Transformative Containers
The art & science of designing powerful group experiences
I usually write here about Torah and the inner life.
Today I'm sharing something a bit different: some thoughts on designing transformative group experiences, drawn from my pre-rabbinic work as a graduate student in education.
But actually, it's not so different at all. This work on creating "containers" for transformation—experiences that shift what participants see as possible—is part of what drew me toward becoming a rabbi in the first place. Before I was thinking about Jewish texts, ritual, and community, I was obsessed with how we craft contexts that open people up to new ways of being. I now think they're the same obsession, approached from different angles.
I got interested in these questions as a teenager.
At 16, I had the good fortune to stumble into an off-campus study experience—a semester program called The Mountain School in Vermont that brought 45 high school juniors together for four months on a working farm. I walked into a whole other little self-contained world where the culture, rules, language, rituals, systems, and ways of relating to each other were totally different. I had a powerful experience—a new experience of myself, and who I could be; of what school could be like; of a new way of living; and of real belonging, true community. It blew me away. When I left those four months, I knew I wanted to do "that." Not necessarily work at a boarding school, but build contexts and containers for groups that shift what participants think is possible.
Over the years I got to do this in different contexts: as an educator at Breakthrough Collaborative, which builds pop-up summer schools around the country; as a youth organizer for The Food Project, building immersive youth employment programs around food justice; designing and running semester-long deep dives into leadership and spirituality for cohorts of adults at Urban Adamah in Berkeley; and as a hospital chaplain, designing rituals and weekend-long immersive retreats for folks grieving the loss of loved ones.
While studying towards a Master’s in Education, I focused on the art and science of designing experiences like these. How do we design for transformation? What do the very best summer camps and executive retreats and social movement trainings and mass art festivals and meditation retreats and leadership intensives and boarding schools have in common? What are the ingredients of transformative group experiences?
Let’s back up. First of all, what in the world does transformative mean here?
I mean the kind of experience that shifts what participants experience or see as possible.1 This generally requires a disruption of the status quo and a held destabilization that opens participants up to the new.
Importantly, transformation here does not center permanent, measurable shifts in behavior or attitude. Instead, it centers the present moment, affective experiences of participants. This kind of transformation is hard to measure and track. Sometimes it is challenging for participants themselves, even, to name exactly what was so profound about an experience, even as they’re certain that something powerful took place.2 This ineffable quality, though not a favorite for social scientists, is familiar to artists, clergy, educators, and others.
I want to underscore that we’re talking about a very specific type of transformative experience here: one that takes place in a group, and that is intentionally designed. Certainly, these are not the only types of experiences that one might describe as transformative. People have transformative experiences in all sorts of ways: birthing a child; accompanying a loved one through death; taking psychedelic drugs or plant medicines; seeing a particularly beautiful sunset; going to war; experiencing trauma; living through a pandemic… Here, I’m talking about something very specific: intentionally designed, often immersive programs for groups. A container, here, is an intentionally designed context that “holds” an experience.
Entering a context is like entering a world.
It brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s famous telling of the story about two young fish who happen upon an older fish. The older fish says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the young fish responds, “What the hell is water?”3 Context is the water we swim in. A container, then, is a sort of aquarium, the boundaried vessel that holds and facilitates an experience.
Experience designer Ida Benedetto observes that scholars in different disciplines have different names for what we’re referring to here as “the container.”4 Johan Huizinga, studying games as a play theorist, refers to it as “the magic circle,” the temporary world that defines a game.5 Mary Douglas, studying ritual as an anthropologist, calls it “the ritual frame,” or a marked off space with transformative potential.6 Erving Goffman, studying performance as a sociologist, calls it a “bounded region,” a space set apart through barriers to perception that creates a highly curated, shared reality for participants.7
Containers matter because they are the primary lever with which we can impact experience. Even though we talk about experience design, we can’t really control participant experience. We can only design excellent contexts. Game designer Jesse Schell writes poignantly about this dilemma:
“Creating great experiences is indeed our goal. But we cannot touch experiences. We cannot manipulate them directly. What a game designer can control, can get his hands in, is the game.”8 “All we can do is create artifacts (rule sets, game boards, computer programs) that are likely to create certain kinds of experiences when a player interacts with them.”9
This is true for designers of all types of experiences. How can we create something that will generate a certain experience when someone—or, even more complex—a group (!) interacts with it and each other. The answer lies in designing a strong container.
We know that context is a powerful driver of experience and behavior.10 While often we are told that traits and personality are static, following people into the contexts they inhabit, the truth is more complicated.11 In fact, the situation we’re in is hugely influential for how we act, feel, and relate.12 It makes sense, then, to harness the power of context intentionally, to design for the kinds of experience we want participants to have.
This is nothing new.
Leveraging the power of context to design transformative containers has been a human preoccupation for millennia. We see it in religious ritual, in developmental psychology,13 and in social movements.14 Certainly, the art of designing contexts that can hold space for transformation is an old and studied art.
Nevertheless, acknowledging the ways that crafting a context is possible and powerful doesn’t discount the fact that individuals are also powerful drivers of experience! For program leaders, this often means taking seriously who we invite in as participants, and/or altering the experience based on the participants present. The truth is more complicated than taking context seriously or taking individuals seriously; what transpires in a programmatic environment develops out of the particular interaction of both.15 It is also worth noting that participants—not just experience designers or facilitators—shape context.
The best facilitators know that the container is remade in every moment, by everyone in the community. That said, the choices program leaders and facilitators make about the container—both before and during an experience—are paramount.
So I went looking for patterns.
Drawing insights from scholarship on ritual, games, and performance—as well as my own experiences in the field and conversations with other practitioners— I distilled the craft I try to use for building transformative containers into 6 core principles.
Most of this isn't new. Skilled experience designers intuitively understand and work with these insights daily—and many are brilliant at articulating them! My conversations with practitioners in the field over the years—camp directors, semester school founders, wilderness trip leaders, social movement trainers, executive retreat designers—were honestly a gift. Usually, we're identified with our content—some of us work in "education," others in "play," others in "social justice" or "professional development," "mindfulness," “religion,” or "the arts." But actually, in some way, we're all working on the same thing.
Transformative containers are immersive, trustworthy, risky, relational, temporary, and magical.
Immersive: They direct attention by creating a world apart
Trustworthy: They earn continuous buy-in through radical consistency and relative safety
Risky: They leverage discomfort to expand what participants think is possible
Relational: They build belonging through shared vulnerability and group formation
Temporary: They create finite spaces with infinite possibility
Magical: They feel invisible and emergent to participants, not engineered
The more I think about these principles, the more I'm struck by how they point to something important about the human experience—our need for spaces where we can step outside of the ordinary and discover what else might be possible. It starts, I think, with creating that sense of crossing into somewhere different altogether.
What does that crossing actually look like? How do we create a world apart—and why does it matter so much? That's where I want to turn next: to work of immersion itself.
Footnotes:
This short definition takes inspiration from Mezirow’s concept of “transformative learning,” which he grounds in the realm of adult development (Mezirow, 1991). It also owes a debt to education researcher Mark Girod and colleagues, who point to transformative learning as one element in a theory of “aesthetic understanding,” where the term transformative indicates a fundamental shift in perception (Girod & Wong, 2002; Girod et al., 2003).
Indeed, scholars like Dirkx (2000), Kasl & Yorks (2002), and Tisdell (2003) have criticized Mezirow for discounting the nonrational, emotional, and intuitive aspects of transformation. (Fisher-Yoshida et al., 2009).
Experience designer and scholar Ida Benedetto articulates this paradox beautifully. “If the experience is successful in delivering transformative potential, the participant cannot fully wrap their mind around what has happened; they cannot satisfactorily tame the splendor of the experience with serious judgment about what happened to them. Leaving an experience in a state of disoriented awe allows for the participant to reorder their world view and sense of self in order to make meaning out of what they went through…Transformation is an unraveling, followed by a slow and sometimes prolonged stitching back together.” Benedetto also helpfully distinguishes between three types of transformation: repetitive, acute, and dramatic, and the ways that experience structure can catalyze each one. (Benedetto, 2017).
Foster Wallace, 2005.
Huizinga, 1955, p. 10.
Douglas, 1966, p. 64.
Goffman, 1956, p. 66.
Schell, 2011, p. 34.
Schell, 2011, p. 11.
Mischel, 1968. In this seminal work, Mischel puts the concept of “personality” in conversation with the power of context. In doing so, he lays the foundation for later work on “situational strength” and “strong situations,” contexts where behavior is highly prescribed.
Rose, 2016.
Hartshorne and May, 1930. Kidd et al., 2013.
Kegan, 1982. Kegan builds on Donald Winnicott’s notion of “holding environments” for infant development to create an analogous concept for containers for adult transformation.
Social movements have perhaps been the leaders in building accessible spaces for personal and collective transformation. A few examples (among many): SNCC’s freedom schools, the feminist consciousness raising circles of the 1960’s, the Combahee River Collective’s retreats, and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed workshops.
Rose, 2016, p. 106. Following psychologist Yuichi Shoda and others, Rose takes insights from both trait psychologists and situation psychologists seriously in pursuit of better honoring and understanding individuality.