This paper is designed to give you a quick glimpse into the world of experiential learning. After reading it, you will be able to make a competent decision on whether experiential training is right for you and your organization and the steps you must take to get you started. First, things first, though.

The answer to this question will depend on the person you pose it to, but in a nutshell, experiential learning is training that involves the student in the activity. By taking your group through an experiential exercise, you allow them the opportunity to learn from themselves, not the trainer.

Typically, experiential training exercises are categorized into two types – the

High Elements and the Low Elements.

High Elements are outdoor initiatives that are generally referred to as ROPES or Challenge Courses. Outward Bound made this type of training popular years ago. Low Elements are ones that do not require "rigging" or big equipment set-ups. In fact, low elements can be done indoors which is what 85% of you will be doing. So, the first lesson is

You don’t have to go outdoors or to a special course to do experiential training!

Whether you are looking to do High Elements or Low Elements, the rules of experiential training are the same. All true experiential exercises have the same basic goal, precept and methodology. Experiential training has its foundation on the following tenets:

1. Experiential learning is concerned with the "experience" of the student, not their activity. This is not about getting them out of their chairs – games do that just fine.
2. The student is an active rather than a passive participant in the learning process.
3. Power (control) is shifted away from the trainer in the direction of the student. The role of the trainer is to set up the exercise and then monitor it from an outside perspective. This part of experiential is very difficult for many trainers because they tend to want to control the classroom. The more control the trainer has, the less "experiential" the exercise is.
4. The student becomes responsible for his or her own learning. We all know that you cannot motivate someone to learn. You can; however, provide an atmosphere that stimulates the students to learn. Nothing will do this more effectively than experiential training exercises.
5. In experiential learning, making mistakes is okay. In many training technologies, if the group does not follow a precise path, they will not "get" the learning transfer. A big part of experiential training is the experience of what did not work and why as much as it is what did work.

The simple definition –

Learning by Doing!

Traditional training methodology seeks to get the information from the trainer’s notes to the student’s notes. We "measure" (We are using this term lightly) this effectiveness through "scan-tron!"

Experiential Training has the same goal of getting the information from the trainer’s notes to the student’s notes, but it seeks to touch the hearts and heads of the student on the way there! Think back to your school days for a moment. Which of your teachers left the most indelible impression on you? (No, besides the one with the 6" wide ties and an unusual love of the Pythagorean theory.) The teacher who left the greatest impression on your life is the own who spent more time trying to touch your heart and head than passing out No. 2 pencils for tests all day and having you read quietly at your desk.

Through the power of experiential training, you can have the same impact on your organization. There are two very strong reasons for this.

1. Experiential is about "feeling" the learning, not just seeing it or hearing (lecture) about it. We all know how hard it is to empathize with someone when we really don’t know how he or she feels. We have a good idea, but good ideas don’t transfer into bottom-line profits!
2. The student is in charge of the process. If the student feels like they are in charge, they will pay closer attention to the process. No one can get to the heart or head of another like the individual themselves!

Remember this quote from John Parker Stewart in Team of Champions, "With a paycheck you earn the hands and feet of an individual, but you must earn their hearts and heads if you want to succeed." Experiential training is the catalyst to the heart and heads. How you ask? Very nice question!

The power in experiential training lies in its ability to link back to the work place. At school, when the kids went out for recess, there was no purpose except to go outside and play. The same will be true with your experiential if it is not metaphorically based.

The beauty of experiential training is that one experiential exercise can have several metaphors. This is not to say that you should have several all at once! Always deal with just one metaphor at a time. But the same experiential can have different meaning and impact with different groups. It is all in the way you set it up.

The key to a good metaphor is that it is not realized or revealed until the debrief. In essence, you never start the exercise off by saying, "Now we are going to do an activity that simulates your lives in customer service." It is perfectly okay, in fact helpful, to loosely establish the metaphor sometimes. For example in Mission Possible, the object the group is trying to retrieve from the middle of the acid spill can be a tray of food for room service, a stuffed animal representing customer or guest care, or the latest product your company is trying to get to market.

In any case, the true meaning of the metaphor does not become apparent until the debrief allowing the student to focus on the exercise and get fully immersed into it without worrying about a secondary agenda. You select the experiential exercise you want to use based on the metaphor you need to convey. The metaphor is the bridge back to the work place and it is your responsibility as the trainer to build that bridge. Once you have selected the metaphor, you are ready to work.

There is one very important point to consider when selecting an experiential initiative – who are you getting your information (discovery) from? Too many times, management will tell you what the needs of the employees are. Using this data, you plan an experiential initiative that will cut right to the heart of the matter with a powerful metaphor. Only, half way through the initiative, you discover that what management thought was the need was not the case at all. In many forms of training, you can recover from this position nicely - not the case in experiential training! Be careful to do a FULL discovery (needs analysis for those joining us from the ASTD ranks,) that includes the people for whom the experiential training is designed. This is a very important lesson - one that you would rather not learn the hard way!

In experiential training, the students complete an exercise that on the outside looks more like a game than anything else. They approach it with less resistance and their walls are down. After all, it looks like fun! It is not until the debrief, that they realize, "Hey, this is training!"

As stated above, all experiential training exercises are metaphorically based which is paramount to their success. By having the students complete the exercise, they can "feel" the emotions at work in themselves during the initiative. Later, in the debrief, they connect those feelings and emotions elicited by the exercise to life at work. Zap! Straight to the hearts and heads!

For example, in the sample experiential exercise in this packet, Land Mines, half of the students are blindfolded and guided through a "minefield" by their partner who must stay outside of the minefield. In fact, the guides cannot move from the starting point, which makes it even harder. In the debrief, we will discuss what it felt like, what their struggles were (and why) in completing the exercise. Then we will build a bridge back to their work lives and - Pow! They make the empathetic connection to the work scenario that they would never have experienced or understood if we had shown them a video or an endless array of overheads on "How to Work as a Team."

It’s this simple. If you were to ask everyone in your department the following two questions, what do you think their responses would be?

	"Do you think people work better when they operate like a team?"
	"Do you want to work as a team?"

The American Journal of Training and Development asked these two questions in a recent article titled "Duh!" (We are kidding on that one, so don’t go running to the library looking for this new reference!) Seriously, we all know that the answer to both of these questions will always be "Yes." So, why don’t they work as a team? There must be some barriers keeping this from happening, right?

If you were to sit this group down in a traditional classroom using traditional didactic training techniques, you would get a flipchart full of predictable, non-specific responses that gain you and your group nothing. If, on the other hand, you get the group together and complete an experiential exercise, the results will be dramatically different. For example, back to Land Mines. Recently, we did this WooHoocise with a large telecommunications company whose objective was "teambuilding." (Don’t you wish you hard a quarter every time someone asked you to do teambuilding?) Through completing the exercise, the corporate group was able to feel what it must be like to be "in the field" of mines" where their salespeople tread everyday.

During the debrief, the metaphor of "the further from corporate a person gets, the harder it is to communicate and support them" was built. From this, it was uncovered that ever since this group had activated the email system, people stopped talking to each other. They would email each other to death, but never talk on the phone anymore. If a rep called corporate and left a voice mail for someone, that person would write an email back in response. Many times the email responses were way off from the original question. And sometimes, the emails were in all capitals…and we all know what that means!

(By the way, did you catch the irony that the problem in this telecommunications company was that they were having trouble communicating?!)

The point is that we would have never reached this discovery with traditional methodology, which is why experiential training is such a powerful tool for your organization. But its power is lost without a skilled trainer who knows how to debrief. (Nice segue)

Do you know what the difference between an experiential training exercise and a game is? A powerful and meaningful debrief! The students have just completed a unique exercise that will be remembered as a game (recess) if no one takes the time to debrief the exercise and build the bridge back to real life.

We cannot focus enough attention on this part. Many trainers who jump into the experiential ring focus all of their time and energy learning how to setup and conduct the experiential. This is important. However, the amount of time they spend preparing and practicing the debrief is often times none and less than that.

Experiential training exercises without a debrief are about as useful as a parachute on the first bounce!

So, here are

The Top 10 Principles of an Effective Debrief

10. Everyone Speaks! Just like the experiential exercise itself, you want the debrief to be a sort of initiative that involves the WHOLE group. Provide for ways to hear from everyone.

9. The Borg Principle. Prepare for resistance. During the exercise, the large percentage will give you no grief, but when it comes to the debriefing, they may start to resist. Make notes of individual observations you had during the exercise and pose questions to those people to open them up. Remember, if you ask opinion questions, there is no right or wrong answer. Monitor and watch for specific body language during the exercise and ask that person what was going on when you get to the debrief.

8. "Whatdyathink" Principle. Never start the debrief with questions like "Well, what did you think? Or "Well, how did it feel?" Again, you know what the answers will be – closed-ended "okay" responses. Ask open-ended questions that allow the group to relate their feelings.

 7.The Psychologist Principle. "How did that make you feel?" First, let us say that you are not to become pop psychologists nor is bringing a couch into the training exercise considered experiential! What we are saying is to make sure that you are dealing with emotions and behaviors. Focus on emotions. You are striving for a change in behavior and this can only happen if we keep the discussion in this direction.

6.The Turbo-charged Tortoise. Pace yourself and the group. Never jump right into the metaphor before exploring the emotions of the exercise first. Sometimes, for sake of time, we try to "cut to the chase." The problem is that the group is not as willing to dive into the deep end as their trainer is. Patience.

5. "The Guy" Principle. Be careful not to let the debrief (or the exercise for that matter) go into areas that the group has no control over. We all know that when the group starts to point fingers, we have lost all effectiveness. You know who "The Guy" is right? He is CEO and president of "Them."

4.The Principle of Effect. Remember this from your principles of learning days at school? There are two parts to this. First, let the group do the talking. One of the key benchmarks to experiential is that the student is in control. If the trainer is doing all of the talking, then you might as well have stayed in the classroom with the overheads. And second, always use the student’s names and tie thoughts from one student to another. Refer back to the answers given by students often – using their names. This keeps the focus on the group and they see that the discovery is theirs, not yours.

3. Never Sacrifice Safety for Fun. Keep the same rules of acceptance and care for the individual in place that you had during the exercise. The more charged a group gets, the more open they can get. Be careful not to let them step on anyone in the group. Foster an atmosphere of trust at all times. Otherwise, you will never get honest responses in the debrief.

2. Build Bridges. It is the role of the trainer to skillfully take the experience of the exercise and link them back to the work place environment. We use the word skillfully because when the debrief of an experiential is working right, the group will make the link back. Lead them in that direction; never pull them there.

1."I Need Closure" Principle. Never let the experiential end with unresolved issues. If necessary, dump one of your other experiential exercises in your sequence in order to make time for the group to resolve its issues. Notice we said for the GROUP to resolve not the trainer. It is not the trainer who needs closure, it is the group.

Now you are ready, right? Almost. (Say this next header with your best reverberating "Monster Truck" or Charlton Heston voice!)

There are two parts to preparing the experiential exercise.

In this step, it is vital that you have everything set well in advance. If the experiential exercise is not properly staged, it will not work and nothing is worse than an experiential that blows up. (Many exercises metaphorically talk figuratively about blowing up, but we are serious!)

Before you attempt any experiential exercise, you better have been through it yourself first!

Safety is always a major concern when dealing with experientials.

	Test all of your equipment ahead.
	Practice the exercise a couple of times before actually conducting it.
	Prepare some appropriate debriefing questions. Never try to "shoot from the hip" with the debrief. It’s not fair to the group.
	Provide for safety concerns such as smooth, level surfaces, ropes that are secure, etc.

 Preparing the Learner

This is very important safety-wise as well. Make sure that you cover the "safe environment" policies before you discuss the exercise with the group. Safe environments include:

	No Zingers. Never let anyone in the group put anyone else down.
	Blindfold Man’s Bluff. Many times, you will have someone who is uncomfortable blindfolded or incapacitated in any way. Make sure that they are being honest with you. If someone is unwilling to be blindfolded, have them serve as an observer and take notes for you to be shared by them during the debrief. Everyone must always be involved!
	Give them clear, precise directions and parameters before they start. Nothing will kill the effectiveness of your experiential more than having to stop it mid-way through and regroup. This takes the learner out of "character" long enough for them to loose the emotional connection to the exercise.

The best and most effective way to conduct an experiential is with a little acting flare. Take on the role of a character. Dress and act the part. Remember that the exercise does not have to make sense to their work – only the metaphor does. Your group will enjoy it much more if you add a dramatic flare to your training. Many of the resources we have quoted here use fantasy roles such as aliens, nuclear waste spills, etc as their exercise setup.

So, now you are ready to start experimenting with experiential training. We leave you with these closing thoughts. This is an overview, not an instruction guide. The intent of this writing was not to certify you as a top-notch experiential trainer. It is to give you a trainer's view of experiential and its power. You have been hearing the term thrown around the industry for quite some time now - mostly associated with ROPES course. Now, you know that the power of experiential training can be used by your organization indoors with some practice.