My Year In Review: Surprises, Change, Growth

This past year, I’ve experienced an enormous amount of change and professional growth. I’m excited to share it with you. I made space for a seismic shift in my career path by choosing to scale back Chicago Detours, the tour company I started in 2010. I want to focus on what I most enjoy and am best at — designing experiences that build community and instill organizational culture.?

By 2020, Chicago Detours had grown to a team of 10, and the way it looked in early March, we were projecting business growth of 30% for the year. Though it sounds great, I’d been feeling stuck at a career ceiling. As I scaled the company, operational demands kept pulling me away from the enjoyable aspects of business ownership.

Then COVID shut down everything. We had to ditch our plan to churn through thousands of tour guests and all the marketing and operations necessary to achieve that. My team and I had problems to solve, strategy to devise, and the entirely new media of live, virtual tours via Zoom. Suddenly, my skills in business strategy, communications, leadership, problem solving, data analysis, project management, storytelling, and experience design were put to the test.

While most companies in our industry had shut down, we thrived that year by pivoting very quickly. The number of guests we had served over 10 years quintupled in size in just nine months. Entrepreneur and Inc magazines featured us in articles about innovative pivots. The last time I had been so professionally stimulated was at the start of my business. The entire process of that shift confirmed for me that I wanted to do what I love and am best at — solving problems, innovating, adapting to change, and designing meaningful experiences.?

These days I work as an experiential design consultant for museums and corporate workplace experiences, and have been integrating special projects into organizational cultures. Chicago Detours maintains institutional clients like Northwestern University, Deloitte, and the University of Chicago for customized tour experiences for specific groups. And I've been selectively considering full-time positions while my consulting projects keep me busy.?

I’ll launch my personal portfolio website at the end of the month! Thank you for reading this somewhat self-focused post - it means everything to me that you want to share in my journey and are curious about my work.??

EXPERIENTIAL DESIGN

Everything I do falls under "experiences" in some way. First let me share some projects with Chicago Detours. Our clients for custom experiences this year included Slalom, Jump Trading, Boston Consulting Group, and several universities. I find that the companies that are looking for something different - and thus find Chicago Detours - are mostly in tech and consulting. Custom experiences with Chicago Detours blend exploration of Chicago history and architecture — via foot, bus or boat — with initiatives in workplace experience and organizational culture. We’ve prided ourselves on educating people on looking at architecture from new perspectives, both downtown and in neighborhoods.?

For the University of Chicago, my alma mater, we customized tours for graduating seniors, family members of students, and new students. For orientation week with freshmen undergrads, we led a Chicago neighborhood tour. On the bus tour, I pointed out possible future experiences for their time in Chicago — like checking out the 16th street murals in Pilsen, exploring the cultural riches of the Stony Island Arts Bank, or eating at neighborhood restaurants. We hopped off the bus several times to make the experience more active.?

For this particular audience, I applied concepts in history, cultural geography, urban planning, and sociology to the stories I shared of Chicago. Beyond the intellectual appeal, this tour — like all our experiences — sought to engage people emotionally with stories that inspire, make people laugh, introspect, and feel connected with both one another and the city.?

In October, Chicago Public Library brought on Chicago Detours for Polish American Heritage Month. We offered two virtual tours and one in-person tour on Polish history. This was particularly fun for me to create a virtual tour of Avondale, which is the neighborhood I live in. I dug through archives and talked with people who lived the history to uncover stories that connect to sites still around today. The 80+ virtual tour guests "traveled" down streets with me as I used 360-degree Google Street View images.?

EXPERIENTIAL CONSULTING

As an experiential consultant for a variety of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, I’ve been excited to apply my learnings from my second human-centered design course with IDEO U. When coming up with a new experience, the standard approach would be for a producer to generate an idea, make it for an audience, and hope they like it. An example of how this standard approach misses the mark is when museums put content into self-guided tour apps and then visitors have no interest in a self-guided tour within that context. With human-centered design, you start with people's feelings, desires, and needs before even thinking about what the solution could be.?

For the Illinois Medical District (IMD), I am applying a human-centered approach for the development of a place-based storytelling program. IMD understands the power of storytelling for engaging workers, students, and residents in the district’s various indoor and outdoor spaces. With so many various media for place-based storytelling - like video, apps, QR codes, games, and in-person tours — the question is, how do we choose the media that people will want to engage with?

My human-centered approach starts with a discovery phase where I empathetically observe and interview stakeholders. After analyzing insights, I will start to test on a small scale the various media formats we could use. Through a process of testing and iteration, the IMD team and I will identify the best approach for maximum engagement before designing the larger program.?

For a current consulting project with the American Writers Museum, I am outlining the visitor experience in a journey map as part of the process of identifying opportunities for enhancing the experience. In particular, I am synthesizing my observations with data from other institutions, and then proposing experiential solutions that fit within their operational framework.?

For the Alternative Schools Network, I created a place-based storytelling program to engage high school students with the places in their neighborhoods. The program integrates visual storytelling and historical research with exercises in emotional intelligence development and teamwork. I’d love to modify this program and apply it to a Learning & Development activity for a corporate workplace experience.?

And for a historic house museum, I completed the first phase of a consulting project to revamp their visitor experience. I proposed solutions for streamlining the museum’s operations while optimizing the delivery of content digitally or in-person.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

My new professional passion is organizational culture. Having led thousands of team building groups, I have been fascinated by how company culture shapes group dynamics. Recently, I flew out to Boston for an in-person course at Harvard called “Building Organizational Cultures.”?

This course gave me perspectives beyond what I’ve learned via trial and error with Chicago Detours, which I scaled from just myself to a team of ten. To give you an idea of Chicago Detours’ own organizational culture, Glassdoor reviews mention “creativity and integrity,” that “ideas are encouraged,” and that it was a “fun place to work."

I naturally fell into working in organizational culture because expression of it is through in-person and virtual events. Due to my background in designing virtual events to be fun and interactive, PLAY Project reached out to me. This early intervention program for children with autism brought me on to translate the company’s values into its virtual conference. I designed the experience to incorporate stories, graphics, and social activities that instill organizational culture and built community for virtual attendees. Pictured above are some results of their “Slogan Sprint,” where PLAY Project consultants went into breakout rooms and created visual expressions of various principles for the PLAY methodology.?

Additionally, I’ve helped small business clients strategize organizational culture. Depending on their budgets, priorities and goals, I customize plans that include organizational culture assessments, cultural communications like employer brand statements, and roadmaps for change.

One element of organizational culture specifically relates most to what I’ve done with Chicago Detours — in-person experiences. With executive recruitment firm Spencer Stuart, we hosted an event that built employees’ connections to the office. I studied the views from their office to customize a presentation for a happy hour.?

On the surface, it was a fun and casual architectural presentation of what people could see from the windows on the 26th floor. On another level, I integrated ideas that would make coming to the office more meaningful for people. I carefully considered the entire experience of an employee going to the Spencer Stuart offices in order to point out nearby sites that might be of interest to them; highlight historical elements that reflect Chicago as a place for innovation (which can be a selling point for recruitment); and tell stories with emotional appeal.?

While the experience likely appealed to those already more curious about architecture, design, and history, the presentation appealed to various interests — from engineering to shopping. It’s one example of how events can enrich the workplace experience.

PUBLIC SPEAKING

In addition to the aforementioned event at Spencer Stuart, I had several speaking engagements this year. Here are just a few!

Consulting firm McKinsey & Company had been a regular virtual event client when their Chicago office was 100% remote. They invited me to present for the reopening of their office. I gave a hybrid presentation of our “Badass Women in History” program which uses the stories of six women with varied talents to reflect on how women’s history impacts us today. In-person guests got the Badass Women Journal that we created.?

Small business platform Hello Alice featured me as a panelist for a presentation on the state of small business for a private event with TransUnion. Hello Alice had given Chicago Detours a grant in 2020 that helped support our experimentation and iteration of new virtual products. I was impressed to learn about TransUnion’s strategies for building financial inclusion, and got to experience the delicious Mediterranean-inspired food at Sociale in the South Loop.

PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL GROWTH

I love how the new shift in corporate culture welcomes more authenticity as the divide between work and personal realms becomes more blurred. How can we separate professional growth from personal growth? They feed each other.

More ways I’ve been growing and learning:?

• Developed skills in leadership, management, and innovation from Seth Godin’s altMBA program.?
• Joined the nonprofit board of Media Burn Archive and am advising on experiences for programming.?
• Became a first-time puppy owner, with all its joys and challenges.
• Cultivated a daily meditation practice to practice mindfulness.?
• Started taking JB-style roller skating lessons. I love it because it challenges my coordination and balance, the music is awesome, and it’s so fun.
• Returned to writing, drawing, collage, and graphic design for the LinkedIn articles I’ll be publishing soon (all about experiential design, future of work, organizational culture)!???

I’ve been feeling so much gratitude for what Chicago Detours has been, and the generous ways people helped my small business succeed. In October, I had a celebratory event at Chopin Theatre for our customers, clients, collaborators, suppliers, vendors, partners, employees, friends and family. I didn’t want the event to be about me, so rather than announcing the changes for me and Chicago Detours, the event focused on expressing gratitude and providing guests with a killer Chicago Detours-style experience. If you're curious, more about the event will be on my portfolio website (launching soon!).?

And if you’ve made it this far, then you really deserve to see this two-minute-long video:?