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"I design transformative experiences for people and organizations.
AND I teach leaders how to do it with their teams to drive motivation and inspire next-level performance through personal identity growth."
"Every one can make a positive difference in this world. Often this requires us to change something about ourselves and the choices we make. This book will be especially valuable to those who are leaders, or aspiring leaders, in their field.”
DR JANE GOODALL - Conservationist, Primatologist, U.N Peace Ambassador
“We all have transformative experiences - two of the big ones are our birth and our death. One in all probability you can communicate, the other seems unlikely. In between are all our transformative experiences. Reading this book will be one.”
WILLIAM SHATNER - Actor, Author, Civilian Astronaut
“This book is an invaluable resource that empowers leaders with practical tools and strategies to challenge people’s self-views and lead to expansions in their identity. It is a guide to transformations that yields the most meaningful kinds of professional and personal growth.”
DR PAUL MARCIANO - Best-Selling Author of Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work
What Exactly Is Experience Design Leadership?
Leaders, have you ever wondered what makes a company not just great, but unforgettable? What makes a team or leader you worked with personally important or even life-changing for you? The secret lies our experience of work. In Experience Design Leadership, we train leaders to recast themselves as experience designers, unlocking the enormous potential that this paradigm shift opens up for transforming lives and empowering people with the fire of self-propelled identity growth. It is made possible by learning new skills for experience design beyond what traditional leaders possess.
This is an opportunity an opportunity to reexamine preconceived notions about who a leader is, and what a leader can do. This is an opportunity to apply social science research to reinvent yourself as someone who can lead deeply rooted personal change in yourself and others. My leadership development method, based on over 25 years of experience, harnesses the psychology of:
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Experiential Learning within our DIS-comfort zones
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Narrative Translation of Our Lived Experiences for Personal Meaning-Making, and
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Identity Development, or how form our ideas about who we are and how those ideas determine what we can (and cannot) achieve.
What Makes An Experience Truly Transformative?
Have you ever had an experience that wasn't just memorable or extraordinary, but that fundamentally changed you? Here's the difference. Extraordinary experiences are just that – wonderful, awesome, sometimes difficult or challenging -- but still extraordinary.
Transformative Experiences, however, are LEARNING EXPERIENCES that have an IDENTITY IMPACT, altering our sense-of-self in some important way. Who you believe yourself to be and/or who you aspire to become. That’s the difference.
Think back... what has been YOUR most transformative experience, so far? What events were included? Where were you? How old were you? Who else was there? And most importantly, how did it change you? Perhaps it was when you were young and fell in love for the first time. Maybe it was becoming a parent and realizing that your life was forever changed. It might be a tragedy you lived through, a traumatic injury or experience, a cancer diagnosis, or the death of a loved one that altered your self-perceptions ever after. It could be that one boss who was able to inspire you to become more than your job and empower you to do your life’s work. Or that insightful coach who drew forth untapped potential you never even knew you had. Or that special teacher who opened your eyes to a new way of seeing yourself in the world. Regardless of the details, all transformative experiences have 3 essential things in common:
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Transformative Experiences Do Not Happen To Us, They Are Created BY Us (whether we realize it or not).
Why and how is this, you may ask? It has to do with the way we process and integrate new experiences into our lives and our evolving identities. While there may be external events that trigger the process, ultimately if and how we are changed is entirely up to us.
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Transformative Experiences Are Life Invitations (often in disguise).
These experiences invite us to something new -- a new way to engage with the world and others in it or even a new view of ourselves and our "possibility spaces" in life. The question is .. once we recognize the invitation, how will we RSVP? Understanding this basic principle empowers leaders to become skillful designers of custom-crafted invitations for those they lead. This is part of the Experience Design Leadership Toolkit.
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Transformative Experiences Are Subjective.
This makes perfect sense if their source is internal to us. Therefore, on the surface, transformative experiences can look very different from one another, depending on a wide range of experiences and experiences, whether they are designed or undesigned, initiated by external events or driven by internal ones.
Regardless, when we look closely at transformative experiences, they all track through the same basic sequence of stages. This sequence composes a framework for understanding how transformative experiences operate and how we can become skilled designers of them. This is the ELVIS Framework and it is the foundation of our Experience Design Leadership training.
How Can Leaders Learn To Become Experience Designers?
We learn by doing. This is the whole idea behind experiential learning. Therefore, my training programs go beyond concepts and theory to include CAPSTONE EXPERIENCES that serve as our "training ground." These are first-person experiences, designed to exemplify Experience Design Leadership methods and in real life. These capstone experiences are customized to the needs of each person or group. They range from the adventurous (such as our Zero-G Executive Leadership Experience or Himalayan High program) to inner exploration (such as our Costa-Rican Yogic Science Experience), and more.
My methodology for designing transformative experiences and training others to do so is based on a system called ELVIS. ELVIS stands for “Experiential Learning Variables & Indicators System.” If you're going to have an acronym for leaders, I figured, why not aim high?
The ELVIS Framework is the underlying structure of the system and the starting place for Experience Design Leadership. There are three components to the ELVIS Framework:
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Discomfort Zone Experiences, which include experiences of many different kinds but invariably incorporate personally relevant learning about ourselves and the worlds we live in.
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Narrative Translation, which is the way we convert our experiences into personal understanding and make meaning from them.
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Identity Construction, our dynamic and constant process of becoming, which determines who we are psychologically, as well as what we do, what we think we can do (or even attempt), who we aspire to be, and how we transform.
Here is how it works... Transformative experiences fall into different discomfort zones according to their internal and external factors. Ultimately, we translate these experiences into narratives of different kinds, something that we are naturally quite good at and that our brains are hardwired to do. Our most powerful experiences are translated into our most important narratives. If these experience narratives are important enough, they become part of our identity narratives.
Identity narratives live in that very special and carefully guarded library of volumes within our heads that contain our most personal and valuable possession: our sense-of-self. These are the stories that inform who we are, how we experience life, what we can do (and what we cannot do), 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.
Using this framework, our programs deep-dive into the psychology of these three components as the foundation for Experience Design Leadership skill-building.
What Skills Does Experience Design Leadership Build?
Skilled Experience Design Leaders are able to shape and sequence the design elements of the ELVIS Framework into LIFE INVITATIONS for themselves and others. This is true whether in a work team or company, parenting, education, coaching, friendship, or even solitary experiences. The notion of crafting custom invitations is critical.
Experience Design Leadership is not something we do TO our experiencers; rather, it is something we do WITH them. For if transformation is to occur, it must ultimately come from inside experiencers themselves.
To engage in a transformative experience is to embark on an inward pilgrimage that can be defined as an encounter between life’s harsher horizons (invariably where discomfort, uncertainty, and vulnerability preside) and the center of your own being. The physical experience, whatever design or shape it may take, is a metaphor for this inward journey. Designers of transformative experiences must, therefore, guide experiencers through this kind of self-growth as we also help people live the outward metaphor of the journey. We do this through a series of life invitations that comprise the experience design.
Seven skill elements are important for designing transformative experiences. I refer to them as the ELVIS-7. Along with several specific design strategies, they enable Experience Design Leaders to develop, deliver, and sequence those life invitations.
ELVIS 7
Risk
What we perceive as risky for us defines our “discomfort zones.” The higher the perceived risk, the greater the challenge, the lower the sense of agency that we can succeed, and the deeper we go into our discomfort zones. This is where transformative experiences are born. And everyone is different. Experience Design Leaders become skilled at designing risk invitations that are customized for their people and their identity growth.
Control
In nearly all transformative experiences, control is shifted from external to internal sources of permission. What kinds of permission? Permission to act, to participate, to engage with others, and to “own” the experience. The task of Experience Design Leaders is to increasingly transfer command and control of the experience to the experiencers themselves throughout the design.
Immersion
The simultaneous activation of multiple brain centers is strongly linked to a heightened sense of awareness, motivation, powerful emotions, memory formation, and strong impacts on our sense-of-self. Our capacity to have transformative experiences is partially determined by our ability to engage on multiple immersive levels. In Experience Design Leadership we call this design skill, “Brain Layering,” and it involves both conscious and unconscious elements.
Social & Emotional Involvement
Highly effective experience designs include both opportunities for social group experiences as well as independent isolated experiences. This means incorporating group-based experiences of coming together, collaborating, building empathy, respect, belonging and team spirit. But research indicates it is also often critical to include solitary challenges that build personal identities and transfer control, permission and ownership to experiencers, tapping directly into those often-scary emotions of having to “go it alone.” Strong designs need both.
Intellectual Challenge
Problem solving – acquiring and applying new knowledge integrated with prior understanding to confront real-world, personally relevant problems -- have consistently emerged in research as critical components in transformative experiences. It includes elements that demand logic, cognitive flexibility, curiosity, wonder and skepticism. Experiences that lack this kind of intellectual engagement are often reported to be boring, not as relevant, or not as significant as other experiences.
Identity Integration
The challenge for Experience Design Leaders is to incorporate experience elements that are explicitly intended to expand the experiencer’s sense-of-self. This begins with understanding WHO experiencers are when going in, and then to present them with opportunities for expansion of who they can be or want to become through the experience. One-size-does-not-fit-all.
Meaning Making
This is the generation of personal narratives derived from our experiences. Recall that for experiences to be transformative, these experience narratives must in some way inform, influence, or modify our identity narratives. For Experience Design Leaders, this means incorporating multiple structured ways for people to purposively translate their experiences into self-stories, construct the meaning of those stories in relation to other aspects of their identities, and thereby become self-aware authors of their personal experiences.
One Final Note For This Introduction
Transformative experiences do not always have to be big brave adventures, although we often design unique and compelling experiences into our leader training programs because they are powerful and immediate examples of how the psychology of transformation operates. But transformation can also spring from the experiences you design every day.
Ask yourself, what life invitations am I making to myself today? To my team? To the people in my life? And how can I be more thoughtful, knowledgeable, and skillful in making invitations to growth and self-discovery? Finally ...What kind of leader am I becoming while I do it?
Aspire to Inspire Before You Expire!
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The Future of Leadership: DESIGNING TRANSFORMATION
Great Leaders Don't Just React to Change.
They Design It
Traditional leadership strategies focus on goals, productivity, and efficiency.
Visionary Leaders go further:
They design experiences that shape movements, shift mindsets, and change lives.
Dr. Brad McLain's research-backed method
equips executives with:
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Experience Design Leadership: The psychology of how profound experiences shape identity and performance.
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Breakthrough Engineering: Creating pivotal moments that inspire and elevate teams.
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Narrative Translation: Turning personal and organizational narratives into strategic assets to forge a deeper meaning for our work.
Zero-G Executive Leadership Experience
Our newest program! Experience weightlessness just like an astronuat while developing your expertise as an Experience Design Leader.
Book Brad
As a speaker, workshop facilitator, experience design consultant, or ideation collaborator.
Let's get creative together!
Himalayan High
Coming soon... stay tuned for a transformative experience with an Altitude! Mountains, yogic science and warm Nepalese culture.