Designing Experiences People Actually Feel

One of the things people repeatedly want from my practice, and the thing I’m known for, is experiential programs. No surprise here: people are tired of sitting through a death-by-powerpoint experience. And we know it doesn’t work. Developing leadership through a powerpoint is like teaching someone how to drive through the driver’s manual.

So when I think about programming that works, we need experiences that help people actually experience the tensions and challenges (CCL’s vertical development work is good on the why, and Nick Petrie’s version of it is that leaders already know it, they just struggle to be it) that would help them have an actual leadership moment. Over the years of doing program design I’ve been asked: how did you learn design? I’ve been fortunate to have had a number of different trainings. Adult learning principles in my graduate work, experiential learning through the group relations frameworks, my training as a coach. But the most relevant one for workshops is 4MAT, and I was lucky to learn it from Bernice McCarthy herself.

A very short 4MAT

4MAT is a learning cycle Bernice McCarthy built in the late 1970s and published in 1980, then spent four decades refining through her company, About Learning. She built it off Kolb’s experiential learning cycle plus the hemispheric research that was going around at the time (that second half has aged the way most late-70s brain science has; the cycle itself has held up fine).

Four quadrants, four questions. What is this thing. Why does it matter to me. How do I do it. What if I take it somewhere else. You move a group around the wheel in that order, and most of the model’s discipline is in the sequencing. Skip a quadrant and you can usually predict what breaks. Skip Why and people execute the move in the room and never carry it home.

That’s the whole model for our purposes. It’s genuinely more than that, and her book About Teaching is worth your time if you design anything.

Practice, not the conversation about practice

The core of 4MAT captures something that matters a lot to me: the practice of the skill as opposed to the conversation about the skill.

And the nuance I take from it (this is my reading, not McCarthy’s claim) is that it’s not just about whether they did the thing. It’s whether they felt it. Doing an activity is not the same as something landing for them. You can go through the motions of something, but that’s not the same as really feeling the difference. It’s one of the many reasons I can’t stand role playing. This is not about pretending. This is about being.

Outside of the experience, one thing that really helps a concept land is metaphor and image. I was fortunate to be trained by Bernice, and one of the things she named was the importance of the metaphor. In 4MAT the image step is where a learner’s own sense of a thing gets pulled into the open before you’ve defined anything for them, and it’s the step McCarthy tells you to design last, after everything else is locked, because it has to carry both the concept and the person’s way into it. She calls it the hardest piece to set. She’s right.

What I keep coming back to

After thinking about the core concept and getting through a design process, I usually find myself looking for good ways to get participants to feel a concept. And really, I come back to images over and over again.

Photo decks have been part of my kit for a long time, and the best one I’ve used is CCL’s Visual Explorer. But some of my work has moved virtual, and when I go looking for images for a specific room, a specific group, a specific question, I often just don’t have enough of them. I wanted something that could travel light, with me, into a video call, into a room of forty people who all have phones.

So I built Aperture. It’s an image deck that lives in the browser. 190 wordless plates, participants join with a code on their phones, no app and no accounts. One flat price per session, never per participant. And the whole curation methodology is published, so you can read how the images got chosen and tested before you decide whether you trust them. Rather than building it and not sharing it I decided to hop on the vibe coding bandwagon and turn it into a tool anyone can use. There’s a free version, Aperture Eight, if you want to try it out (and let me know what you think!). The bonus for people who work in person is this tool now means a room of 200 can all glance through photo cards and use it to pair-up and have conversation with their neighbor.

And the other half

Designing the room well is one half of the job. It’s the half I’ve spent the most years on, and it’s the half this piece is about.

The other half is everything around the room. What the person walks back into on Monday, who authorized them to change anything, whether the system that sent them has any interest in them coming back different. That’s where a lot of good design goes to die, and it’s a bigger subject than this piece.

I’ve said some of this before, back when I made the claim that leadership development is broken. I ended that one by promising more on the system side, starting with role suction. I haven’t forgotten. That’s next.