An Exploration of Wonder of Wisdom

on 2024/02/08 category

Health care leaders from across the country joined in The Experience Lab’s Wisdom Journey—a one-of-a-kind exploration of wonder and wisdom tuned to the unexpected brilliance of the people, places, and Experiences that surround us every day. 

The Wisdom Journey was created as a gift and an elixir of sorts—a simple way to soothe the intensity of all that’s happening in health care organizations and across the industry as a whole. It’s an invitation to return to the heart of health care and humanity on this continuing quest to create a more meaningful and memorable Experience for team members, providers, patients, and guests.

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted  by Suleika Jaouad is at the heart of our Wisdom Journey. Suleika’s written words, creativity, insights, and lived Experience–as a cancer journeyer–help us:

• Sharpen our focus on what matters,
• Identify what’s missing, and 
• Discover what  might be needed most.

Through three unique Wisdom Discussion Salons, we explored the book using different approaches, methods, and perspectives for making health care better:

The Wisdom of One. Starting up close––with a tight focus on Suleika and the power of one–the collective discussed how one person can be a guide for how we are leading, designing, and personalizing organizational culture and Experience in our organizations.

Connecting Concepts and Themes to the Health Care Experience. We took a much broader view –pulling the lens back to explore the big sweeping themes, patterns and threads woven throughout the book and how they can inform our designs and decisions.

Being ‘Between Two Kingdoms’. We delved into a more esoteric and provocative realm––investigating the idea of betweenness––being ‘Between Two Kingdoms’ and the feelings associated with being in the in-between or liminal space.

We then hosted a culminating Author Salon with Suleika Jaouad herself. It was a truly illuminating, energizing, and inspiring conversation–and the wisdom Suleika shared helped us further define the heart of health care and sparked a movement for new ideas and action!

Inspired by Suleika’s creative practice, the collective decided to embark on their own 100 Day Project—100 days of small, meaningful acts of intention, beauty, connection, or creativity to fuel their important work of creating a more human—and more humane—health care Experience for all. The projects include capturing the beauty of health care through one photo a day, journaling, story gathering and storytelling, painting, connecting more deeply with patients each day–the magic goes on and on.

Sonia Rhodes, CEO and Founder of The Experience Lab, is asking 100 people (one person a day) to consider their ideal health care Experience, and then share in one word how they want their health care Experience to feel. The growing chorus of feelings is a clarion call. And, in asking a question about how folks want their health care Experience to feel—they’ve also shared their current state—how the health care Experience feels to them right now. Here’s what she’s cataloged in the two weeks of her 100 Day Project practice…

Email check ins or virtual gatherings will be taking place every 25 days across the 100 Day Project to connect, encourage, share, and celebrate how this small action sparks and fuels personal and professional transformation.

Contact us to learn more about a custom Wisdom Journey for your executives, leaders, or organization. 

Wisdom and Wonders

on 2023/12/22 category

In The Experience Lab, we believe in the power of ceremony to mark milestones, honor transitions, and celebrate new beginnings. As we honor the wisdom that was gained across 2023 and tune to the wonder 2024 will bring, we invite you to take a few moments to create your own personal Wisdom and Wonder Ceremony – this is an opportunity to reflect on the new wisdom, insights, learnings, and discoveries you gained in 2023 and to set your sights on the wonder, curiosity, hopes, and dreams for the new year. Pause to appreciate and acknowledge all that you’ve Experienced this year while creating space for setting a new intention for what’s to come in 2024.

To the possibilities!

Insights and Outlooks – Your Personal Reflection Ceremony

on 2023/01/01 category

In The Experience Lab, we believe in the power of ceremony to mark milestones, honor transitions, and celebrate new beginnings. As the year turns from 2022 to 2023, we invite you to take a few moments to create your own personal Insights and Outlooks Ceremony – this is an opportunity to reflect on your new insights, learnings, and discoveries from 2022 and to ponder your outlooks, hopes, and dreams for the limitless possibilities the new year brings. Pause to appreciate and acknowledge all that you’ve Experienced this year while creating space for setting a new intention for what’s to come in 2023.

Curative for Healing Health Care

on 2022/11/08 category

Share Your Wisdom

Creating a new future for health care is possible and requires big thinking, bold action, and brave new connections.

We invite you to ponder the heart of health care today – the challenges and changes, the inspirations and innovations, and the options and opportunities.

Consider:

• The connections that need to be made or strengthened
• The people who may feel overlooked or unheard
• The big dreams or ideas that want to be realized
• The untapped possibilities
• The courage necessary to be the change
• The joy that comes from creating something new for the world

JOYFUL Salon: Designing for Joy with Ingrid Fetell Lee

on 2021/03/03 category

“Joy is not something that is extra or a distraction. Joy is a sign of thriving. It is a sign of well-being.” – Ingrid Fetell Lee

When it comes to creating and Experiencing more joy in life and work there is no better Exemplar than designer and author Ingrid Fetell Lee. This inspiring and uplifting Experience Salon explored the bridge between joy and well-being and the hidden influence of our surroundings on our emotions. At a time when so many across the industry are feeling depleted, Ingrid shares simple methods to spot and nurture joy–reminding us that the greatest source of joy is the world around us.

#JoyInHealth
We invite you to join The Experience Lab in spotting, scattering, and seeding more joy into the world by tagging your joyful images with #JoyInHealth. As Ingrid shares in the Salon, even in times of struggle, it is important to remember that we can still find little moments of joy. It is easy to overlook those moments but finding them can have a big impact.

ABOUT INGRID FETELL LEE
As a former design director at IDEO, author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, and the founder of the website The Aesthetics of Joy, Ingrid empowers people to find more joy in life in work through design. Her immensely popular TED Talk “Where Joy Hides and How to Find It” has been viewed more than 17 million times.

Ingrid holds a Master’s in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Princeton University. She loves pancakes, polka dots, and rainbow sprinkles, and has an extensive repertoire of happy dances for any occasion.

HOPEFUL Salon–Designing for Hope: Vaccination Experience Innovations

on 2021/02/08 category

Health care systems everywhere are rapidly designing a truly hopeful Vaccination Experience as they inoculate their teams and communities against COVID-19. The Experience Lab and our Lab Partner guest faculty from AdventHealth, Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, UC San Diego Health, and Vidant Health shared their unique and memorable Vaccination Experience design elements and helped participants imagine new possibilities for their own hopeful Vaccination Experience.

Using the Five Stages of Experience as a thoughtful tool we explored all aspects of the Vaccination Experience for both patients and volunteers/clinicians.

The inspiring conversation also covered

• Ideas for Ensuring Equitable Vaccination Access
• Community Engagement and Outreach
• Vaccination Experience Modalities
  • Drive-through
  • Walk-up
  • Pop-up
  • Mobile/Bus
  • In-home
  • In-clinic/In-hospital
• Signature Experience Elements and Memorabilia
• Volunteer Onboarding Possibilities
• And so much more…

Our HOPEFUL faculty graciously shared their personal insights and Experience ideas they’ve implemented:
Pam Guler, Chief Experience Officer, AdventHealth
Caroline Goldzweig, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Cedars-Sinai Medical Network
Lesley Wilson, Associate Chief Experience Officer, UC San Diego Health
Julie Oehlert, DNP, Chief Experience Officer, Vidant Health

*5E Model adapted from Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, The Experience Economy 

THE HEALTH CARE EXPERIENCE MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER

on 2020/11/12 category

Experience matters. Now more than ever. This global pandemic and time of great change vividly spotlights what matters most for health care team members, providers, patients, and their loved ones, and creates a rare—once-in-forever—opportunity for health care systems and leaders to change everything for the better.

A catalyst for transforming the future of health care.
Since March, every single health care worker has proven their grit, creativity, and inventiveness—rapidly melting silos, creating collaborative solutions, and using the lens of humanity as their guide in making the health care Experience the best it can be. These uncharted times have called on the entire health care industry to quickly evolve—paving the way for this time of great change to be the catalyst for wholly transforming the health care Experience from the inside out.

A Lab is where breakthroughs happen.
The Experience Lab creates a safe and brave space for visionary health care leaders and systems to explore, experiment, collaborate, and design anew—creating the kind of health care Experience their team members, providers, and patients most desire and deserve. From the first minute of the pandemic, our Experience Catalysts have had a unique vantage to all that is transpiring across the industry—guiding the rapid design of Experience innovations and transformations based on the real-time challenges health systems and medical groups faced every day, including:

• Healing Experiences and respite spaces supporting stretched team member and providers
• Orchestrating the in-person and virtual visit Experience
  • Virtual visit Experience and provider virtual visit action kits
  • In-person visit/stay and clinic/hospital action kits
  • Personalizing safe and touchless Experiences: arrivals, departures, curbside concierge, car-side check-in
• The guided Experience (virtual and in-person) for new patients
• Team member, patient, and guest health screening Experience
• Signature moments, ceremonies, and celebrations
• Personalizing the end-of-life Experience: Honoring. Remembering. Healing.
• Virtual new team member onboarding Experiences
• New building, hospital, and clinic Experience design
• Equipping leaders with Experience design methods and tools

Health Systems committed to a new kind of Experience are realizing the power of Experience experimentation—discovering new insights and activating meaningful breakthroughs.

The Experience Lab’s method includes four Experience Design theme—LEADING, LOOKING, LIVING and LOVING—and twelve actionable principles serve as the instrument of change. Born from big ideas or small insights, these health system visionaries are LEADING brave and bold transformations, LOOKING to see details that reveal new possibilities, LIVING into a more human Experience, and understanding wholeheartedly that LOVING is the greatest design tool of all.

To elevate your Experience, consider the ways you are LEADING, LOOKING, LIVING, AND LOVING your way to a new Experience:

Transforming Experience is the legacy work of leaders.
LEADING requires the courage to act—setting the path forward through thoughtful Intention—understanding that the hallmark of any Experience is the feeling imparted and the memory created.

Thinking about your team members, providers, patients, and guests:
How do you want their Experience to feel?

Learning to see what is rarely noticed.
LOOKING through the lens of possibility opens our eyes to what is and what could be, helping us empathize, personalize, and humanize the health care Experience.

What previously overlooked details—large or small—could reveal new
possibilities for your culture and Experience?

Be the change.
LIVING is where we bring big ideas to life and breathe new life into our health care Experience. As agents of vitality, we set the stage for transformation, and create the space for a new story to unfold. It’s about being and becoming the change—and Experience we hope for.

How might you breathe new life and energy into your Experience?

Work is love made visible.
LOVING is more than emotion–it is action. Choosing to bring our whole heart to the work— expanding our empathy and widening our circles of compassion— we create memorable moments that matter. It is not about chasing happiness. It is about designing for joy. Unleashing joy. And scattering joy all around us.

What moment in your Experience could be transformed through love?

About The Experience Lab
The Experience Lab is dedicated to transforming every aspect of the health care Experience from the Inside Out. Conceived as a place of true experimentation, The Lab serves as an incubator of ideas and an accelerator for action—bringing a curious collective of visionary health care systems together with Experience experts and exemplars from all over the world—to imagine, design, and bring to life a more meaningful and memorable health care Experience for all.

A Virtual Salon with Yoko Sen & Northwell Health — Sounds of Caring: New York

on 2020/10/16 category

Pioneering sound alchemist and Experience Lab guest faculty Yoko Sen has been generously and deeply listening to the powerful and courageous voices of health care heroes at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this moving work of art, Yoko reveals with unparalleled intimacy, clarity, and authenticity what it feels like to be a caregiver in such intense and uncharted territory.  

We were honored to host the health care premiere of Sounds of Caring: New York. This extraordinary collaboration between Sen Sound and Northwell Health, a New York-based health system that has cared for the most COVID-19 patients in the country, features the voices and stories of caregivers leading the way through this crisis. In this Salon conversation with Yoko and Northwell Health Experience leaders Sven Gierlinger and Aggie Barden, we explore the importance of listening generously to the voices and wisdom of our heroic health care workers.

Yoko, Sven, and Aggie first met in the inaugural 2017 class of Inside Out—our National Collaborative for Experience Transformation—and this year they’ve had the opportunity to combine their talents and passions for transforming the health care Experience to bring voice to the feelings and emotions of the extraordinary team members and caregivers leading the way through the pandemic.

Yoko is an ambient electronic musician and the founder of Sen Sound, a social enterprise with a vision to transform the sound environment in hospitals as well as the beeps from alerts and alarms. She is guest faculty in The Experience Lab, a fellow at the Halcyon Incubator, and a Citizen Artist Fellow at Kennedy Center. Her sound is described as soothing — like listening to a dream — and it is this unique sound that has taken her work to many interesting places such as IDEO and TEDx. Sounds of Caring: New York has been selected as a Venice Film Awards Finalist (September 2020), received the Independent Short Awards Bronze Award (September 2020), and received Official Selection for the IndieX Film Fest (October 2020).

It was Yoko’s own personal health care Experience five years ago that sparked her passion for reimagining hospital soundscapes. While spending many hours in the hospital, she was terrified by what she heard — a cacophony of alarms, beeps, patients in pain, doors being slammed. It is said that hearing is the last sense to go at the end of life—as Yoko laid in her hospital room, she wondered what the last sound she would get to hear at the end of her own life. As she got better, she decided to explore ways to help humanize the hospital Experience by transforming the sound environment—for it to be safer, more soothing, and beautiful.

A Virtual Experience Salon — Designing for End of Life

on 2020/08/04 category

Watch this timely and moving Virtual Experience Salon – Designing for End of Life – with the incredible Michael Hebb, founder of Death Over Dinner and the recently launched End of Life Collective, and renowned movement artist, Jon Boogz.

Amid the pandemic, we have Experienced – individually and collectively – so many losses. From the depth of deaths that could not be prevented or mourned, to the loss of jobs, routines, sleep, and control. This time of “great pause” is shining a bright light on the opportunity in front of us to more holistically imagine and design for loss and End of Life across the full spectrum of our caring Experience.

Michael Hebb is the founder of EOL – The End of Life Collective, Death Over Dinner, and creative agency Convivum, and is a partner at Roundglass, a global wellbeing organization. For the past 20 years Michael has been working to understand the secrets of human connection. His projects have turned into international movements and impacted millions. His latest work, The End of Life Collective, is designed as a free community resource with a dream for caregivers to share EOL with families and patients.

Jon Boogz is a movement artist, choreographer, and director whose edgy contemporary work seeks to push the evolution of what dance can be. Sharing with audiences of all backgrounds an appreciation of the melding of movement genres while inspiring and bringing awareness to social issues. He’s worked, choreographed and directed with artists and brands such as Pharrell, Naomi Campbell, Banana Republic, Apple, Hulu, and Netflix.

Honoring Health Care Heroes for Hospital Week – Learn the Good Vibes Dance

on 2020/05/12 category

Health care leaders from across the US called on The Experience Lab to create new ways for sharing gratitude, inspiration, and moments of positive energy for team members amid the pandemic. We are honored to create and host weekly Joy Bursts as a way to bring the industry together for these moments of goodness.

To celebrate our health care heroes for National Hospital Week, and every week, we recently welcomed world-renown hip-hop dancers Keone and Mari Madrid for a Joy Burst. The duo, along with their 9-month-old daughter, recently recovered from COVID-19 and created this hand dance as a way for people to release stress and amplify joy.