Experience Design
We create memorable and utterly distinctive client, patient, staff, and customer experiences, branded to your organization and keen on learning, growth, and behavioral and perceptual shifts.
Our Work for a Texas Addiction Recovery Network
Dr. Schneider steeped herself in our culture. A very, very different way of doing consulting.
She has created a felt experience that transforms our patients.
A revolutionary experiential, life-as-laboratory curriculum that enables those in recovery to begin practicing the skills of a recovered person.
The Story of The Pilgrimage
How it all began ...
It began in earnest when the Clinical Director trained as a THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Conductor and then sent his addiction counselors who lead inpatient support groups to train with us, too.
This multilevel addiction treatment organization then wanted to bring us in to create an integrated set of recovery experiences across its inpatient and outpatient addiction treatment centers. They’d experienced firsthand what we’d achieved with THE HUMAN JOURNEY® and wanted us to bring active engagement, psycho-spiritual learning, and total experience design to their work with people recovering from addiction.
How we worked together ...
He had a dream that something could be developed that would help those recovering from substance addiction build the insight and the social skills that have proven key to sustained recovery. This engagement was a little different because we actually contracted with Ethos to have a series of meetings that would help clarify what we would create before we created it.
We came up with the idea of a calendared set of themes, a set of three seasons over the course of a year that corresponded to what effectively are three seasons in the region in Texas (each consisting of approximately four months), which we called “Cuatros.” The Cuatros incorporated our client’s belief in the healing power of nature; our emphasis on the healing powers of the group and of creative expression; and the unique resources of its residential inpatient center on the [extended] rural of a restored bed and breakfast complex.
What it led to ...
The Pilgrimage is a year-long suite of core and weekly psychosocial and spiritual growth experiences that, using best practices in adult learning, puts the “Sojourner” in charge of what they learn and when.
In the course of engaging with The Pilgrimage, people in recovery can pick up and practice some of the essential personal habits and interpersonal skills that are characteristically practiced more easily by those without addictions.
It engages the senses, multiple learning styles, and active engagement with critical content that ingeniously incorporates adventure- and arts-based learning within the metaphor of the archetypal pilgrimage we all take to become whole.
The program has allowed our client to achieve consistency across the entire continuum of care under their organization’s umbrella so that patients can pick up the program seamlessly as they move along the recovery arc. It thus circumvents one of the danger zones of recovery — the loss of progress as patients transition, and potentially drop out, between levels of care.
What this could mean for you
Sometimes you know only what effect you want to have on your audience. We’re experts in framing the questions that will move us toward a creative solution that meets every criterion and gives us a truly successful outcome.
Talk with us about what you see for your institution. Let’s see what we can dream up and do together.