We started because the training wasn't working.
In 2013 three Perth practitioners with very different backgrounds - business, occupational therapy, training, education, theatre and improvisation - looked at the workplace training landscape and saw the same problem. Programs were being designed to be delivered, not to land. Participants were sitting in rooms watching slides, ticking attendance, walking out unchanged. And the training meant to address it was, by and large, performance theatre of the wrong kind.
We started The Experience Lab to fix that.
Three founders. One conviction.
The work didn't start in 2013. It started in 1989, when Angela and Michael Sanderson-Green - both Occupational Therapists - left full-time clinical work and formed two companies on the same day. Sanderson-Green Personal Development Consultants was the corporate vehicle, taking scenario-based experiential training first into schools across Western Australia, then into workplaces at a time when "workplace training" still meant a binder and an overhead projector. The Australian Institute of TheatreSports was the improvisation craft that underpinned it.
Almost twenty-five years of that work - corporate facilitation in Australia and South-East Asia, theatre training, championship-level improvisation, ongoing clinical insight into how adults actually learn and change - became the foundation. In 2013 Angela and Michael partnered with Jacob Fjord, who brought corporate management, producing experience and a frontline community-services background, and The Experience Lab was formed.
From the beginning, the model was different. Not a single person delivering. A team. A specialist facilitator and trained Corporate Actors, scenarios written for the team in front of us, debrief built around what participants said and did in the room. The model was different. So was the result.
Three disciplines, joined deliberately.
The craft of putting a recognisable scene in front of an audience and making them feel it. Forum Theatre, Lived Experience, Character Interview, Rehearsal for Reality - these aren't borrowed metaphors. They're trained methods.
Occupational therapy, organisational development, workplace behaviour and compliance knowledge. The reason a session on Psychosocial Hazards lands in the language of the WHS Code of Practice, not in actor-speak.
The discipline to scope tightly, deliver consistently and turn up on time across mining sites, hospital wards, government departments and university lecture theatres. Theatre without operational rigour is a hobby. We are not a hobby.
More than a decade in.
Today The Experience Lab employs more than 80 Corporate Actors and is the preferred provider for leading organisations in mining and resources, state government, healthcare and tertiary education. We're powered by a core team of professional directors, facilitators, workplace behaviour experts, writers and producers - the InTELs.
135,000 participants. 170 organisations. 97.5% positive feedback. We have delivered for Woodside, Rio Tinto, Chevron, the WA Police Force, Curtin University, Murdoch University, Fiona Stanley Hospital and Perth Children's Hospital - among others. The recognisable names matter, because they reflect what most teams are looking for: evidence that we can hold a room of senior professionals, deliver in their language, and move the dial on behaviour.
Where we've been.
Woodside · Karratha site delivery
Tianqi Lithium · Kendall on the Ropes (Corporate Play)
RAC · Training session
CBH Corrigin · In the field
Activity · Blindfold maze
Founders observing a delivery
The conviction is the same one we started with.
Training that doesn't change behaviour is a compliance habit, not learning. The landscape moves - Positive Duty, Respect@Work, psychosocial hazards. The technology moves - more e-learning, more compliance modules, more clicking through screens that nobody remembers. What doesn't move is how adults learn. They learn by doing. By trying. By being in the room with other people who are also trying. That is what The Experience Lab was built for, and that is what we still build for.
Want to see how we'd build for your workplace?
Twenty minutes with Jacob. He'll walk you through what we'd build for your team.