How Does Change Happen?

How does change happen? Is it the same as transformation?

These are two big ideas, and for some experience designers they are the holy grail of design. Can we create experiences that are transformative? And can those experiences create lasting change in individuals, organizations, or communities?

A number of my certificate program students have been asking this question as they launch their summer of lived research, during which time they read, conduct interviews, and expose themselves to various experiences to see the effect they have. It’s a thorny question, and we don’t have a clear formula, but there are a few things to guide us.

What’s clear is that experiences can transform us into other people when we are in them.

This may be why we love new experiences. Who are you when you are in school? Who are you at a great party? Who are you at a meditation retreat? The problem seems to be that when we get home we become, again, the person we used to be. We may be transformed for a moment but, like Cinderella’s carriage, when the clock strikes midnight we find ourselves, frustratingly, pumpkins once more.

Many traditional religions separate time (and space) into the sacred and the profane. We can think of these as times of transformation and maintenance*. We love to focus on the exciting, transformative rituals – the vision quest and the pilgrimage to Mecca and the graduation ceremony. I talk about the nature of these in the eventness chapter of my book. These generally have a lot of build up – years of preparation and expectation. They go beyond declaring the individual transformed, conferring on the individual ongoing rights and responsibilities that maintain their new status. It is this structured and contextual integration that makes change possible…

* Although Sacred times can also be times of maintenance in a different manner, but that’s a different topic…for more on this, see Mircea Eliade on the Sacred and the Profane or, more relevant and recent, Robert Moore’s book The Archetype of Initiation.

Design briefs rarely include lots of lead up and lots of follow up; We have little control of the before and after. I have heard the frustrated accounts of mindfulness teachers, leadership coaches, activists, and others that they design incredibly powerful experiences and the people seem transformed, but the change is fleeting. Consider the well-intentioned but largely ineffectual world of diversity trainings. Or the way a week without money at Burning Man has done little to curb Jeff Bezos’ avidity.

Preparation – transformation – maintenance. Without these three, change is unlikely. This applies to negative experiences as much as positive ones. This, of course, is just the beginning. Change cannot be simply dropped on people; they must participate and find meaning in it. How that happens, however, is a whole different topic.

Mailbox

My last Phase Zero was about the failed experience design of news. I thought I’d share a few of the fascinating replies I received…

From Alex Leff

Love this!I once was trying to design a similar idea where once a week there would be a news gathering among friends. The concept was we’d share a potluck, then each present a news story we thought was important to the rest of the group, and have a short discussion around each topic. Each week one person would be designated as the “main story” with a longer time to present, and the expectation that they’d give some larger historical context to that story. The rest of the participants would be designated as “headlines” with a briefer period to share. Each story would be followed by asking chosen questions:

• “How did it come to be this way?”
• “How might it be different?”
• “What are we missing about it?
• “Where did this story come from? What did that storyteller (news outlet) want us to think about it?”

From Nicole Thayer:

The thing that has worked for me - and to your point around the function of community in news - is news as a means of delivering connection. The 24 hour news cycle does the opposite of this - it either makes you feel powerless or makes you numb. I’ve subscribed to local journalism and focused my efforts on group actions that can make measurable impact on a smaller scale.

From Casey Rosengren:

It would be so cool to have a “school of the world” that takes a contemporary issue and creates a quarter/semester-long curriculum around it, so you can understand and have a conversation about it on a deeper level. So for Ukraine, maybe it’s geo-politics, reading about WWII, understanding propaganda and how dictatorships are sustained, understanding the actual military strategies each side is taking, etc. Or for Israel / Palestine, maybe it’s about historical context, looking at polarization in American politics, protest movements on campuses in history, how governments justify war domestically and abroad, etc.

From William Carlos Williams

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there.

excerpted from Asphodel