Experience Design Camp
Year
2018
Organization
Stone Soup
Team
4 Co-Founders
100+ Organizers / Participants
My Role
Primary Founder
Founded an experience design camp, empowering professionals worldwide
In 2017, I had the transformative experience of being a professor at The College of Extraordinary Experiences. Soon after I founded Stone Soup, an experience design camp that empowers anyone to co-create nourishing experiences.
Experimenting with a scalable culture of decentralized ownership I was able to organize two 35-person 4-day camps in California and Poland. I then created recipes to equip anyone to create a Stone Soup wherever they wanted. Since the first two that I organized, 9 other Stone Soup camps have been organized across the US, Europe and Australia without any involvement of me.
We’ve established a decentralized, growing, diverse and collaborative community of professionals creating extraordinary experiences across the world.
Created a culture of decentralized ownership amongst organizers
The core group of co-organizers created guiding principles for Stone Soup, one of them being decentralized ownership. However, we gave ourselves 10 weeks to organize first Stone Soup and caught myself doing most of the work to line up the venue, create the website, and make the vision come to life.
I took a step back and had one-on-one conversations with each co-organizer to understand their goals, needs, and capabilities in organizing the event. From there I was able to co-create roles and tasks with and for the co-organizers.
The co-organizers felt inspired and empowered to take ownership make the vision come to life with me. We went from 12 participants to sold out in two weeks.
Empowered novices to become experience designers
Our intention was to give each participant a opportunity to facilitate a workshop, experience, or activity. Some participants were extroverted and ran workshops for a living. Some participants were shy and had never done this before.
At the beginning of the event participants co-created a set of agreements to support the intention. We then ran workshops where participants practiced creating and facilitating experiences. This was followed by open freeform collaboration.
An environment that encouraged collaboration, experimentation, and learning was formed. Experts gave novices guidance and empowerment. Stone Soup has become a camp where anyone can experiment with experience design.
Enabled anyone to create a Stone Soup camp
After creating a couple sucessful camps, I focused on empowering anyone that was interested in creating a Stone Soup camp.
An editable journey map that organizers used for high-level planning and roles and responsibility distribution.
Standard principles that could be used as is, or edited for an individual camp to help protect and evolve the culture.
A website that organizers could use to advertise and gain applicants to new camps.
A Cookbook, where organizers could leverage documentation and spreadsheets from previous camps for things like finances, schedules, onboarding, etc…
As a result, 9 more stone soups were created without my direct involvement. The 2024 Romania Stone Soup was organized by a experience designer that was a novice for her first Stone Soup in 2018, and grew in ability and confidence as she attended more and more camps.