Management Perspectives

I cannot tell you the number of leaders I have spoken with recently who have expressed the desire to go beyond their tradition leadership roles and duties…managing people, processes, meeting deadlines or quarterly targets. There is a growing thirst for something deeper that has come to the surface in the post-COVID era. It is about learning how to work and lead on deeper levels.

Experience Design Leadership is about harnessing the fascinating psychology of our most important life experiences into an entirely new view of leadership. It is a view that recasts leaders as experience designers and explores the potential that this paradigm shift opens up for transforming lives and empowering those we lead with the fire of self-propelled identity growth. In my book, Designing Transformative Experiences, I address several myths around this new view of leadership. Here are some of them:

MYTH 1: PEOPLE DO NOT CHANGE. FUNDAMENTALLY, WE ARE WHO WE ARE.

Actually, people do change. In fact, we cannot NOT change…it is the basis for ‘transformative experiences’. In my work, I define transformative experiences as learning experiences that have an identity impact, changing the experiencer’s sense of self in some important way—who you believe yourself to be or who you aspire to become.

This is perhaps most evident with people who have experienced life tragedies. We see identity-reinventing in veterans returning from deployment and rejoining civilian life, survivors of catastrophic events who deal with survivors’ guilt, people who are facing chronic illness and those with life-altering injuries or surgeries, and more.

We also see it in more ordinary situations, including divorce, death of a spouse, or parents becoming empty nesters. When life knocks us around, we are invited to abandon former ideas about who we are and dig into our undiscovered depths to rekindle old identities or conjure new ones that will carry us forward into the unknown. We also see it in life’s more positive transformations, such as finding your passion-work, meeting your love, graduating, landing that big job, or any experience that invites us to re-define ourselves.

Our identities are fluid throughout our lives as we learn, grow, and age. The old adage that ‘a leopard cannot change its spots’ misses the point entirely. It is far more accurate to say that it is not the leopard’s spots that change, but the leopard itself that changes underneath the spots. The leopard cannot not change. Neither can we.

Experience Design Leadership empowers us to harness this natural process and asks, “What would happen if we applied design thinking to purposively generate experiences that may be transformative for those in our spheres?”

MYTH 2: TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES HAPPEN TO US—FROM EXTERNAL SOURCES AND CONTROLS.

People typically describe their most transformative experience as something that happened to them, over which they had very little control. But upon closer investigation, we find that transformative experiences ultimately come from within us, regardless of external triggers or circumstances. How does this work?

Ultimately, we translate all our experiences into narratives, something that our brains are hardwired to do. Our most powerful experiences are translated into our most important narratives. If these resulting narratives are important enough, they become part of our identity narratives. Identity narratives live in that carefully guarded library within our heads that contain our most valuable possession: our sense of self. These are the stories that inform who we are, how we experience life, what we can do (or cannot), and who we want to become. When an experience alters our sense of self through this process, it becomes a transformative experience, and it has the power to change our lives from within, the lives of others, and the world beyond.

Therefore, Experience Design Leaders learn to design experiences that invite their employees to put their existing identities on the edge of discovery; at risk of change and growth. These invitations come as identity-tailored tasks, stretch assignments, promotions, and other challenges that require them to evolve. Experience Design Leaders also need to become expert narrators, supporting the meaning-making process which, if done right, empowers people to become more self-aware and intentional authors of their own life trajectories.

MYTH 3: EXPERIENCE DESIGN LEADERS ALWAYS INTEND POSITIVE EXPERIENCES.

Our most transformative experiences do not occur in our comfort zones. Rather, they happen in DIS-comfort zones. They demand we explore and embrace the unknown, the new, and often the difficult, both in the world outside and in the world inside us.

When people talk about getting out of their comfort zones, they are talking about vulnerability. Generally speaking, we do not like vulnerability. We avoid it when we can. We struggle with it when we have to. We eliminate it wherever possible. Yet, vulnerability traces that razor-edge frontier between life’s more severe experiences and our own undiscovered selves. Life on that frontier is unmapped and often unfolds unpredictably, beyond our plans and expectations.

Discomfort zone experiences require a special kind of self-permission to become vulnerable in the face of the unknown, both inwardly and outwardly. Experience Design Leaders help their experiencers identify and take risks necessary for growth. This requires some knowledge of risk psychology and the ability to tailor risks to the identities of those you lead, intentionally building the kinds of experience designs for experiencers to confront their vulnerability and engage exactly where “thar be dragons,” beyond the edges of the map of their known experiences.

MYTH 4: EXPERIENCE DESIGN LEADERS CONTROL EXPERIENCES.

Experience Design Leadership is not something we do to our experiencers; it is something we do with them. It is an invitation to both the designer and the experiencer to co-create a transformation.

Since transformative experiences are subjective to each individual and ultimately emanate from within, I am talking about designing opportunities with high probability for generating a transformative experience. Leaders create the optimum conditions for transformative experiences to occur. You, as the designer, present the doorway. Your experiencers have to walk through it themselves. But you also provide much more. You offer the room, the furniture and decor, the lighting, and everything else. As the experience designer, you are the leader, architect, interior designer, and personal host. You do not control the transformation, although you help to guide it in a positive direction. You invite others to one of the most precious opportunities that we have in life: to author our own change journeys in becoming better versions of ourselves.

MYTH 5: EXPERIENCE DESIGN LEADERSHIP IS A SIMPLE CHECKLIST OF BEST-PRACTICES.

Experience Design Leadership is an entirely new view of leadership; a new identity of who a leader is and what a leader does. Embracing this stance is to redefine success for yourself and those you lead in terms of identity growth, which translates into retention, performance, and whole-heartedness in the work we do together. The method in my book is called ELVIS: The Experiential Learning Variables and Indicators System. It includes a framework for understanding how transformative experiences work and a toolkit with seven design elements for leaders to use. Building your skills as an Experience Design Leader is not hard, but it does involve an identity transformation, changing who you are as a leader.