Brad McLain is a social scientist interested in the nature and psychology of identity development, learning, and leadership. He is the Director of the Center for STEM Learning at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Director of Corporate Research at the National Center for Women in Information Technology. He routinely works closely with Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, and everything in between on the subjects of identity, inclusive culture construction, and change leadership.

Previously, he served two terms on the Board of Directors for the Jane Goodall Institute and was the United States Chair of Goodall’s Roots and Shoots Leadership Committee. He has served as principal investigator and researcher on numerous federal, foundation, and privately funded programs, resulting in frequent collaborations with state and federal government agencies, corporations, non-profits, and private organizations.

Before that, McLain was an educational researcher at the Space Science Institute, a NASA educational lead for the Space Shuttle Program as well as NASA’s Office of Biological and Physical Research, and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and was a social science researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He is also an accomplished filmmaker, having produced and directed three documentary features and dozens of short films.

His new book is Designing Transformative Experiences: A Toolkit for Leaders, Trainers, Teachers, and Other Experience Designers (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, May 2023). His TEDx talks, podcasts, and other work can be found online. McLain lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his two children.

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For those who have not as yet read Designing Transformative Experiences, hopefully your responses to these questions will stimulate their interest and, better yet, encourage them to purchase a copy and read the book ASAP. First, when and why did you decide to write it?

This book is twenty years in the making. It shocks even me to say that! But it really is the culmination of my life’s work up to this point. The subject of this book has been threaded through every experience and every job I’ve had since 2003. Anyone
out there who’s ever worked side-gigs that nourish their “passion work” will know what I’m talking about. Somehow the work calls to you, blooms in you like a seed come to harvest.

For me, that seed was the space shuttle Columbia Tragedy. As I tell the story in the book, when I first worked at NASA it was on the space shuttle program and STS-107 (Columbia’s final flight) was my mission. When the re-entry accident occurred in
February of 2003, killing all seven of the crew and ushering in the end of the space shuttle era, it shook me to the core. I began to change profoundly and at the same time became curious to the point of obsession with understanding how I was changing. By that, I mean the vey process of transformation I was experiencing – so powerful was it.

In a very real sense, my quest to understand how transformative experiences operate in our lives was born of tragedy – which is not an uncommon emissary of change in our sense-of-self.

I embarked on becoming a social scientist in order to understand this. Eventually, as my research matured, after numerous projects and experiences training leaders and leading projects and companies myself, various publications and key appearances in my career, I finally started to write this book. And that took several years to accomplish in itself! Ironically, it finally came together at the very same time as I was recovering from cancer, going through a divorce, and then COVID hit. As I say in the book, sometimes transformative experiences come in bundles. I suppose it is a fitting birth for this book in particular.

Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.

Oh my yes! The biggest was the application of the psychology of transformation to leadership. “Experience Design Leadership,” as I present it in the book, asks leaders to re-cast themselves as experience designers for those they lead. When they do this, an entirely new paradigm of who is a leader is and what a leader can do opens up, complete with a new toolbox of social science that is a departure from all other leadership training out there. And it applies to corporate leaders, educators, coaches, parents – wherever mentor-protégé relationships exist — or even simply leading our own lives. The holy grail of becoming an Experience Design Leader is the ability to generate transformative experiences for those in our spheres. The ubiquity of this transformative psychology and its power as a new lens on leadership was pretty head-snapping to me when it became clear.

To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ significantly from what you originally envisioned?

Well, when my editor told me I had to cut 80,000 words from the manuscript, my response was that you might as well cut off my left arm — and I am left-handed! I knew then that my book would have to change from the original vision. Happily, I was able to place much of the amputated material on the companion website. But it turned out great because I’m finding that after people read the book, which is now a quicker read, they then go back into it at different points as a reference, a guide, an actual toolkit… just as intended.

And then that’s when they find that they have some questions or want to go more deeply into a topic I briefly introduce in the book. That’s when the companion content on the website kicks in.

What are the core principles of the Experiential Learning Variables Indicators System (ELVIS) strategy?

First off, I hate acronyms. I was drowning in them when I worked at NASA, and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and even now within the academy and to some extent in my work with the Jane Goodall Institute and the National Center for Women & IT. So when I was forced to use an one to represent my life’s work, I decided to at least make it memorable – and ELVIS was born. And I do love this acronym. ELVIS is the basis of Experience Design Leadership and how we can learn to design transformative experiences. Since all transformative experiences are fundamentally learning experiences, ELVIS stands for the “Experiential Learning Variables & Indicators System,” as you said. It actually has two parts: The ELVIS Framework, which empowers leaders with an understanding of how transformative experiences work psychologically; and then the ELVIS Toolkit, which contains seven practical design elements for making that magic happen.

What differentiates this strategy from all others that also focus on organizational transformation?

One of the biggest differentiators is identity. In fact that is how I define a transformative experience – a learning experience that has an identity impact. That is, an experience that changes one’s sense of self in some important way… who you think you are or who you want to become. I do a lot of work with companies and leaders to help them move beyond managing change to actually learn to lead change, to make their cultures more innovative, more inclusive, more attractive to talent, and to do things that have never been done before. As Tim Cook at Apple has famously said (paraphrasing) – let’s create a place where people can do their life’s work. At the heart of this notion, I believe, is identity.

I begin my workshops with three key questions:

1. What are we doing?
2. Why and how are we doing it?
3. And, who are we becoming while we do it?

This last one paves the way into ELVIS – the idea that our experiences and what we learn from them influences our sense-of-self.

We can choose who we want to become, we can intentionally shape our work and our lives to realize our best possible selves, and we can use the psychology of identity to skillfully design experiences that change our sense-of-self and empowers others to do the same. It’s a very personal level of transformation that can lead to organizational change. And that is why when I work with companies, even large ones, I don’t typically work at the organizational level, but rather at the team level – where those personal experiences take place every day. This level of change can lead to organizational change when effectively designed.

What are the unique challenges that the ELVIS methodology poses during the planning and implementation phases?

Transformative experiences always come from within, whether we realize it or not. I go into this seeming paradox quite deeply in the book. But as a result of this fundamental precept, in almost all transformative experiences, there is a transfer of control from the experience designer (the leader) to the experiencer. Often, this presents a challenge to leaders who’ve been operating under a “command and control” style. It represents a threat to that kind of leadership.

There is an art to knowing how and when to transfer control to those we lead. And then there is the question of what it means to be a leader after that control has been transferred. If the only tools in your toolbox are command and control, many leaders feel lost when they are no longer at the center. But this is just when ELVIS gets going and where transformative experiences become possible.

The new leadership skills within ELVIS include design thinking, learning about the psychology of risk and failure, becoming skilled at the narration and meaning-making of lived experience, and learning to recognize and effectively respond to the many
identities that our teams present in order to provoke identity growth. In the book, I present these as invitations that this new view of leadership makes to us. They are available to us through the ELVIS methodology. The question for us as leaders is, are
we available to become skilled at transformative experience design?

Which of the tools in the ELVIS toolkit seems to have the greatest impact on the success of that process? Please explain.

There are seven design elements in the ELVIS toolkit. I call them the “ELVIS 7.” They are: Risk, Control, Immersion, Social & Emotional Engagement, Intellectual Challenge, Meaning-making, and Identity Matters. Their greatest impact occurs when leaders use them in concert, holistically. Individually, however, risk is the biggie. Learning how to “do risk” well is one of the most powerful tools in the ELVIS design toolkit.

In the book, I discuss four kinds of risk: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Social. In transformative experience design, they are all mashed together in various ways, but in all cases they invite us into our discomfort zones. Experience design leaders must
design and make risk invitations, which require risk decisions, and result in risk outcomes. Discomfort zone experiences are where all this happens; where we deal with risk, uncertainly, vulnerability, and of course… growth. They are where we are invited to put our identities at risk. Experience designers need to become skilled in the creation of discomfort zones that include specific elements tailored to the identities of those they lead – areas where they have a low sense of agency. These may take the form of stretch assignments or promotions or especially challenging tasks where failure is a real possibility. In fact, experience design leaders need to be ready for possible failure outcomes and use them as part of pro-growth experience designs.

In Change Leadership, James O’Toole suggests that the greatest resistance to change initiatives tends to be cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." What are your own thoughts about that?

Yes and… discomfort zone experiences are required precisely to bump us out of that cultural trance – replacing it with a culture of curiosity, growth, and putting our existing identities on the edge of discovery. This is the only place where transformations can occur. And as I explore in the book, ELVIS focuses on individual change but collectively leads to cultural change at the team and then organizational level. I view culture as another word for collective identity. In my work at the National Center for Women & IT (NCWIT), we define culture as: A defining set of shared norms and values that influence policies, practices procedures, and social dynamics. When an Experience Design Leader applies the tools of ELVIS to create transformations, the tipping points of cultural change become accessible through individual identity growth.