In May, we wrote about “Our Big Question.” This piece about learning throughout life & work was shared more and garnered more responses than nearly anything we've written. The ideas were actually born from some deeper research around the future of learning. So it was especially meaningful to hear from so many of you.

Now, we're excited you to invite you into a new, open research project called the Ei Sandbox.

Not Your Typical Research Project

For the next several months, Ei will be leading a community research project. True to our nature, we’re not going to just send surveys; we want to host experiences and experiments with you. These will range from 60-minute virtual sessions, to multi-part workshops over the course of a month, to dinner gatherings in various cities. Some will be open, and some will be application-only.

What Will You Learn With Us?
Aside from the experience itself and the chance to meet more of our stellar community, we’ll also be sharing our insights with our participants. Our hope is to have thousands of bits of information synthesized into bite-sized summaries that can inform:

• How to build or adapt your culture of learning for the modern-day worker.
  
  
• How to define what types of experiences you or your team need to learn next in order to grow together.
  
  
• How experiential learning fits into career growth and the workplace in a world still navigating a global pandemic, economic insecurity, and war.
  
  
• What core topics are helpful to continue learning in the changing landscape of work.
  
  
• How to design short, medium, or long experiences ranging from professional side projects to sabbaticals.
  
  
• How Web3 and the Metaverse might help to extend or augment opportunities for experiential, lifelong learning.

Who is this for?

We’re looking for three main co-experimenters:

1. You’re in a career and you’re starting to hit your edges. You know you want to learn and you’re looking for more experience to shape how you think, work, and practice your craft.
   
   

2. You’re leading a team, and you’re feeling a sense of burnout in yourself or on your team. You know learning is powerful, but you can’t fathom sending everyone another article or video. You want to facilitate experiences that shape values, foster mindsets, and build skills, but you’re not sure how.
   
   

3. You help lead learning or HR at your company. You’re interested in innovation and you’re trying new programs that will help people grow in their careers and feel good along the way. Sometimes, you see glimpses of joy or bursts of energy, and you want to expand upon those moments. Or you’ve seen signs of teammates buckling under the weight of the past three years and you want to explore new ways of supporting them.

When does it start?

We’ll start short experiments in July and begin recruiting for some of our multi-part projects later this summer.

If you’re interested, add your name here: sandbox.expinstitute.com. And if you know friends or colleagues who would be interested, please forward this along.

Oh, and this isn’t a newsletter subscription. We’ll only send emails when there’s an update or an experiment.

Join us!

We’re not exactly sure what will come of these experiments. But I do know we’re going to learn more about the way work is changing, what people need to navigate uncertain times, how we can design learning experiences throughout our lives, and how our careers and companies can be brighter when learning and community is more present. That’s work I’m excited to dive into. I hope you are too.

Victor and the team

https://sandbox.expinstitute.com