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Learning from experience, not "experience"
Think for a moment about some good experience you've had recently. A fun trip, or an especially good meal, or a healthy interaction, a process with a successful outcome, a welcome surprise, a happy moment. Something specific. Have it in mind?
Now let me ask: would you rather have had that experience, directly, or would you have preferred to hear someone describe the characteristics of good experience, in the abstract? Perhaps with a diagram and flowchart to go with it? What do you prefer, and what has more impact?
See, there's a difference between an experience... and "experience." One is immediate, and the other - with the quotes - is abstracted. The experience is something you have, and feel directly, while "experience" is something you hear about from a distance, often through a "guru" or other mediator.
I've always found it ironic that "experience" is often presented in such a dry, abstract fashion - supported with tools, methodologies, frameworks, layers, constructs, paradigms, and so on. To put it bluntly, studying "experience" is often not, itself, a good experience. (Actually I'd argue that it goes beyond irony and reveals a fundamental flaw in how user experience as a discipline is taught and understood.) In contrast, the best way to understand "experience" is to go out and have good experiences, directly.
This is why I'm drawn to people who are actually out there doing something, creating something good, which create dual outcomes of the project itself, and the bonus of serving as a great teaching tool about good experience.
The attendees of our recent Gel 2010 conference experienced, I hope, some measure of this - seeing, hearing, meeting, and interacting with people and projects that are creating good experience in the worlds of business, art, technology, and life. I actually don't know any other way to present my thoughts on good experience except to show example after example, hero after hero, case study after case study. There's no need for dry abstract constructs when there's such rich material available in the world. (Incidentally, one of my favorite Gel presenters this year was Sal Khan, whose video is required viewing for anyone interested in good experience.)
My suggestion is to be attuned to what you're experiencing. Are you learning something from your direct experiences, or are you relying on frameworks about "experience"?
Mark, I think you're right, there's a deep irony here. The point is to help design great products and services for people to experience themselves. You can't control that. You can't even design that directly.
People think of user experience as a discipline and organizations carve out roles to fill for it. That's the wrong approach. It leads to producing all sorts of abstract artifacts that, as you say, get us further from the real thing rather than closer to it.
Creating all that good stuff that delights people when they browse and skim and click and laugh and ignore takes craftsmanship from domain knowledge in each area. Not UX design.
Sketching turns out to be a great tool for getting teams to see and solve problems across disciplines. Gets people hands-on, seems more "real" from the start, and gets everyone visualizing the desired result from the start.
After leaving my job to take a break, I started again to look out for a new challenge. One of the most interesting parts of my job hunt was to go through the different hiring experiences. My verdict: 9 out of 10 hiring experiences were awful. Surprisingly, most of the businesses providing a bad experience state the goal to be a preferred employer to survive the so called "war for talents" and refer to studies where they are regarded to be one (the studies are mostly done with people who actually don't work for these companies). However, how do you want to attract talent (other than with a huge paycheck) if you don't care for them during the application process? How is the employee experience like if the hiring experience is already painful?
So, based on my negative experiences, it's my goal, rather sooner than later, to have an impact on a business' HR-experience, because I'm convinced a business can make there a true difference and gain competitive advantage.