The Circle Project

The Circle Project featured by SHRM

The work of The Circle Project was featured prominently in a recent article by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Members of SHRM can access the full text of the article here. We’ve excerpted a few sections of the article below for those who aren’t able to access it online:

Experts: Intentions Should Dictate Experiential Outcomes
By Rebecca R. Hastings, January 2007 [From the SHRM Online Diversity Focus Area]

Employers seeking nontraditional or experiential forms of diversity training have a wide range of options available to them. To achieve lasting benefits, however, experts say that an employer’s intentions and their employees’ expectations must be aligned before training begins.

“There’s a great opportunity to use nontraditional modes,” says Patricia Digh, co-founder of The Circle Project, a consulting group focused on diversity issues through experiential learning. But some programs don’t quite reach Digh’s definition of “experiential.” “For me, experiential [programs] involve asking people to experience something and make meaning out of it,” she says. “The meaning is co-created with the other people in the room.”

What Makes Experiential Learning Stick

“There’s a difference between learning and training,” says Digh, but what people really need is learning. “I might absorb information from a lecture but I don’t necessarily internalize it.” Experiential programs can help increase learning, she says.

A Measured Approach

Before recommending an experientially based program, Digh suggests, HR professionals should ask themselves a series of questions:

• Am I doing this just because I need to mark it off my “to-do” list?

• Am I prepared for people to have open, honest communication?

• Are senior managers willing to be vulnerable with the rest of the staff?

• Are we willing to follow up on what comes out of the training?

• How are we going to measure the success of this work?

• What is the transformation that we want this to effect?

• If I believe that managers would not participate, what does this mean about my own stereotypes about this group?

Organizations that cannot answer questions like these should not offer a program that could raise people’s expectations that things are going to change, Digh says.

One Employer’s Experience

“Experiential learning is far more effective than the traditional type of learning programs,” says Karen Allen, vice president of human resources for the National Parks Conservation Association in Washington, D.C., a client of Digh’s, whose experience in counseling, education and HR led her to pursue an experiential option for her organization. 

“I wanted something different,” Allen says, though she wasn’t sure how well it would be received. “What they offer is ‘way’ different, but so much more meaningful and effective,” she says.

“My primary concern was that the organization was not ready for this experience,” Allen said in an e-mail interview. But the outcome was in her words “amazing” in terms of her expectations of the program and her colleagues’ responses to it.

Other Considerations

Measurement of the results of an experiential program should take place over the long term, Digh says. Though participants can be asked broad questions, such as “what were your biggest surprises?” following an event, Digh encourages participants to identify long-term commitments to change behaviors. “The organization needs to take a long-term focus and build into the post-learning process a way to revisit it,” Digh says.

“Organizations have to have a broader belief that this work can make a difference,” Digh says.

NW Speakers Series - Materials

For those participants in the January 23rd NW Speakers Series session on "leaning into your discomfort," you can find PowerPoints slides from the session here. Please email if you'd like additional information.

Exploring the Power of Metaphor: A Circle Project Retreat

We sometimes overlook the tools we have at hand, those that are the most potent.

One of those is metaphor. As we've explored learning and organizational culture and story, we've come to appreciate the power of metaphor. Emerson has said, "The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind."

 We've become enamored of metaphors such as "desire lines" and "dorodango" and want to explore further how the metaphors we use both illuminate and obscure, how they help and how they hinder, both personally and organizationally.

This weekend retreat, "Desire Lines: Exploring the Power of Metaphor," will start that exploration. We'll make use of a beautiful space and place to explore metaphors of those same concepts, applying our learning to the organizational universes and systems in which we find ourselves. Come, join us!

Details follow...

Train the Trainer Intensive Retreat set for May 2007

Since we began our work, participants have expressed a desire to learn how to create experiential learning processes. This intensive "train-the-trainer" retreat is designed to explore learning and help participants "explode" their current training curricula by creating transformative, experiential processes that will come closer to what learning really is--a process that leaves us changed.

Come join us! This retreat, "Training at the Edge: Experiential Tools for Transformational Learning", is limited to 14 participants to allow for in-depth work for each person. It is appropriate for people who work in a wide variety of disciplines and types of organizations.

We will have online registration up and running soon; in the meantime, if you'd like to reserve a spot, let's do it the old-fashioned way: just email and let us know of your interest and we'll go from there. Details are below...