The significance of Transformative Experiences in both personal and professional Contexts
Anyone who has had to deal with a process of organizational transformation — at any level — knows how complex it is to orchestrate it and how difficult it can be to change the culture of an organization, to transform the way people work, and how easy it is to fail on this path.
The same logic applies to any change that requires effort to accomplish and whose success is, as we know very well, inversely proportional to the time it takes to act on it.
How difficult is it to lose weight? To quit smoking? To change one’s worldview? Abandoning a habit acquired through years of repeated gestures over time?
However, there are rare and remarkable instances in which people experience transformative events that fundamentally shift their values and behaviors.
This intriguing concept was introduced to me by Andrea Gaggioli, a Psychology Professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, who elucidates it well in a recent paper.
According to Gaggioli, there are three defining features of these experiences:
- They entail a profound transformation in how we perceive ourselves and our inner world.
- They possess both an epistemic and personal dimension, meaning that they not only change what we know but also how we experience ourselves and the world.
- They arise from self-organizing dynamics as an emergent phenomenon.
In their book “The Experience Economy,” Pine and Gilmore emphasize how experiences have become the primary driver of our economy and lives.
Well before the two authors, in his 1970 publication, Alvin Toffler, a prominent futurologist, was the first to recognize and forecast this shift towards the experience economy. He asserted that emotionally stimulating experiences that produce a transformative impact on the user, rather than the experience itself, would hold the most value. This means that the value derived from such experiences lies in the changes they generate in the individual, rather than just the experience itself.
Today, more than ever, companies strive to create and provide these transformative experiences that can alter our perspectives on both personal and work-related matters.
The literature on this subject, spanning from Maslow to Miller, from James to C'De Baca, provides ample evidence of moments in a person's life that create the conditions for a psychological quantum leap.
These are "a-ha" moments that elicit distinct sensations and emotions, which enable the individual to realize that something significant has occurred and that a change has taken place.
These “a-ha” experiences are characterized by a new realization, a novel way of thinking or understanding. Transformative changes are often a result of personal growth and life experiences. On the other hand, mystical quantum changes, also known as epiphanies, are not linked to “ordinary” reality and are marked by a sense of being acted upon by an external force. Such experiences leave the individual with an immediate understanding that something significant has occurred, and that their life will never be the same again.
However, there is a catch: by their very nature, transformative experiences cannot be artificially constructed. They necessitate a set of conditions that deeply engage the individual. Nevertheless, it is possible to create conditions that may facilitate the occurrence of such experiences.
As George Bernard Shaw also said:
Men are not wise in proportion as much to their experience as to their capacity for experience.
This is an interesting lesson we should keep in mind.
Ok, but what do we do? The answer comes from Transformative Experience Design (TED): a framework that strives to bring about enduring changes in the self, both on psychological and existential levels, through the use of interactive technologies.
This framework is centered on creating transformative experiences and epistemic emotions, which are carefully designed moments that aim to facilitate cognitive and perceptual expansion by regulating sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes.
For genuine transformation to take place, individuals must actively engage in generating new meanings and perceive the experience as relevant to their lives. As with meaningful learning, a profound connection must be established between the new experience and the individual’s ingrained cognitive systems. Since personal transformation is inherently subjective, it is impossible to predict how an individual will perceive an experience before it happens.
The goal is not a complete rethinking of all our work and non-work activities, with experience at the center. Still, as Gaggioli also points out, transformative experience design should not be confused with engineered self-actualization, but rather as the ability to explore possible new technological means to support people’s natural tendency toward self-actualization and transcendence.
As Donald Norman argued in unremarkable times:
Technology confronts us with fundamental problems that cannot be overcome by relying on what we have done in the past. We need a quieter, more reliable, more human-scale approach.
