Magali Robathan of Attractions Management magazine invited me to write a short (600-word) opinion piece on peak experiences. I responded yes, but only if I could segue from Abraham Maslow’s concept of peak experiences to transformative experiences.
When she said yes (thank you, Magali!), I then contacted an IP lawyer friend of mine, Wendy Heimann-Nunes, who does great work with LBEs (location-based entertainment) venues and other attractions, to cowrite it with me. We met last year at the World Experience Summit in London (you’ll have to ask her the story of that meeting. . . .), and she knows everyone in the attractions business.
Wendy worked to set up a number of interviews with executives in the industry, but after just two – with Scott Trowbridge, senior creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, and Phil Hettema, founder and CEO of THG Creative – we had more than enough background and examples for the piece. (Thank you both!)
And here is the resulting article (along with several other invited pieces):
https://www.attractionsmanagement.com/index.cfm?pagetype=features&codeID=37103
I want to point out the key line in the piece, which Attractions Management chose as the callout:
People are seeking experiences that don’t just transport them for a moment, but also transform them for a lifetime
It was this thought that enabled me to recognize part of the solution to the problem I had recognized with some experiences that people said were transformative, but that did not in fact leave a permanent mark on them. In my post Types of Transformative Experiences I labeled these provisional transformations, recognizing that they were temporary and transient. But they were not true transformations.
It was Wendy who gave me the right term: transporting experiences. In the conversation with Phil, she talked about a recent experience she had at one of her clients, a theme park in Brazil. She described an experience that was so engaged, so in flow, so captivating, that she said she was “transported”. I immediately recognized that as what people were talking about when they said they had temporary transformations; they, too, were transported. (Thank you Wendy!)
And as you may have read (or saw) in my post on the Delta Model, transporting experiences are a key element of this new framework that replaced the two Types of Transformative Experiences I had written about in the post above (and received insightful feedback on – thank you subscribers!).
transporting experiences are a key element of the new Delta Model framework
I have continued to think about the Delta Model – I’ve already made two intertwining changes to it – and will write it up and post it over the next month or so. When I do, you will find a lot of commonalities between the article on peak experiences here and the section on transporting experiences there.
Joe Pine
© 2024 B. Joseph Pine II