Outbound Learning Expeditions
Take the room somewhere it cannot pretend.
Travel is a great source of learning, and the power of environment is tremendous — in framing an idea, in opening a team up, in making anything you teach actually stick.
The turn-off
Plenty of organisations already send teams abroad, or take them somewhere local and call it experiential. Too often the experience amounts to a good trainer in a nice place. A place is not an experience. What you travelled for is the thing the place can do to people, and that has to be designed.
What we design
Four Kinds of Journey
Retreats that have to be travelled to
Leadership offsites and all-staff retreats built around where they are held, not merely relocated there. The route, the hosts, the meals and the silence are all part of the design.
Heritage, and the stories worth carrying
Old roads, old crafts, old cities. A team that has stood in the place a story came from argues about strategy differently the following week.
Our own turfs, read honestly
Development as it actually looks, at home and abroad — what has worked, what has not, and who paid for it. This is the part that turns exposure into commitment.
A craft picked up on the way
Storytelling, speaking, music, cooking, making something with your hands. A skill learned somewhere unfamiliar is remembered differently from one learned in a training room.
Who leads it
With a Face, or Without One
Both work. They do different things to a group.
With a face
A named member of the tribe travels with the group and carries the learning arc from the first evening to the last.
Without one
No visible leader. The route, the hosts and the rituals do the work, and the group discovers it was designed only on the way home.
What it is for
Four Things Come Home
- Exposure
- They see something they could not have been told.
- Belief
- Seeing it done elsewhere makes it thinkable here.
- Commitment
- What a group goes through together, it defends together.
- Skills
- Learned in an unfamiliar place, and so not left in the room.
Range
How Far, and How Many
- Locally, across Pakistan — the northern valleys, the old cities, the crafts and the coast
- Regionally and internationally, wherever the theme actually lives
- Groups from a leadership team of eight to a cohort of a hundred
- Student and faculty journeys, with participatory work along the route