 All right, so today we're gonna talk about transformational learning experiences online. A lot of us obviously have this idea that, oh, online experiences are far less interesting and effective than in-person experiences. And obviously you can't replace the in-person. However, the person I'm talking with today, Laurence Sell, he's created a platform called Sutra, which we'll talk about later that allows, and not just the platform, but Laurence, what you teach helps people to bring more of the transformational aspect that they might only expect in-person into the online environment. So really excited to have you here. Laurence, thank you so much. Thanks, George, it's really great to be here. Yeah, so let me just kind of like share your official bio with folks, and then we'll get into this conversation about creating transformational online learning experiences. So, Laurence, you are the co-founder of sutra.co, and I just wanna first bring it up on the screen because I think it's good for people to kind of see it. And if I could spell it correctly, I will bring it up on the screen. So yeah, I just wanna show people. So sutra.co, and by the way, it's not sutra.com, right? It's sutra.co. Yeah, yeah, .co, yeah. And this is really, as you can see, it's built for people who are kind of like wisdom creators or wisdom communicators, people creating in the more holistic space. It's not just any kind of, just another online course platform. No, it's very much about like transformational experiences. So back to your background here. So the platform has supported programs at the Harvard program in refugee trauma and the United Nations and the Presencing Institute. So some really respected organizations that is using sutra. This platform now has over 24,000 people participating in group learning experiences, amazing. And you and your partner have also created an online mentorship program, a seven-week program called transformational teaching online which has helped hundreds of educators to create more meaningful connection, deep conversations for their online experiences. So anyway, we're gonna talk more about that, but let's dive right into this. What, how do you think about online learning experiences that's different from what most of us have experienced with online courses? Yeah, and I think you kind of use the word there that really jumped out on me, which is meaningful. You know, a lot of my journey with this work started with really an aspiration towards meaningful work, towards creating more love and connection into the world. And really the last 10 years has been about, what does that mean? What does that look like in practice and in a practical way, particularly online? And where that's really landed is just really seeing how an online learning experience can be a vehicle that invites particular ways of being together, that invites qualities of deep listening, of empathy, of presence, of really witnessing each other and seeing each other at a very deep level. So obviously I'm talking about a group experience. And I think it's important to know that when it comes to online learning, there's a broad spectrum of what that can mean, right, on one side of the spectrum you have, and a kind of experience where you put up some content and then a person goes through it at their own pace, what's called an evergreen self-paced experience. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have an experience where there's an emphasis on the communication and connection between the participants, so more of like a group experience. And then in between you have something where you have a course, and maybe you have content, you might have a Facebook group and people can post messages and there's activity, but there isn't necessarily an emphasis on the quality of relationship and intimacy between the participants. And none of these are necessarily better or worse than each other, they're just, they're different. And I think it's really important to understand that the differences and also the possibility that if you are a heart-centered creator and educator who really thrives from meaning, right? I think it's really important to understand also what's important to you. Because for some people it's that creating that kind of connection isn't an important, they have information they want to share and that's what they care about. But for other people that sense of I'm having a transformational impact on people, I'm creating a space of deep connection of transformation and that's really meaningful to me and the people who I'm working with, that's really meaningful. And so I think what's important to understand is that that's absolutely possible, online. It's obviously possible in person, but it's absolutely possible online. And that's really been the heart of our work is both really discovering that possibility, like what is possible online and then creating best practices and software to support these kinds of experiences. That's awesome. And a couple of questions about this. Is there a ideal number or range of number of people that you recommend so that the experience can feel more intimate or a meaning, the connection can feel more meaningful? Or is there not a number if it can be, I mean, we could talk about whether there is a maximum or minimum number for a group or maybe it doesn't really matter how large a group is, but it's about the breakout groups or the smaller groups that are formed within the larger container. What do you think about that? Yeah, exactly. And one of the insights that we had was that meaningful connection really happens in small groups. That it's really hard to feel connected to a group of a hundred people or a thousand people say in a Facebook group. But when you are in a group of say five to 10 people and there's a particular structure that invites your interaction, that invites a space of deeper intimacy and sharing, then there's an opportunity for a deeper connection. But if you have a larger community, so for example, a lot of this work for me started when around 2015 I participated in a program from the Presencing Institute which is an organization loosely affiliated with MIT. And they had 30,000 people in there in an offering that they had online and they put us into groups of five people. And so over the course of 10 weeks, I would meet once a week with these people. And I felt it was one of the first times when I felt a very deep level of connection with strangers online. And so this really crystallized this idea for me that the way that people feel connected is through small groups, but when you're in a small group in the context of a larger group and you feel connected to that small group, you can also feel connected to that larger group. So, you know, however big your population is. And I think this is also a really key area where something like prototyping really helps because you can start with a however big a population you ultimately want to address. If your goal is connection, you can start with a small group because you're really talking about something that's alive. Something connection happens when people are authentic, when they're present, when they feel safe. So these are qualities that are alive. They're not necessarily formulaic. They're gonna be different with every community, with everybody of knowledge. And when you approach that as a prototype, when you're really kind of approaching it from a space of, okay, I actually don't know how to do this. And I'll just say, you know, I've been doing this pretty much nonstop for 10 years and I still come back all the time to I actually don't know how to do this, but in a way that really opens up a space of curiosity and learning and even knowing that every time I work with a group, even if it's in the community of people that I've worked with before, that group is different, that group is alive. That group is, if there's something new that's emerging there, there's something new to learn. So really taking this approach of starting with a small group, prototyping, trying different things, really continuously learning about what works and then also possibly scaling that. So if something works with a group of five to 10 people and you have a larger community of a hundred or a thousand, then you can really look at gradually expanding that in a way that's organic, in a way that's authentic and in a way that's really informed by the real world behavior and experience of your participants. Awesome. In the experiences you've had, whether it is as a participant or as a facilitator, have you noticed any patterns in terms of common pitfalls that make the experience or that break the intimacy or break the meaningful connection? Is there any kind of like things that we should watch out for? Don't do this. Maybe even though they're, yeah, I agree with you, there's no formula for every group of every industry. There probably are some pitfalls that you've noticed. Have you anything you wanna share regards to that? Yeah, it's an interesting question as far as pitfalls. One of the challenges with doing this kind of, what I call my transformational experience design is that ultimately you're creating a space that invites a deep quality of authenticity and with that authenticity, things can come up and sometimes that can create a disruption in the space. Something can get activated in people. And so, I think ultimately, if you are creating a transformational space online, there's a whole slew of things to be aware of in the way that the space is defined and contained. In person, you have people's undivided attention for a whole day. There's a lot less distractions. You can have a lot more control online. There's a lot more variables. And I think this is also where prototyping really helps you gradually begin to become aware of the different variables that can affect your experience. This is gonna be different for everybody depending on the depth that you wanna take it to, depending on what's appropriate if you're working in a corporate environment versus if you're working with a group of seasoned awareness-based practitioners. Obviously, there's a very broad spectrum of how people might respond to different levels of authenticity and also in an online environment. When things come up, how that's handled, particularly right now, for example, there's a lot of work being done in the anti-racism space. And so that's a space where it's really easy to step into a very sensitive territory to have something potentially explosive come up. And how do you respond to that? How do you handle that in an online space? There aren't necessarily clear answers for that other other than for you as the spaceholder to really approach everything as a learning experience, as a prototype that you continually learn from and also invite your own authenticity in really sharing with people that you're learning, that your goal is to create a space of deep connection and authenticity. I think one of the things that I've learned is that the more clearly you can define what's ahead, the more likely you will avoid challenges. And so if you're, for example, if you're going into a sensitive topic area, just saying we're about to go into a sensitive topic area and so I just want to acknowledge that. Or even a simple, for example, if you're organizing an experience where you're organizing an online course, we plan to have a series of Zoom calls, being very clear on the schedule of those Zoom calls before people sign up, being very clear on the expectation of attendance because you might have your experience and say, well, no one's showing up for my Zoom calls or no one's doing this. So the more that that expectation of participation can be made absolutely clear beforehand, the more that anything that might come up might can be spoken to beforehand, more that people really have a choice and you kind of ask their permission along the way, the more the space becomes safer and can really sustain a deeper level of connection and interaction. Awesome. And you've spoken about this idea of prototyping several times and I wonder if you could go into it a little bit, like I agree with you, as an entrepreneur or a minded person, I always think that experimentation is everything and how we learn and we share that same mindset. So when you're prototyping a group experience, what does that really mean? Like, is it a launch? Is it a big launch? Do you, yeah, what is a big layout? Like, is this kind of like give us that kind of contrast between what we typically might think of as, I'm gonna launch a group program versus I'm prototyping something. Right, and I think this is the thing about prototyping and I'll just say that prototyping has really transformed my kind of entrepreneurial career. I really started with the book Lean startup that I thought is phenomenal as far as really what they call minimum viable product, which is kind of a version of prototyping. But, and also discovering the work of the processing and student, they have something called Theory U, which is really heavily about looking at a space where you want to innovate, observing that space, really sensing it, really building a very visceral, personal relationship with it to allow some sort of new insight to emerge and then crystallizing that insight into action, into some kind of prototype that allows you to really ground it and test it in reality and then take the learning from that and repeat that process of observing, sensing, and again crystallize it. And so, in that sense, prototyping can mean kind of like what you suggested, it can mean in more marketing context where you put together a landing page or an offer and then see how many people sign up for it. But in the group sense, a prototype is really testing different approaches to how you bring the group together. So you're creating a container, you're offering people particular agreements and expectations, you are enrolling commitment. And then when it comes to this kind of transformational work, you're doing something that I call warming up the space. And this involves a particular rhythm of maybe if you're working with say a slightly larger group of over 10 people doing some breakout groups, offering people prompts, maybe some journaling, maybe some stillness, different kinds of activities. And so all of these activities, all of these things that you put into that mix to warm up that space, right? Because you put a group of people together and the default response is people kind of quiet, people like, you know, they're a little guarded, it's natural, even the most enlightened people, you put them in room, it takes a moment to kind of thaw that ice and really warm up. And so in the work that we do when it comes to this thing called transformational experience design, it's really about how do you warm up that space? How do you create a space of vulnerability? How do you create a space of sharing and deep connection? And so the prototype is really all the different approaches to that, the different activities, the rhythm that you bring into that online in the context of what you do, right? And because that's also gonna be different with, like as I mentioned, different communities, different bodies of work. And so the prototype is really finding the particular flavor and expression that is yours, that is appropriate for your community and the people that you're working with by working with different activities and then different rhythm and pacing. And it can be subtle just from kind of, you know, across different Zoom calls, you know, I like to think there's hard metrics and there's soft metrics. There's hard metrics like I put up a landing page and this many people signed up and I did some A-B testing and this page is better than this page. But when it comes to a transformational experience, we're really talking about soft metrics. Like how did the space feel? You know, how did the people feel? It's something you can have as a kind of a visceral experience. And in my experience over the last 10 years, that's the prototype is you're really, you're bringing a group together and you're sensing, okay, like I'm trying this and this is the response that I received and this is how it felt and this is how the participants felt and this is how, you know, we kind of started here as a felt sense and we ended here as a felt sense. As we went through this journey and so maybe you can't quite quantify it with hard numbers, but you can feel it. And as you get more practiced at that, you really begin to develop a sense for that. And you also teach about the gathering of the feedback, I guess, from those who those, the groups that you are prototyping. I'm like as my students and clients know, I'm really obsessive about feedback as well. Like I'm always looking to say, how can I improve? How can this group improve? What was that like for you? What was your favorite thing? What was one thing that you could, that you suggest to be different? But how do you think about getting feedback so that we can continue to improve the prototype? Yeah, I mean, exactly what you just said. And I'm similarly, you know, such a big fan of gathering feedback in any way possible over the last 10 years. I mean, I don't know how many surveys and user interviews I've done, but a lot. And so for me, that revolves around if you're running a course experience, you can do a pre-course survey just to really understand your participants a little more. But you know, what's your intention? What's your background? You know, whatever questions are gonna give you information that will somehow inform you better about who exactly are the participants in your experience. And then I always do a mid-course survey and the mid-course survey again, just ask people about, for example, I'll ask how is your experience of the Zoom calls and they'll have five options, something like transformed my experience, was, I don't remember the exact things, but was really great, was okay, you know, kinda not so good, bad. And then we always ask a classic what's called a net promoter score, you know, how likely are you to recommend this experience to another person, which is always such a powerful and telling response because if a person's likely to recommend it, they're obviously satisfied with the experience. And then we always do exit surveys, you know, some kind of just questions that help us understand about the person's experience in the course. I'll, you know, especially in the earlier stages of the formation of a course, doing face-to-face interviews, like you can get that much into so much information from a survey, but you know, having that conversational flow of, you know, a person says something and you kinda go off script a little bit to dive a little deeper to really understand their experience. If you're serious about creating a space that really invites this deep quality of connection, it, you know, really, the trick is really getting inside the mindset of your participants about what's important to them. And some of these things, they're, you know, they're tasks that you just kinda get a feel for them and having conversations with your participants really helps that. And then the other thing I'll add, which is kind of a unique question that I found so powerful and it's in your questions that you offered a minute ago to remind me of, is really asking people, you're really trying to tap into the listening that people have for you. So that might mean something like asking them, what are my strengths and what are my weaknesses? You know, really giving them permission to just speak directly to how they perceive you. How can you understand, you know, if you're trying to work with a particular community, there's your skills, there's what you're good at. But then there's just the perception that that community has of you. And sometimes we don't see that. Sometimes it's somehow it's blind to us. And to the extent to which you can create an opportunity for people to speak to you directly about that so that you can become aware of that and work with that however you need to, I find that's one of the most powerful things you can do. It's a courageous thing. Yeah, it's hard. And I was actually shocked. I recently, you know, was speaking with a whole bunch of our creators and I gave them this assignment of doing this work. And I was really surprised that almost none of them did it. Because it is, it's really, really hard. Yeah, it's like you have to really be ready to be neutral about receiving it, not be defensive, you know, or not be too shy when someone says, these are your strengths. I'm like, oh, you know, thank you. That's very helpful to understand you're thinking about the feedback gathering. So I'd love for you to say a bit more about the transformational teaching online. Did I get that right? I know it's TTO, transformational teaching online, yes. Which is an upcoming, and you do this on an occasional basis. So whenever people are, okay, yeah, awesome. And so I'm just gonna go to the link, TTO.sutro.co and I'm gonna share the screen real quick just to kind of people can see it. There it is, awesome. Transformational teaching online. So do you wanna just talk us through what can be expected as people sign up for this? Sure, and I'll just share briefly the backstory. You know, my wife and I, we started TTO five years ago really kind of out of this combination of our search for you. How do you create meaningful connection? How do you bring more love into the world? And how do you do this online? And so over the last five years, we had an opportunity to work with a lot of different organizations, a lot of different individuals. Really in almost like a continuous prototype. And just before COVID hit at the beginning of 2009, 2019, I think so. Yeah, end of 2019, yeah. Yeah, end of 2019, yes, exactly. We realized that we had so much, we'd learned so much and that we'd really built this platform to be used in a particular way. And that we wanted to kind of condense everything we learned into a course to share the best practices around this. So this was the first cohort of TTO actually launched just before COVID went live. And actually halfway through is when COVID really came into the mainstream. And it was really interesting how the work that we do now with the TTO is so relevant to the possibility of and the necessity of really connecting online. And so the TTO is really about how do you create an online space that invites deep qualities of presence, meaningful connection, deep conversation. And we take you through every aspect of creating the content, the technical setup, learning how to facilitate groups online, and how to work with embodiment practices. But really, and I think this is the most powerful part of the course is that it's not conceptual. It gives you a direct experience of what's possible. And when people come through this experience, they end up having a life-changing experience. And we've had so, if you go to the course page, I highly recommend watching the testimonials because I can't do justice to the experience. And I mean, it's life-changing for me just to be a participant in it because it's literally co-created by all of us. And many of the people who come, some of the people who come have no experience with working with people online. They just have an aspiration to do this kind of work. If you scroll up a little bit, you'll see there's a bunch of video interviews. I think they're not there right now, but... They're there right now for some reason. Maybe there you go. There you go. Yeah, okay. So some of the people who come into the course they have very little experience. And some of the people who come into the course have decades of experience working with people, working with trauma, working as healers. And so what happens in the course is that you get this direct experience of what's possible in a community of practice. And you come out of it with, first, this deep sense of meaningful connection with your peers. You come out of it really having had an experience, a direct experience yourself of what's possible. I think that's what's the most valuable. I mean, yes, of course, people in the TTO course learn the how-tos of creating this type of experience. But then the actual, the experience itself is I think the greatest learning. It's life-changing. Therefore, they're excited to actually do this with their own community too. But thank you so much, Lorenz. Obviously those who are watching this video, the link is above or below wherever you're watching this. It's tto.sutra.co, yes, tto.sutra.co. But check out the link. And any questions about the program, comment below and I'll make sure Lorenz sees it. Thank you so much, Lorenz, for the work that you do and how you do it and just the impact that you're making by helping so many caring, wise creators and teachers be able to make a much deeper impact online than before. So thank you. Thank you, George. And thank you for the work that you do. It really touches my heart. Thank you.