Developmental Experience Design

The quality of the experiences we share defines our ability to connect, grow and change. Developmental Experience Design equips leaders, facilitators and learning professionals with a modern, actionable method for designing experiences that help people grow – in what they can do, and in how they see themselves, each other and the world. Whether you design workshops, leadership journeys, gatherings or organisational change, you leave able to design for people's development, not only for delivery.

It is a collaboration between Kaospilot and Emerge Institute, built on the Kaospilot Experience Design method and drawing on the open-source Inner Development Goals framework. Two days on Ekskäret sit inside an eight-week journey, with online sessions before and after, so the spark from the island is sustained into your real practice.

Most training adds to what people know. Developmental experiences change how they know. Research on adult development – from Robert Kegan's work on meaning-making to Jack Mezirow's on transformative learning – shows that adults keep growing in the complexity with which they make sense of their work, their relationships and themselves.

That growth does not happen by chance. It happens when people meet a real challenge, with real support, and have time to integrate what shifted. Those conditions can be designed. This programme shows you how, and is built the same way – spread over eight weeks, so the spark from the island carries into your practice.

L&D professionals, facilitators, change-makers and leaders working in leadership and inner development, culture and behavioural change, learning and organisational development, and employee experience. Trainers and coaches, HR and culture leaders, consultants and facilitators, and IDG hub organisers all find a home here. No single background is assumed – only a real challenge you want to design for.

Kaospilot combines more than thirty years of experience with theory, creativity and practice; Developmental Experience Design adds the science of adult development and the inner-development work of the IDG community. The method works with the 5E model and the SHIFT process, with challenge and support in holding environments where people can safely outgrow old ways of seeing, and with learning designed across time – before, during and after – for transfer.

It is grounded in constructive-developmental theory (Kegan), transformative learning (Mezirow), the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky) and experiential learning (Dewey), and connected to the IDG's five dimensions: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting.

Ekskäret is a small island in the Äpplarö nature reserve, about two hours from central Stockholm. Tomas Björkman founded it in 2008 as a gathering place for people, conversations and initiatives in close relationship with nature; the Ekskäret Foundation is one of the founding organisations behind the Inner Development Goals.

The island calls itself a living learning lab – the outer landscape woven together with the inner work. Its buildings were nominated for Building of the Year by the Swedish Association of Architects. Between sessions there is a shoreline to walk, a lookout tower and a sauna.