the faculty is already on that it becomes a norm. And that norm can last for generations.
- [62:28]
B
And it affects decision making.
- [62:30]
A
And it affects decision making, but also it will affect. When you say a sentence to students and you say we instead of you.
- [62:37]
B
And we now have students say, like, well, one of the reasons that I decided to major in business is because the vision, mission, values is inspiring to me. That's a group that I want to hang out with.
- [62:47]
A
I have a few closing questions. The first one is, Matt, what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [62:54]
B
I love this question. I think the primary job that I hire my job to do is, is to keep me curious about the world. I remember as an undergraduate, I was really worried about a career and I had a hard time really knowing what jobs were and what people did. But I was really worried about doing something that would just be repetitive. And I was just doing the same thing all the time. I really wanted something that continued to present things that I could be curious about and learn. And I guess connected to that was doing so in a way that I could share what I was curious about with other people that would impact them in positive ways. And I hadn't thought about teaching or being a professor or anything at that point. It was just, how can I continue to just be curious and enjoy learning? And so I think that's at the core of what I've hired my job to do.
- [63:48]
A
For me, how well designed is it to keep you curious?
- [63:52]
B
It's pretty well designed. I think I have the best job ever. I get to do research, which I really enjoy. But I'm always thinking about, am I doing research that has any type of practical significance? Because I've got to go into the classroom and teach undergraduates or executive MBAs and going back to the definition of transformative learning, I want to teach them stuff that they can use in the real world. And so I feel this healthy tension between my teaching and my research, which I really love. And I get bored too. If I'm just teaching the same thing year after year, I always want to know, like, what's new, what's going. This is why. Again, going back to I Was like, I want a podcast. This seems so fun that you get to just talk with, like, tons and tons of people. I just got to find the time. Maybe after I'm done.
- [64:38]
A
I was going to say yes.
- [64:39]
B
Yeah. To do that.
- [64:40]
A
When you said what you hired your job to do for you, I almost said you should have a podcast.
- [64:46]
B
It's on my to do list.
- [64:47]
A
What does your job cost you?
- [64:49]
B
Oh, man, that's a good question. I mean, I think about time and attention is a limited thing, so I'm spending my time on my job.
- [64:58]
A
I want to point something out about that.
- [64:59]
B
Okay. Okay.
- [65:00]
A
I highlighted all the sections in the book where you talked about time, and the reason is you spoke about services are time well saved. Thank you. Can you say the thing?
- [65:12]
B
So Joe and Jim were the first to say this. So service is time well saved. Experience is time well spent. Transformations, time well invested.
- [65:21]
A
So you just said that one of the opportunity costs of what you do at work is time. And to me, that's the pivot point for whether this is a good experience versus some other experience.
- [65:36]
B
Yeah. But I would say in terms of the percentage of that time. Right. Because I'm saying, like, okay, this is my job. I'm going to go spend this much time there. I think the percentage of the time that I feel is time well invested is really, really high. Yeah. I've got to go to meetings and there's this paperwork stuff and those things that's going to be, you know. But for me, it's probably like 10 to 15% of my job. And I would say that I also feel like, because being a professor is pretty autonomous, too, I can carve out and drop in time for family and outside of work in a pretty natural flow as opposed to being constrained to. Okay, here's my. I get my three days here and my, you know, two weeks here and this. That it's. I feel like it's a much more natural flow of work and. And my personal life that I'm really grateful for.
- [66:31]
A
Some of that goes to autonomy and the freedom to design how you spend time. Right. It's funny because people say one of the things people want from work is autonomy. I'm always sort of like, yes, but you have to ask autonomy to do what?
- [66:48]
B
Well, I'd say it's one of the trickiest parts of my job because there's a flow of, like, there's sometimes when I'm teaching a lot, there's other times that I'm doing research. I've always got so many things that I want to do the autonomy piece. It can be great, but can also cause you problems as a professor too, because one, I've got so many things I want to do that it would very easily just put all my time into work. And there's other times where it's like I don't have any time because I'm teaching in administrative meetings. So I don't have a regular flow day to day. Every day looks a little bit different and there's parts of the year I always know that may feels pretty tricky for me because I'm wrapping up a semester. I'm not going to be teaching again until September. I've got these four months where I am pretty autonomous. But how do I best weave in productivity, time with my family, other things during that. And every year I'm sort of reinventing what that looks like. So I think autonomy is like spices, right when you're cooking, if we have too much, it doesn't work. But if we have the right ratios and right balance, it can be a beautiful thing.
- [67:53]
A
Where can people learn more about you and your work?
- [67:57]
B
So I hang out on LinkedIn a lot. That's probably. I don't do any other social media, but I'm on LinkedIn a bunch. I do have a website that I try to keep updated with stuff. It is called matt durden.com and we.
- [68:10]
A
Have to spell Durden. D U E R D E N. Yes, exactly. And Matt is with one T. With one T. Yeah, yeah, one T on Matt. D U E R D E N. Yeah.
- [68:22]
B
It's funny because my full name is Matthew with one T and my mom's never given me like a clear reason why that is. I mean, she said like she likes Matthew and not Matt. Anyways, I've always gone by Matt. So I usually say it's like Matt like doormat so people know how to spell it. And a couple years ago she got me a doormat for my office that says, hi, I'm Matt. People get a kick out of that. So.
- [68:46]
A
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to be on the show. Really appreciate it.
- [68:50]
B
It's been super enjoyable. I really loved the whole conversation and gave me some good things to think about. And yeah. So thanks.
- [68:59]
A
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 the 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.