# Strategic Value of Mind-Bending Employee Experiences

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-10-20

## Transcript

Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Wille and Teresa Kortz.
And we're so happy you're here.
Petra, I have a weird topic for us today.
I want to explore, I think I'm going to frame it as like mind-bending experiences.
Oh my god.
Yeah, big time.
Context, context.
Things that happen in your life at an event, like...
I know both of us have conferences that we've attended that fall into this category and not like normal work conferences, but a little bit more.
We can talk about that.
Mind-bending conferences.
Or like for me, like pushing myself to do activities that are maybe outside my comfort zone or like reading something that's like so counter to your point of view, like something that pushes you.
to see the world a little differently or see yourself a little bit differently.
And like whether or not companies should be trying to create these experiences for their employees.
And is there a benefit to that?
And so like maybe we could just start with like, what do we mean by mind bending experiences?
You could share a little bit about your House of Beautiful business experience.
And then maybe we can get into like, is this something companies should be thinking about as a way to like, help grow their employees.
Yeah, so it's actually really hard to pinpoint what actually happens if you attend this, the House of Beautiful Business conference, or in the past, I have been attending the conference in Malmö, Sweden, which had a similar vibe.
It was always a mixed bag.
You were never fully sure what you would get experiences-wise, topics-wise, formats-wise.
But you knew you go there for, I don't know, new lenses, new angles, thoughts that you have never thought, but you see people comfortably thinking about these things all the time, which is massively inspiring.
And it really brings you in this like, huh, is that something that I should think about more often as well?
And then oftentimes it's not, by the way.
So oftentimes you're just like, oh, I appreciate you thinking about the topic, but.
It has nothing to do with my corner of the internet or world.
So I appreciate the beauty of your thought, but it's not helping me over here.
And still, I always come back richer.
I think it's very similar to the experience that you sometimes have when exposed to art, because you have to really immerse yourself in the art experience to some extent to build a connection with it.
And these conferences are...
a bit similar to my art experience at least so to some extent maybe you can share about your your conference experience as well um and they are still business events so to some extent you still talk business and maybe there's something about how to retrofit houses to the current changes in world climate or something like that.
Is that something that I will need next week?
No.
But will we maybe need to retrofit some of the software that we have written in the past?
Maybe yes.
So maybe it will come, the point will come where this might be an interesting piece of knowledge.
Maybe not.
Maybe I can connect the dots.
Maybe not.
But at least it's inspiring.
At least it creates this more artsy resonance in me.
And I always feel enriched and coming back richer than I went.
And it always has some very raw and, I don't know how to call it, personal interaction with other humans.
that I haven't planned for, that are outside of my bubble, that have other thoughts than I have, other opinions that I have, other backgrounds, experiences, worldviews.
So that in itself has a lot of beauty.
And it's rare that you find that places if you're not attend such a conference or, and I see, by the way, companies asking more for different types of events again.
So I think the in-person offsite was a bit dead over the last few years for whatever reason, maybe budget constraints, but I see them coming back to some extent.
I have more companies saying like, hey, we're bringing the band together and we want to create different experiences than in the past.
We don't only want to talk about our strategy or next year planning and we don't only want to focus on improving a skill.
that we currently want everybody to improve.
We want to really push everybody out of their comfort zone.
Sports is often added to the mix.
We can double click on that, I would say in a second.
Yeah.
But what's your mind bending business experiences?
Yeah, I think a word that comes to mind is awe.
Yeah, that's a lovely word.
Experiences that inspire awe.
It's such a little word that has so much power.
So for years, I went to the World Domination Summit, which was a conference put on by Chris Guillebeau.
And the tagline of the conference was how to live a remarkable life in a conventional world.
And it was, it's not the Silicon Valley like bro achievement remarkable.
It's more like what's remarkable for you.
It's about like life fit.
And it was very inspiring.
awe-inspiring every year.
So like one year this guy, I can't remember his name, Colin somebody, like did a solo trip across Antarctica and his talk was just about his story and like that's very awe-inspiring.
Like another time a magician stood on the stage and talked about the role magic played in his life and while he was doing it...
He did one of the most mind-bending magic tricks I've ever seen in my entire life.
And even just describing it, I'm getting goosebumps.
Like, that's how powerful it was.
I heard a talk by an NPR person, someone really famous.
I'm not going to remember her name.
And she gave a really raw story about losing her job and having no idea what she was going to do next.
And just the, like, bravery of telling that story.
And not after the fact.
Not after it all turned out fine.
but in the middle of the messy middle of having no idea where she was going.
And every year it was like eight speakers and you never knew what you were going to get.
And some of them were like crunchy bits.
Like I started this blog and got to a million readers and here's how I did it.
But most of them were very real human stories that were humans doing remarkable things in ways that were meaningful to them that left you really just thinking about what the hell am I doing with my life?
And it shook you.
It did.
It literally did.
I actually moved to Oregon because of this conference.
Like there was a year where a woman talked about, I don't even remember what her talk was about.
I don't remember the topic at all.
What I remember is at the end of the talk, she passed out strips of paper that said one year from now, fill in the blank.
And the point of her talk was like, what have you been putting off?
that you're not doing, that you're going to commit to doing by the time you come back to this conference next year.
And what I filled in the blank, I was living in San Francisco at the time.
I was fed up with the Bay Area.
I didn't want to live somewhere where the only thing people did in their life was work, where people had good jobs and were stressed out about not being able to afford life.
And what I filled in the blank was by this time next year, I'm going to find a new home.
And you did.
And I did.
Honestly, like by the next year.
When the conference was coming up, I was like, holy crap, I need to find a new home.
And I started to look at other cities.
I actually decided on Portland.
The conference was based in Portland.
And at the next year conference, I signed a contract for an apartment.
This is so amazing.
And I moved the following August.
And so what did this do for me?
It was really about hearing.
really human stories sometimes of accomplishment but it wasn't about the accomplishment it was about people finding the thing for them it was always very personal finding the thing for them that created meaning and pushed them outside their comfort zone and that there was meaning in that and this is why I associate it with awe like how do we get so uncomfortable that it creates meaning and there's The book, The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, I think falls into this category, which I recommend to people.
But I think good things happen at those end.
Yeah.
And another framing, and that is coming to the sports connection, I think, is this, how do we create an environment where people are so in the moment?
that something beautiful happens as well and that i think for example that's i'm big in all the water and wind sports so that's kite surfing and wing foiling that's all mine um and you cannot practice that while checking your email this it's just not it's just not happening right so you have to gear up get into your wetsuit it has to be windy usually the conditions are like not so pleasant unless you're at the Red Sea in Egypt and it's warm.
But other than that, oftentimes it's not so pleasant conditions, but still you're excited about getting out there.
You have to fall down a board 1 million times only for 30 seconds, right?
But this feels amazing.
So you're willing to do it another 30,000 times.
And that is another thing that I really like if companies allow employees to experience something like that and it can be all sorts of things for example when i was at sap um moto racing was big back then was like one million years ago but i remember us having a team event where we were really going to one of the formula one courses and it was i don't know daimler mercedes cars back then um that we were allowed to really fastly drove over the tracks.
And you cannot do this half-assed as well, right?
So you were very present.
You were very much in the moment.
Of course, there was an introduction.
Of course, there was a safety training part of it and blah, blah, blah, all the things.
But it was such a different experience and it was still an amazing team building.
And I think it created so much energy within the entire department back then that it had really a long lasting energy boost for all of us to some extent.
And I saw that happening for similar things as well with different sports.
You're doing different sports, right?
What's your thing?
Yeah, the kite surfing comment of like, you can't be checking your email.
This is mountain biking and hockey for me.
They both require 100% of your attention.
Like there's no ability for your mind to wander.
Especially for me with mountain biking, because I have no depth perception.
So my brain has to work exceptionally hard to even follow the trail.
And you don't really want to make a mistake, you know, like it hurt.
Yeah.
But I actually find this to be the benefit of both activities.
This is like a huge benefit of both activities.
First, they're incredibly fun, but they're also like complete and total escapes from the rest of my mental life.
And I think that's important.
I also think like one of the things I love about sport and where I think it could be really helpful on like team events is like offsites is when you're learning a new sport, it's like we get to practice being a beginner again.
Oh, this is so important.
Even like mountain biking or hockey.
I've been playing hockey for a very long time.
I'm a fairly new, only in the last several years, mountain biker.
But I don't think it matters.
Like no matter how long I do both sports, there's always things I'm learning to do.
There's always things I'm not very good at.
Right.
And so one thing I love about sport is it allows you to practice getting comfortable with being a beginner, getting comfortable with learning how to break down a skill and how do I practice that skill?
And there's always going to be people better than you.
There's always going to be people that you're better than.
And like, how do you just get comfortable with this continuous improvement mindset, pushing outside your comfort zone and also just feeling strong in your body and like how empowering that is.
Yeah.
And there's, that's by the way, if you're designing such experiences for a professional environment, that is sometimes a bit of the tricky part because if you.
Let's say you have a team and three hierarchy layers included.
Then not everybody is comfortable to struggle in front of everybody else in such activities, right?
So whoever is designing these activities need to be cautious about hierarchy and politics to some extent.
And maybe we split the group in certain ways so that it's easier for the people to...
be with their peers or something like that.
But in general, and in most companies, it's not no problem at all, right?
If I would look to all my Scandinavian clients, nobody would care.
So if the boss is not good as equally good in horse riding, then everybody else, nobody would care.
But in other environments, maybe this is just not appropriate to put your boss on a horse and then not succeeding in horse riding.
So it really depends on cultural preferences here as well.
But in general, I think it would be amazing if companies would do more.
And we talked about innovation, right?
And why innovation is so boring for the sake of novelty and for the sake of innovation.
But I think if you allow people to step outside of their cubicle and outside of their LLM boxes that everybody of us is contained into these days.
and really experience life and the interface of nature maybe every once in a while that actually creates an energy that might lead to the innovation that everybody was hoping for in the first place.
I will add one caveat to this.
So I love this exploration.
I also think that if leaders are going to plan something like this, they have to get input from their teams.
Yeah.
Because I also think this is a way...
Please do not put everybody on the mountain bike or under the car.
Yeah, because you don't want to alienate people.
And like, I'll just share like your experience at the F1 raceway.
I don't have a driver's license.
Like if I was on that team, that would be totally...
That was not required.
That would be totally alienating to me, right?
I'm glad it wasn't required.
But like we see companies making policies like this.
Like I remember when I read...
that DoorDash was requiring their employees to do deliveries.
I was like, wow, what would I do if I worked at that company?
I can't do deliveries.
Bike deliveries, Theresa.
True, I could do bike deliveries.
But I also think with sport in particular, we have to be cognizant of like, not everybody's in an abled body.
Not all disabilities are visible.
And so I think that's where if you're going to do something like this, you have to find a way to get feedback from your team that's safe for people to expose those things and what they're comfortable with.
So I do love this idea.
Yeah, I do love this idea that companies should create experiences that one, inspire awe and two, push people like outside their comfort zone a little bit.
And keep them in the moment.
Keep them in the moment.
That's the thing.
When you push people outside their comfort zone, it has to be in the zone of proximity.
It has to be close to what they're comfortable with.
If you push too far, it's not helpful.
So that's where I feel like this feedback loop of getting your employees to co-design the experience helps to make sure it does push a little bit, but not too much.
Important addition.
Thank you so much.
I love that.
That was a beautiful topic to explore with you.
Talking about all amazing and arts.
Thank you, Teresa.
Thanks.
Thanks, Petra.