Designing Transformative Experiences

So how will manufacturing leaders get people-ready for our AI/robotic driven operations?

Designing Transformative Experiences:  A Toolkit For Leaders, Trainers, Teachers, And Other Experience Designers, by Brad McLain, PhD, Berrett-Koehler,2023

When can we really make positive, memorable changes in organizations like heavy, economy-bound businesses?  And when does leadership mean something different from what we have come to believe it is?  Well, social scientist and author Brad McLain offers us a new framework for looking at work and life experiences .  The starting point is understanding what makes up a transformative experience, one that creates awe (like the work of Dacher Keltner in the book Awe), and affects the way our brain sees and reacts to these big events.  

Although we may at first find it difficult to call up a transformative experience, McLain shares his work with memorable change leaders, like Jane Goodall, NASA and STEM education as examples.  What he shows us is how our neurobiology is wired to see and translate experiences into new stories and inspiring images.  Further, he illuminates the connections between how our brain reacts to powerful visuals and strong human connections, what we remember, and how we react going forward to these strong perceptions.  A leader who understands these awe-filled experiences and their reactions and staying power has a better shot at remaining in and improving the human system.

To make this new learning experience easier McLain offers us his Toolkit to understand and create powerful experiences that can change our work lives.  The Toolkit is designed to take leadership beyond our traditional key performance indicators.  Seven Toolkit elements are used to generate change:

    *  Risk

    *  Control

    *  Immersion

    *  Social and emotional involvement

    *  Intellectual challenge

    *  Identity matters

    *  Meaning making'

Big experiences - good and bad - have great power over us and our futures, and McLain's book is a welcome assist into a future that calls upon human leaders to co-exist with AI and robots because - although we recognize that in manufacturing our future leaders will be tasked less with running the robotic production operations, but more with valuing and working with fewer, higher level workers -  we are not yet clear on how to do it.  McLain's book offers us a starting point, one that we can think on, test out and use to carefully move forward.    

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com