Claus Raasted - Imagination is your most undervalued business tool!

Steve Usher (00:00) So Klaus, a very, very, very, very warm welcome to the experienced designers. Claus Raasted (00:01) So Steve. Thank you, thank you. Steve Usher (00:08) Um, pleasure to have you on. Um, I've got lots to dive into. We've been doing some research and I've got, there's just, there's just so many different directions we can take this conversation in today. So, but kind of, okay, let's start, let's start in this place. Um, and, and it was really prominent when, when, when we obviously went onto your website, but the, quote relating to you being the mix of Mick Jagger, Thor. Claus Raasted (00:19) Research is risky. Steve Usher (00:37) and Lady Gaga. Tell me about that. Let's start from that place. me how that persona was created and what it also means as well would be great. Claus Raasted (00:48) So I think there are a couple of things to say about. So a guy I work with, I've actually written two books with him, it's called Brian Matamor, said at one point that Klaus is like a mix of Thor, Mick Jagger, and Lady Gaga. And first of all, the reason that's there on my website is because people read that and they either go, I want to know more or I do not want to know more. Which either is good for me and one of things I do, especially on my website, is try to divide between the hell yeses and the hell nos. And I find that to be easier the more distinct you are. It's also why the first words you will read on my website are, you looking for an overpaid rock star consultant? And some people will say, no, that's not, no, this guy's not serious, what the hell is he talking about? And others go, yeah, we are. Steve Usher (01:25) you nice. Claus Raasted (01:44) So there's that. for the whole Thor, Lady Gaga, Mick Jagger. First of all, what the hell does that mean? Nobody knows. But it sounds fun. The Thor part I can sort of relate to. My girlfriend would probably say I'm more fat Thor than actual Thor. If we're looking at like stature, but I am six foot, which is nothing in Denmark. It's just average. But in the rest of the world, it's... Steve Usher (01:57) Hmm Claus Raasted (02:15) It puts me in the taller category. I'm a little over 100 kilos. I have a beard and long hair and a reasonably deep voice and I have this Viking background. I was once described in an article in Time magazine as like this hulking Viking and I thought, yeah, not really, but if you're five foot six, then a reasonable bit of hulking, right? So I think we can say, out of shape overweight Thor's, there's a little bit of at least the visual side of that. The Mick Jagger I think is easy. I live on stages. Give me a stage and I will be there. And there are plenty of people in this world who are afraid of public speaking. I think those who know me well will say Klaus is more afraid of not being allowed to be on the stage. A lot of my work is on stages. I have a past in role playing where everything is a stage and the performance part. may not have the moves like Jagger, definitely not. I may not have his charisma or sex appeal or talent or even anything like that, but the love of the stage and the outrageousness. Yeah, a little bit of that. And finally, Lady Gaga. I don't know what it means, but I've always been glad that was part of the quote. Because both because it speaks to my feminist side and also because it... In some respects, I'm a very feminine character. But I think most of all, it's the fun part. Who the hell knows what it means, but it sounds fun. Steve Usher (03:48) Hmm. Yeah, love that, love that. And can I, I'd like to like just go back because what we saw was this kind of foundational period in your life, which I think there's so many things in that we can kind of different directions we can go from. But just tell me about this kind of 13 year old that found LARP, LARPing and that journey that that kind of went on just to give us a sense of this foundational period of your life and the amazing work you did in this area. And also just for those that are listening and perhaps don't know what LARPing is and have zero knowledge just to give a sense of what it is and how you've applied it. Claus Raasted (04:36) So we'll start with the basics. LARP is short for Live Action Role Play. Just like laser is short for something with light amplification, yada yada, but today we just call it laser. LARP is Live Action Role Play, short form. And that is born out of role playing. So when I was eight, I stumbled onto Dungeons and Dragons as like tabletop role playing. You sit around the table, you pretend that you're these mighty heroes and interesting adventurers and you go on quests and you slay dragons and that sort of thing. And you don't really go anywhere. You just sit there and you pretend to be the character. So you say, okay, I climb up the stairs trying to sneak close to the wall so the dragon doesn't spot. Steve Usher (04:58) Mm. Claus Raasted (05:20) or I try to seduce the vampire lord using my skills of music and my rogue-ish wit. Okay, roll up some dice to see if it happens. you fail and the vampire lord is onto you and he says, how dare you? You're not a friend, you're a foe. Uh-oh, what do you do now, right? So role playing, I started when in the late 80s when that was something that was strange, popular. also strange and it seems a little bit dangerous by some. It's basically playing pretend just with words. It's collective storytelling. And I did that for a couple of years and then when I was 13, I stumbled onto a role playing club in Denmark where I'm born. And they said, we do this live role playing thing where we dress up as the characters and pretend to be the characters. And I thought that sounds cool. So instead of sitting. trying to have adventures just with words, you got to live them out. Of course, the adventures were slightly more low budget. The moment you take something out of the imagination into the real world, whether you're doing a Hollywood film or a piece of theater or a role playing experience, budget starts to matter. And there were fewer dragons because how the hell do you build a dragon when it's a bunch of teenagers running around with no budget? There's a... Steve Usher (06:24) Hmm Mm-hmm. Mm. Claus Raasted (06:42) If anybody's curious and Google dragon and car and role playing, you will find a lovely one from some time long ago where some Americans built a Toyota Suzuki into a dragon. It is not pretty, but it sure looks fun. Anyway, so it was dressing up, pretending to be these characters. And of course, no dragons and magic is hard to do. So you throw a tennis ball at somebody and call it a fireball because you can't really do real magic. And it was ugly and it was badly choreographed and because people had very little acting skill. were teenagers. The dramatic structure was terrible. It took place at a public school where we would literally sleep in classrooms and pretend they were houses in this, this town. And again, 60 teenagers. pretending to be these fantasy characters in a fantasy town. But it was amazing because you've got to be part of it. You've got to not just look at the story, not just read the story. You've got to be part of creating the story. You've got to break into the classroom that was the town smithy and steal weapons. You've got to have rooftop chases, actual rooftop chases on top of the school. Steve Usher (07:45) Hmm. Claus Raasted (08:07) And that was exhilarating. And I remember I was part of the evil church. It was literally called the Church of Evil. And our high priest was this 14-year-old guy. And we found that was the Church of Bloch that was so evil you could only whisper the name. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous and it was fun. And at some point late in the evening, we're having a ritual in our evil church. Steve Usher (08:23) you Claus Raasted (08:34) What is really happening is there's a 14 year old kid in like robes that are home soon and not really good looking. It's a public school classroom. There's like kid projects and drawings on the wall. And this 14 year old is sacrificing somebody on top of the, the, do you call it? The teacher's table. And there's a bunch of teenagers chanting and everybody's laughing. And it's not, it, it, sounds like, like a bad cult, but he was more like a fun cult. not even really being bad, and there's a guy sleeping in a sleeping bag, and somebody who's apparently a spy leaves open the door, again, classroom, and in storm the nights, the good guys, and they just start whacking us, and they whack the guy in the sleeping bag, and I remember jumping out a window to escape the nights, and the sheer thrill of that still is something I can recall, like this to this day, and I was 13. Steve Usher (09:23) Yeah. Claus Raasted (09:29) And it didn't have a budget. didn't have props. didn't have proper design, but it was bloody awesome. And I thought I need to do more of this. And that Steve Usher (09:39) So how did that materialize? How did that then evolve into a business, a, yeah, where did that, how did that evolve? Claus Raasted (09:51) Couple of years later, I joined the group organizing. So I went from being a participant to being one of the organizers. Couple of years later, when I was 19, I became the chairman of the nonprofit running it, which was at the time the biggest nonprofit doing this sort of thing in Denmark for a while. And I started at the university, studied philosophy and philosophy and history at the university and thought I was going to be a high school teacher. That was the plan. And I did this role playing thing as a nonprofit volunteer for fun thing in my spare time. And at some point when I was 23, I ran out of university stipends. So in Denmark, you get paid to go to the university. Not everybody in the world has this experience, but in Denmark, you get paid to go to the university and they They introduced some rules in 99 where they said, we're going to pay you, but you need to actually deliver some exams. And I had not delivered enough exams. So I needed to either get serious about my studies or do something else with my life. And I thought, okay, this role playing thing, maybe I can actually make a career out of it. And that was in October, 2002. And it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. And then I slowly started with like doing Children's birthdays instead of coming out as a balloon clown you come out and be an orc at a children's birthday and move them around and doing small stuffs for libraries and public schools and random gigs here and there and teaching youth school classes and it slowly grew and at some point a couple of years later I I wrote a book with a friend on role playing on role playing as a pedagogical tool And that took off and that established me as an authority within that space. that time, age 25, I was established as one of the leading authorities in LARP as a teaching activity in kind of Danish schools and Danish pedagogical circles. Not really big, but bigger than most of the others. And slowly started growing. Company, and that ended up... Steve Usher (12:02) Hmm. Claus Raasted (12:07) quite a few years later as about 50 employees when we were at our highest and the biggest in the world of its type. Not Disney, not Samsung, but the biggest of the, the biggest live action role play design studio in the world. And then I crashed it like crazy, but that's, that's the next chapter. Steve Usher (12:29) Yeah, I'll come to that. this is kind of, yeah, cause then we can, there's a business intersection there as well. Just to, just to also understand as well, like how did the going from like a Dungeons and Dragons in a classroom being in that place of pure imagination, pure fun, out of like a material construct, you know, system world into something you just make up along the way. it's So a story and it's a narrative that you contribute and co-create. How did that evolve as you got older? So were like in terms of Dungeons and Dragons two different applications and areas, how did it evolve? Just curious around the topic or the focus or the theme element. Claus Raasted (13:21) So it's a really good question and one of the simple answers is it evolved a lot as we evolved a lot. So one of the nice things I also, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy as a teenager. And as I grew older, I started reading more science fiction and less fantasy and more other stuff. And that is a good example that when I started my role playing days, it was fantasy and it was... It was Dungeons and Dragons, right? was pretend playing, it was Dungeons and Dragons. And then later I realized, there were other role playing games. You could play cyberpunk or you could play pirates or you could play 1920s gangsters, or you could play a law firm in the 1980s. Because role playing is just a method. It's just a way of engaging with stories. It doesn't have a specific setting. And that also meant that when I started doing the live action role playing stuff, the first things I did were this fantasy thing. And when I was 18, I was part of my first cyberpunk thing, which was done by some people I knew. And we were a couple hundred people participating and it was set in a fictional 20, I think it was 2029 or 2034, something like that. They created this timeline that started with. A couple of years later, this happened in 1998. So in their timeline in 2004, Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes president of the United States and they'd gotten, what's his name? There's a William Gibson, American science fiction writer. They'd gotten him or somebody like him, somebody incredibly high level science fiction writer they'd somehow gotten into contact with. And he had written like this one page world, really poetic, really beautiful, really out there cyberpunk stuff. And we got to play around with that. So I got to play like this gang member in a cyberpunk setting. And here, yes, it still didn't have a lot of budget. It was not a Hollywood movie by any, any means, but it looked a bit better and it was done at this kind of grungy party location. And people were a bit older. Steve Usher (15:27) Hmm. Claus Raasted (15:37) and it felt more real. And to me that opened up, okay, so role playing is not just fantasy. Role playing could be anything. Whether it's easier to do role playing in spaceships if you're doing like this tabletop role playing where you just talk about it because you don't have to build a spaceship. But you could essentially, if you can build a spaceship that your participants will accept, whether it's a low budget or high budget one, then you can have stories that take place anywhere. And through my role playing, Steve Usher (15:39) Mm. Claus Raasted (16:05) gotten to play around with some pretty crazy stories, both on a production level, like a Swedish destroyer that was rebuilt into a Battlestar Galactica spaceship. that was wild. I've been a submariner on an actual submarine. So I've spent 36 hours in the Russian Navy in 1962. Right? That was pretty wild. And also these stories that are very different. Steve Usher (16:32) Yep. Claus Raasted (16:35) I've spent six days inside a Jane Austen story in 1829 that was primarily about comedy and love and romance. Steve Usher (16:43) Amazing. Claus Raasted (16:43) So thematically, I've gotten to try out a lot of different stuff. Some of it has been fun. Some of it has been entertaining. Some of it has been dark as hell. so, so I've tried out quite a bit and that's to me, the power of role playing, especially the power of live action role playing of LARPing is that you get to play around with different worlds. You don't just visit them by watching the TV series or the documentary or the movie or reading the book or playing the computer game, but you get to be there. It is fake reality because the mind doesn't understand the difference between fiction and reality on a Steve Usher (17:05) Hmm. Yeah. Claus Raasted (17:21) brain chemistry level, on a neurological level, the mind doesn't understand. The mind only has experienced reality. It doesn't really understand, we pretending or is it real? That whole social reality, it doesn't really understand that. So I've gotten to have some pretty wild adventures in different realities. And some of them over the years have been a little bit more high budget than we started out and a little bit both more Steve Usher (17:23) Yep. . Claus Raasted (17:51) serious and more adult because I've also grown. I'm 45 now. So what I like is a bit different from when I was 14. Steve Usher (18:01) How does this kind of... Because I've been dying to kind of, I've been wanting to reach out for some time because obviously my awareness of you came via the College of Extraordinary Experiences and it's something I'm yet to do myself yet. Tell me about that because I have a sneaky feeling there is some threads from what we've just discussed and shared on your journey from kind of lapping and evolving and growing and then taking it into this kind of field and area. Share with the audience about the College of Extraordinary Experiences. I think the name alone kind of suggests something quite interesting. But just, yeah, tell us about how it came about and what it means to you as well in terms of representation of the previous period of your life as you've kind of evolved as well. Claus Raasted (18:54) So the College of Extraordinary Experiences started in 2016 and runs to this day and is one of the main things I do. It is a professional conference. It is a networking event with learning opportunities rather than a learning event with network opportunities. Because we say the most important thing that happens there is people meet each other. And if they learn something from the classes we have, the interactive classes, then that's good. But even if they hate all of them, at least they do it with other people. And that is the most important thing. It's an event focused on experience design. It's five days at a 13th century castle in Poland, as things are. And it's a bit crazy. It's a bit Harry Potter. People get dressed up in costumes and are sorted into houses, not Gryffindor, but there is a Gryphon house. And it is a slightly out of whack reality for five days using tricks from the experience design world, using tricks from the role playing world, using a bit of letting people get to be versions of themselves that they want to experiment with. And it draws in people from different backgrounds, different age groups between 20 and early 70s we've had so far. It draws in people from different nationalities. People come from all over the world, different professional backgrounds. We've had... doctors, we've had lawyers, we've had shoemakers, we've had film people, we've had anything and everything. Students, people who do weird stuff. Traditional Japanese buto dancers. To me at least that's weird. Or exotic is perhaps a better word. So the idea behind the College of Extraordinary Experience is to get people together in a way where they connect. Steve Usher (20:33) Hmm. Hmm. Claus Raasted (20:52) deeply and have shared experiences and then they learn from each other and out of that comes some some pretty beautiful and radical things. But that's that's what the college is. You can find it at extraordinary.college for a shameless plug and it also you'll probably either say okay I want I want more of this or say this is not for me because it is it is distinct if nothing else. Steve Usher (21:15) Yes. Yes. yeah, I was going to Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask, because you said something there, which I think is so, so important was shared experience. And, know, whether you're doing a bungee jump with your partner or you're doing, you know, something extreme or very different contextually to your normal life day routines and et cetera, that's Claus Raasted (21:20) That came about when the role playing company still existed. Steve Usher (21:48) that connection that when staging this kind of learning experience or environment for people, I think that's the really magic word is shared experience. Because the depth of that camaraderie, the connection, the learning, the reflection is so, it's just so much more memorable. And also in a world today where we know like connection is so, so... undervalued right now, particularly in person. So I'm really just curious about how do you think about that when you're the stager and what goes in you can't control anyway, but actually as the creator or the co-creator of this, what's some of the thought that goes into that and the ideas to to stage something like the college? Claus Raasted (22:42) So I think that the stager is a good word to use here, where when you design experiences, whether you're designing an onboarding for a sales team, or you're designing a shop experience, or a restaurant, or a music concert, or a movie, or just a sit down with your family, right? You're also designing where the chair is gonna be, and are we gonna eat something? Will there be presents? Like, should we? make sure that the uncle who has a bad back, that he has a nice place to sit, all this sort of thing, that is experience design. Some of it is stuff we do every day, some of the stuff we don't think about, but sometimes we put a little bit more intent into it. And I think at the core of experience design as a discipline, whatever you use it for, is intent. And the college is quite intentional. There are many things that we... design that a lot of other events leave up to chance or just let somebody else handle. And that can be like, how do we handle the check-in? Many professional events, you go to some venue and you check into the hotel and you get your keys and you drop off your bags and then you connect with the event organizers. But that whole check-in experience, which is for many people the first one they have, The event organizers have completely outsourced that to a hotel. That usually is not a good experience because hotels are built for people coming in a little at a time. So when you have a hundred people coming out of a bus, it means queues. means three overworked people behind a hotel desk, trying to fix things. There's mix ups and blah, blah, blah, blah. We, for example, take control of that. So that allows us to check in a hundred people in very, very fast, in a fun way and, and very, very efficiently because we take charge of that. Steve Usher (24:12) you Claus Raasted (24:26) We take over the intent of that. So one thing is the event is very intentional in many spaces. The second part is that we design it based on the hero's journey. The idea that you go from your normal life, there's the call to adventure, there's these, we use this 12 step version of the hero's journey. We're entering into this, special world is something. So we take great care of transitions. When people go to the event, the whole day one is onboarding. It is changing from you were somewhere else in your normal life, now you are here. We dress you differently. We establish some different social rules. We establish different social context. It's like arriving at Hogwarts just on a lower budget and with less spells and less Lord Voldemort. Steve Usher (25:22) Yeah, I love that. Claus Raasted (25:23) But that is a thing that a lot of the college is this intentionally designed experiences. And then the second part of it is we let it go. We are huge believers in co-creation. We're huge believers in a delightful bit of chaos. So we're at a Disney experience in Disneyland. You are strapped into the ride and it is fed through your senses, right? You are literally strapped in. Steve Usher (25:50) Hmm. Claus Raasted (25:52) and the ride comes to you and it can be amazing. I love Disney. Really talented people working there, But you are not controlling what's happening. You are having it fed to you. We're here, so much of the experience happens between the people and we do our best to create a container and create a space where magic can happen and then we let it go. So we even say that if you go and read the info pack on the webpage, it says, Steve Usher (26:05) Yep. Hmm. Yeah. Claus Raasted (26:20) What will you get out of it? We don't know. But you might get something out of it. You're not going to come out and learn something specific. We're not going to teach you these guitar chords or how to do Photoshop layers or how to apply the PERMA model. We could do these things and we sometimes do these things, but the college is not that. The college is a playground. It's a place where people go to have experiences that may or may not change. what they think and who they are, maybe they'll just have a good time. But we don't know what they're going to get out of it because we don't know who they are. We don't know what interactions they're going to have. But we do know that we create a container and a space that gives ample room for aha moments. Steve Usher (27:07) I love that. And I think I'm going to switch this as well now into like a, cause you just shared something which really, was like a really nice intersection, which I'm going to use, which is control and this concreteness of experiences. They can be a tough sell for particularly corporate world, business world. It can be a tough sell because they want concrete outcomes. So what are we going to get concretely? And actually sometimes you just go, we don't know what we're going to do is we can facilitate. And actually what might come out is nothing but failure, but a whole bunch of learning, or you might get complete magic or something in between. how have you like, cause I was really curious when reading that obviously you did some work with as advisor to McKinsey and that world just on where you've taken me from, you know, Rick to College of extraordinary experiences. to McKinsey is a really interesting journey. So I'm curious to see what was your observations of being in that environment and bringing these two worlds together. What did you observe and learn from that period? Claus Raasted (28:21) So one of the nice things about the McKinsey stuff I've done is I've gotten to do some amazing things that I normally would never get to do because McKinsey gets to do pretty high level stuff. The sad thing is there's a lot of it I'm not allowed to talk about. But there are some things I can share and part of it is that when I, my McKinsey work has consisted of a mix of some frontline consulting like, you're out at a client, you're running around trying to help solve some problems, some internal training of consultants and some being brought in as like a futurist, as somebody who has out of the box thinking and helps a client solve or at least give them a dish of ideas, a menu of ideas for how to solve a particular high level problem. And on that, I've gotten to meet some really interesting people and get to see some high, high, high level problems firsthand. I've gotten to pitch to actual princes in the Middle East, right? I didn't know that was gonna be part of the package. And what I could see is that what McKinsey does, McKinsey does many things well and some things I would say not really. I like less, right? The performance culture is extreme. And that also leads to professionalist culture that is not really something I subscribe to. But one of the things they do incredibly well is turn random pieces of interaction, random things into hard data. And what these high level consulting companies are about, they're very data driven. So it's finding out how do you find data? How do you take an interview with a tour guide? who does walking tours in the western part of Saudi Arabia and how do you take his input and combine that with the input of 50 people like him and turn that into some sort of numbers that are, that make sense like what do they find most important? What's most challenging? What do most of their visitors like? What do they not like? What do they need? What do they not need? And if you have one person, it's opinions. If you have 50, it's data. And how do you take 20 other data sources, everything from visitor reviews to budgets, to training manuals, to culture, to history, how do you take that and how do you weave that into a net of understandable data that you then present to somebody so they can make an informed decision, right? At the core of what a company like McKinsey does, in my experience, is figure out. Steve Usher (30:39) Hmm. Hmm. Claus Raasted (31:06) how to make the world, how to make data accessible to people who are making decisions so they can make data-driven decisions of something that is sometimes pretty tricky. And then of course come up with solutions for how to help with that. And sometimes the solutions are very data heavy and sometimes they're very, very creative. But they're all based on knowledge. They're all based on trying to figure out as much as possible, what does the world look like instead of just what does this guy feel? Steve Usher (31:36) Yeah. Claus Raasted (31:36) And that's pretty fascinating to be in the engine room. And it's also been fascinating to get to be part of things that are huge, right? Looking at Saudi Arabia, where I've done quite a bit of stuff that's been tourism related, has a declared goal of being one of the world's leading tourist nations in 2030. until 2019, it was a closed country. You weren't allowed to just go there. Like going from that to world's biggest tourist nation in 11 years, that's a huge thing. It had meant that they've been doing transformation on a national level. It means also that they've been changing not just how the world sees them, but also how they actually are. And getting to see that from the inside, I would never have gotten to play around at some of these levels without McKinsey. And that's been fascinating. Steve Usher (32:05) Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Claus Raasted (32:34) to get to do Steve Usher (32:34) Yeah. Claus Raasted (32:34) and also get to be me, right? I got pulled in and I often was told, you don't really look like a McKinsey consultant. And which is true, but I have rarely worked with people where the level of trust was so high. Like people who were partner level partners in McKinsey saying, hey Klaus, we're doing this project of those of us in this project. Steve Usher (32:43) Good. you Claus Raasted (33:01) you're the one who has the most experience with what you're doing. How about you lead it? It's like, okay, I'm happy to, because in this case, some storytelling thing, I had the most experience, but that the level of trust that I've experienced within McKinsey has been extreme. And I think that the only reason it exists as this global company that is the small units working very independently generally. is because of that very high level of trust, very strong mission and very clear idea that what we do is we try to find data, we try to analyze data and we try to deliver it in a way so whoever is making the decision can make an informed decision, whatever that may look. Steve Usher (33:47) Yeah. So can I just ask, Where do you see the form and the more kind of experienced design industry, if we want to give it an industry, where do you see it evolving and developing? like how far can we push this and and how how can we maybe also bring this a little bit more into? the business world more into bringing value through this work in the more corporate world and business world. Claus Raasted (34:13) So that's a really good question. I'm going to give you a rather complex layered answer. No, no, no. And that is that the world of experience design is, it's hard to have a bigger umbrella than that because it's basically designing experiences, whatever that means. Is it designing a zoo or an airport or again, or a sales meeting or Steve Usher (34:18) Cool, nothing straightforward. Claus Raasted (34:41) how you load a truck. There's an experience designed element to all of those. That of course also makes it insanely broad, slightly smaller within that container is the world of experiences, the experience economy, right? Are you selling, are you designing the experience of an airport? Well, but you're not selling the experience of the airport, you're selling the flight, right? You're selling the concert, you're selling the book, you're selling the whatever it is. Pine and Gilmore in the late 90s wrote Welcome to the Experience Economy. Their point was that we are now in a place where experiences are an economic driving factor. There's so much money and economic value in experiences. But that is not in having an experience, it is in selling an experience. So if you're doing a sales meeting, Steve Usher (35:33) Hmm. Claus Raasted (35:37) that you're not selling the experience of the sales meeting, though of course there's an experience design element to it. If you're selling a concert or you're selling a vacation or a football match or a movie or that sort of thing, video game, dinner, restaurant, that's an experience you're selling. So the first thing to say is that there is the biggest field of all is experience design. And in this case, right, of course, somebody will say the biggest field of all is the universe or something like that. the Steve Usher (36:01) Yes, I agree. Claus Raasted (36:05) science. But the biggest field of all experience is experience design because that is designing experience. The slightly smaller but still huge field is the experience economy, which is where the World Experience Organization comes in. It is people who design experiences and sell that, which means that there are more filmmakers there and fewer bankers. Though both design experiences, the filmmakers sell the experience where the banker sells the banking services, but the experience of buying that or engaging with that is of course part of it. So that's the first place. And the smaller, the more granular we get under experience economy, then you get people who design concerts or people who design role-playing events or people who design violin rehearsals or whatever it is. And the advantage with experience design and the whole experience economy circus is that the broader, the bigger the tent, the more you have this like big tent idea, the more you have people who can learn from each other. The world experience organization is a good example of that. The college, we do that, that you allow the lawyer to learn from the bricklayer, to learn from the doctor and the formula one driver and whoever else is there. And that is insane. Now the tricky thing is. Steve Usher (37:11) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Claus Raasted (37:26) that the bigger you make the tent, the harder it is for people to speak together. Imagine it like languages. If we put everybody, if we put 200 people, the world has roughly 200 nations, put 200 people, one from each nation, in a room together. The potential for learning and for collaboration and for wow is insane. It's also gonna be pretty hard when you talk to the people. Steve Usher (37:30) Hmm. Claus Raasted (37:53) who only speak Mandarin and you only speak English, or the people who only speak French or Italian. And the people who know how to speak with others are going to be the ones who can translate and the ones who get the most out of it. Because if you go to that thing and you only speak Swedish, then you're gonna be able to interact with the Danes and the Norwegians, who speak Danish and Norwegian, which is close enough. And everybody else, you're just like, okay, they're interesting, but I don't get what they're saying. Experience design is a bit of the same. Steve Usher (37:56) Hmm. Claus Raasted (38:23) that the broader the gathering of people is, the more there's potential for aha and wow and also in a business sense, but it's also more tricky because you need to figure out what the hell are we talking about? And I went from being one of the global leading pioneers in the LARP space and knowing Steve Usher (38:38) Yes. Claus Raasted (38:48) shit ton of people, having done projects, knowing what was going on, being incredibly well versed in the theoretical discourse and having like a foot in many camps there, to the broader world of experience design where I'm also one of the pioneers, but suddenly I'm a tiny fish because the fish bowl is now a fish tank. And it's full of tiny fishes who aren't really that aware of each other's existence and are slowly beginning to be that. So there will be people from Burning Man who've been doing that for 20 years. And there'll be people from the Nordic Clark movement who've been doing that for 20 years. There'll be people who do Amonkard Theatre in Southern Italy. There'll be people who do like Mehdi, one of our participants at the last college, who is a dentist, Palestinian-British dentist who does events for other dentists. And he brings in artists, for example, to give them a different experience, to give them inspiration for their dental practices, but bringing in those outsiders, right? So he has a group of people who all speak a language and he'll bring in somebody to show them a different one to be inspired. So, so there's a bit of a trade-off and especially when we talk about the business side, it's tricky because if you and I said, okay, well, now we're going to create Klaus and Steve's, we're going to write a book together. Steve Usher (39:54) Brilliant. Claus Raasted (40:17) I write books, so we're going to write a book. And it's called Klaus and Steve's Book About Everything. Okay, some people are going to think that's interesting, but mostly it'll be our mothers and a few die-hard friends. If it's instead said Klaus and Steve's Book About Business, then we may catch some more flies. Maybe now our mothers are less interested, though they'll still be polite and go for it. But maybe some more people say, but if we... call it Klaus and Steve's book about the business of experience design, suddenly most of the world no longer cares. I can assure you my mother now no longer cares about that. But we might hit some people who are like, this is interesting. And if it's now instead it's called Klaus and Steve's book on how to build a viable experience design business aimed at creating one day experiences for clients in Europe. Then suddenly More people will say that's not for me, but somebody's gonna go, where have you been all my life? And that in a business sense, it's tricky because where is the right amount of globality, Of universality, which I think is more of a word than globality to be fair. But, and how does it make sense to people? Steve Usher (41:20) Yes. Yes. Hahaha Hmm. Claus Raasted (41:41) If somebody writes a book about life advice for Claus Raasted, I will read that book even if I've never heard of that person. If somebody writes a book called Life Advice for 45-year-olds, I might pick it up. If somebody calls a book called Life Advice, I'm not even going to Steve Usher (41:49) Hmm. No, no, that's really good. I love that. I think the level that we engage at is super important for the relativity for the initial hook for people to go, I'm curious to get over that, that initial like experience design, which is very, very broad, very broad. Yeah, no. Claus Raasted (42:13) very broad and nobody knows what it means. And nobody in their right mind is going to hire an experienced designer to design an airport. They're going to hire an airport designer and they're probably going to hire an airport designer with a specialty in Southeast Asian airports, if that's what you're doing. So being an experienced designer on the broadest level means that you have an incredibly broad skillset. Right? I have the advantage that I know a lot about. Steve Usher (42:23) Yeah. Claus Raasted (42:42) a lot of things in the experience design world, even more when I couple it up with my kind of personal specialty, which is getting shit done, which is even broader, Shameless book club, Klaus's book on getting shit done. And that means that, what the hell does it mean, right? If people don't know, I'm gonna lose out to the airport designers most of the time. Steve Usher (42:54) Yep. Claus Raasted (43:11) unless they're looking for somebody who knows something else, who hasn't designed an airport, and that's why they want a different thing. So there is advantage to having this deep expertise, but there is also advantage to having multiple expertises. And I think the best words on that are from the British advertising guru Rory Sutherland, one of my heroes, and he says that it is better to have multiple high level skills that you combine instead of just one, right? It's really hard to be the world's best violinist. It's really a tough, tough, tough field to compete in because the others have been doing it since they were four and they're maniacs and they're amazing. It's really hard to be the world's best ice skater. Again, the others have started when they were four, they're maniacs, but being the world's best ice skating violinist, now that's in it. Google that, she's out there. Steve Usher (43:42) Hmm. Claus Raasted (44:08) Right? But that's an achievable goal. And that means that if you want to stand out, then doing this combo of things. If you speak German, nobody cares. A hundred million people do. Speak Japanese, nobody cares. If you speak Japanese and German, that's interesting. If you speak Japanese and German and know something about the auto industry, that's a career. Steve Usher (44:11) Yes. Yep. So Klaus, can I just ask just for anyone listening who has really become more curious about either the college or just experience design generally and maybe trying to figure out what it is or maybe how to apply into their business or to affect change or to even just take a team or group of people and just shake it up a little bit with creating a different container. for people to engage in? What, any kind of just thoughts or resources or recommendations you'd share out on that? Because I think that's part of that is someone taking that first step and a little bit of leaping into the unknown and saying, okay, how could experiences actually help me in what I'm trying to do in my team or my organization? Claus Raasted (45:16) So I can give a resource that didn't exist until a few weeks ago, which is that the College of Extraordinary Experiences is a physical event at a castle that exists, but that's also a pretty big investment of both time and money for a lot of people. But we've started doing these extraordinary design lectures, we call them, which are 90 minutes and they're virtual. So they're pretty accessible from all over the globe. And they're Steve Usher (45:21) Cool. Claus Raasted (45:44) also cheap and easy to tap into. So that's one place to go is experienced designers talking about experience design subjects, where they talk about how to build transformative retreats or how to look at the event canvas model or how to use narrative alchemy as a way of storytelling, right? These a little bit of intro, a little bit of diving into stuff that's there, but a collection or first season here is 10 of them. basically 10 different. Steve Usher (45:48) great Claus Raasted (46:14) approaches to experience design. So that's one resource that's out there that we've just recently launched and is growing. Another is the world experience organization does these really cool fireside chats once a week. They're called campfires. They're once a week and they invite us, right, members to come and share experiences, whether that's in theme park design or in how to build proposals or how to use, there was recently a guy who talked about how to make a career out of LARPing. And I thought, that's interesting. If this had been five years ago, it might've been me who had been interviewed and I wanted to go there and listen to what he had to say. I sadly couldn't, but, but that sort of thing, the WXO campfires are great there. There are some resources online, but not a lot because most of them go at a slightly more granular level. Steve Usher (47:11) Hmm. Claus Raasted (47:11) So it's easier to find somebody who will have made some resources on how to design a music festival than somebody who will about how to design experience because it is so broad. What the hell does it mean? It's the difference between a guitarist and a musician is that a guitarist probably knows a lot about playing the guitar. What does a musician play? Steve Usher (47:23) Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Claus Raasted (47:34) Who the hell knows? It's not in the title. Steve Usher (47:37) And you know, I think what you shared there with the extraordinary workshops, I mean, just some of the examples you got there is like the nice kind of simple consumable just to like, just try. I mean, I think this is one of the things I would always recommend is just out of bubble learning and then just lean into it and then extract, see what resonates or not. I mean, that's the whole thing about being curious and trying things. So I think certainly those like small little modular workshops that you've created. off from and back off the back of the college sounds amazing. So we'll obviously put the links in the website, also to your books and also anywhere where can people find you and connect with you Klaus? Where's the best channel? Claus Raasted (48:21) So if you want the fun intro, then my website, classroster.com will lead to some fun things. If you want the rabbit hole, then Google my name and you will find all sorts of stuff. Some good, some bad, some I agree with, some I don't. Some of it interesting, some of it less so, but it is a deep rabbit hole because my level of content production has been... Steve Usher (48:26) Cool. Claus Raasted (48:48) decent. have 46 books to my name. I've done events, podcasts, articles, yada yada, and I've appeared on a lot of things. So if you want a weird rabbit hole, and here I don't say exotic, I do say weird, then Google my name and you will find stuff. If you want a little bit more specific, my website's a good place to go. The college is a good place to go. Steve Usher (49:10) and I'll leave those all in the show notes. genuinely, when the team handed me like the initial research piece that we did, I was reading it through. I was like, wow, okay, cool. So trust me, if you do want to dive into Klaus's background, there's some fun things ahead. So, but look, Klaus, look, it's been a pleasure. I'm so glad to have you on the show and I'm really grateful for your time. And I do believe we're also going to see each other in London at the end of April for the... Claus Raasted (49:38) We will, we will. And thanks, thanks for this, Steve. Really a pleasure. And looking forward to seeing you in London. Steve Usher (49:42) Yeah, yeah, I look forward to it, my friend. Take care, thank you so much, thank you.