Findings

This section presents the findings that emerged from the data. The two key findings presented are well-being and networking. These two key themes are linked to the transformational nature of BM and the role played by digital workers. A particular note is paid to the workplace benefits that digital workers introduce as a result of being a BM participant.

Well-being

Physical well-being

The interviewees linked digital worker BM attendance to improvements to their subjective well-being. Such improvements ranged from physical fitness

Table 13.1 Interviewee profiles

(Continued)

Interviewee profiles

Digital workers, well-being & networking 233 through to improved emotional well-being, which resulted in increased levels of self-confidence, motivation and creativity, among other benefits. Attending BM is a physically and emotionally demanding experience, as participants seek to survive and thrive in a harsh desert environment. Interviewees relished the challenge of testing themselves in such conditions.

Amid the interviews were numerous stories of how participants were made stronger by their BM experiences - as AD, a consultant to tech start-up founders (among other roles) described, “BM is this powder keg compression chamber where you get put in, and it's only the strong who survive”. The physical demands of BM were recounted by interviewees as they described attending yoga workshops, walking or riding bikes all day, dancing at parties and putting themselves into physical danger to construct art installations. Constructing art installations was a recurring theme that linked creativity with transformative learning in an extreme environment. For example, BZ, TL and JK each recounted working on the development of large-scale art installations that incorporated digital elements (such as LED lighting, projections or robotics), and the risks they took in creating these artworks (such as working on high scaffolding, the destruction of artworks due to extreme weather conditions and the dangers associated with working with fire based art works). The physical challenges helped SC, an intellectual property lawyer working in an environmental start-up who is also the chair of a regional festival based on the BM concept, in “terms of figuring out what I could physically achieve and realising that I probably wasn’t as fit as I thought I was”, whilst for FI, who leads a government agency to develop a regional start-up ecosystem, his BM experiences led him to make healthy improvements to his lifestyle - “I started to take care of myself better - I did a yoga teacher training course for a year”.

Emotional well-being

Just as FI’s BM experiences led him to make changes to the way he took care of himself, other interviewees recounted how their BM experiences precipitated profound personal changes in relation to their emotional wellbeing. AD, who, amongst other work roles, is developing a new personal development framework, explained the role of emotional well-being being a healing process at BM:

There’s a lot of healing around sexuality that happens at Burning Man... A lot of people have so much shame, and construction and rules around sexuality. Burning Man is like a place where they feel like they can drop that and express themselves in ways that they thought were off limits to them or that really reveals deep seated trauma or discomfort.

Other interviewees also spoke of emotional power of healing that can occur at a TF like BM. RJ, who has founded two successful communicationagencies, and who has been to BM over a dozen times since the 1990s, recounted a powerful personal story about how he was encouraged to go to BM in search of healing:

My wife and I back then had had a rough experience in terms of a premature delivery of twins that we lost. It was a rough time for us. One day when I came back to work following that experience, a friend had put a candle on my desk that had a picture of the Man from Burning Man. Then it just had this beautiful quote on it about touching the flame. His suggestion was that what my wife and I needed was a healing journey by going to Burning Man. I felt it, and we did go ... and it was an incredible healing journey.

Others found the extreme conditions at BM not healing but exhilarating. As BZ, a successful tech-entrepreneur-turned-educator, author and conference organizer, recounted, “there are fewer and fewer chances to experience a place where it says on the ticket, you may die”. In other words, BZ was responding to the thrill of being immersed in an extreme event in the desert, where emotional limits were tested as much as physical ones.

As demonstrated in these quotes, people experience emotional well-being in different ways in relation to their BM experiences. AD provided some insights about why people are likely to experience well-being at BM that transforms them, stating that

when you’re at Burning Man, you’re like, cracked open to a degree that you wouldn’t be in normal life - people are just so much more interested in trying new things at Burning Man, and pushing their boundaries and accepting that they can grow and change when they’re in the container of Burning Man.

Subjective well-being reflects a change process known as transformative learning, which Mezirow (1997, p. 5) defined as “the process of effecting change in a frame of reference, whereby, frames of reference refer to the coherent body of experience which adults have”. In other words, the associations, concepts, values, feelings, conditioned responses which are seen to define their life world (p. 5). Transformative learning processes have been characterized as having positive outcomes for the learner, and Moore (2005) provided a list of such outcomes which reflected improvements to well-being. Examples include improved self-confidence in new roles and relationships, a greater sense of personal power and spiritual growth, deeper compassion for others, new connections with other people, and increased creativity (p. 86). Within the interviews for this study, all of these outcomes were evident.

Almost all interviewees reported deriving an increased level of selfconfidence in relation to their BM experiences, as AD reported, “the way

Digital workers, well-being & networking 235 that I envision myself after Burning Man is far more as a doer and a giver and a leader whilst for GC (TV producer), it’s inspired me to do more and bigger things”. An increased feeling of connectedness was also predominant, as interviewees recounted becoming more community-minded and connected to others. As JD, a Chief Marketing Officer at a tech start-up, recounted, “people have an idea of what BM is, and then you go there, then it's actually so much more about the stuff that you don't see, like the emotions and relationships and connections”. For SC, his newfound community-mindedness led him to starting and managing an innovative festival based on the BM concept:

The way Burning Man has changed me is that it’s made me more interested in community. It led me to get involved in founding our regional burn and running it. When I came back, I started looking for likeminded people, and a lot of the people I ended up bumping into had been to Burning Man. Because of that we had a common language, a common idea of like, let’s see if we can start something.

SC then reiterated how he was changed by his BM experiences, explaining that “before I went I wasn’t involved in community, I was just doing the everyday worker bee thing” and how “I’ve really changed a lot, becoming more involved in getting this community group up and running and trying to build a group of people whose common interests are developing art, making music and being creative”. Developing art through co-creation at BM recurred a lot in the narratives of the interviewees, becoming a leitmotif in conversations with burners about their experiences at BM. AD provided an explanation about the role that such experiences at BM play in leading people to experience profound personal change:

Burning Man takes you out of this transactional mindset where it's like: “I'm only going to give and participate and help if I can see a direct line to how it helps me.” So that's the way our world has taught us to think, especially if we're talking and thinking business, but it's not how we think at Burning Man.

For regular burners, BM provides an opportunity for ongoing personal development. But businesses that employ burners also benefit from the improved well-being of their staff, such as their increased levels of selfmotivation - as AD explained:

There is a freshness to Burning Man. To me every burn is the beginning of the New Year, like the man burning is a much bigger New Year celebration for me than January 1. It’s a marker to check in and see how far I’ve come and how much I’ve developed. And then also, it allows me to really come back to my work with a renewed sense of optimism, anda strong feeling that one, I am the kind of person who can create ripple effects in the world [...] The way that I envision myself after Burning Man is like, far more as a doer and a giver and a leader and a participator than maybe what I feel when I’m coming into it.

AD’s comments were reflected by other interviewees who recounted bringing the positive well-being effects that stemmed from their BM experiences into their workplaces, such as increased self-confidence and creativity. One such interviewee was RJ, who provided an example of how BM

gave me a different setting in my consciousness around what is really possible, and how Burning Man impacted how we came together not just as a company [...] because we became such a tribe and family beyond just the idea of a workplace [...] we were known as an IT company that brought a lot of technology and creativity together, something that I retro engineer that back to our experience at Burning Man and seeing how the latest technologies could also come together with creativity and make really cool things.

Creativity and making cool things are part of artistic experiences, illustrating the role of thinking outside the square had on transformative experiences.

Most interviewees discussed the well-being benefits they gained through their BM experiences. However, two interviewees cautioned that the use of narcotics by burners can have negative effects on their well-being. BZ pointed out, “there are tons of people who go there and develop horrible addictions or hook up with the wrong people or get really sick”. Hence, experiences are not all positive. In other words, not everyone benefits from the physical and emotional well-being environment created by BM. Some participants ruin their mental and physical health.

In sum, BM catalyses profound personal changes (transformative learning) in relation to well-being. Such personal changes result in people feeling more confident, motivated, connected and creative, positive changes which they bring to their workplaces, and from which their employers’ benefit. But not everyone as some destroy themselves by drug taking.