The idea behind Vzable is simple, though it took me much of my life to fully appreciate:
You cannot become interested in something you have never encountered. And you cannot know what an experience might reveal about you until you have had it.
We can often see what someone did in an experience. What is harder to see is how the experience landed for them, and what it may be bringing into view while there is still time for that understanding to matter.
For more than 30 years, Scouting has been part of my life. It introduced me to people, responsibilities, activities, and ways of thinking I probably would not have encountered otherwise and, over time, to young people and perspectives from around the world.
Looking back, I can see something that was much harder to recognize while I was living it. We encounter something new, and we respond. Sometimes it pulls us in; sometimes it does not. Either way, the experience may reveal an interest, challenge, or possibility we did not know was there.
Before a possibility can become a serious option, it usually has to come into view.
One experience that made this especially visible to me was a large maker environment we created at a Scout jamboree. Young people could try everything from drones and soldering to sewing, digital fabrication, and building things out of cardboard.
One person became absorbed in electronics. Another gravitated toward textiles. Someone else just wanted a pile of cardboard and the freedom to invent something.
They were all in the same environment, but they were not having the same experience.
What mattered was not simply which activity attracted the most people, but what those different responses might open up next.
That idea followed me into other work.
Later, I helped design maker and learning spaces for a Boys & Girls Club. We wanted young people to encounter many different ways to create, learn, solve problems, and spend time together.
But the facilities also included something much less obviously connected to learning: washers and dryers.
A young person could put in a load of laundry, head off to the makerspace, computer lab, kitchen, or an activity with friends, and come back later to clean clothes. Laundry did not have to mean leaving the Club, sitting in a laundromat, or stepping away from everything else happening around them.
It was a small thing in the scale of the building, but not necessarily a small thing in someone’s day.
It reminded me that what we see someone doing tells us only part of the story. Transportation, work schedules, family circumstances, or something else entirely may be shaping how a person enters an experience and how much of themselves they can bring to it.
Observation tells us something. It does not always tell us why.
The Question We Could Not Answer
When I was part of the senior management team at the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago, I began exploring many of these questions with Trisha Crookes.
We shared a belief that new experiences can widen what people imagine for themselves.
At Adler, students, families, tourists, astronomy enthusiasts, and casual visitors moved through exhibits and programs where they encountered ideas that might be entirely new to them.
We could see what people did.
But we kept wondering:
What did the experience actually do for them?
Did someone leave more curious? Did a student discover an interest they had never considered? Did something change how they thought about science, or about their own ability to understand it? Did one small moment make another possibility visible?
We could count attendance. We could evaluate programs. We could observe behavior.
But the person having the experience still had a perspective we could not see from the outside.
The Planetarium had invested enormous thought and resources in creating experiences, yet we did not have a practical, consistent way to hear that perspective while those experiences were still unfolding.
I came to think of this as the human value of an experience: what it reveals, changes, strengthens, or makes possible for the person having it, not just what the organization offered, completed, or measured.
What If Self-Discovery Were Part of Learning?
For much of my career, I had focused on helping create experiences that could open possibilities.
Eventually, I became just as interested in what happened next:
How could we help people explore what those experiences were revealing about themselves?
Much of self-discovery happens by accident. We try something. We respond. Maybe we talk about it. Maybe years later we understand why it mattered. Sometimes we never do.
What if we became more intentional?
Not by telling someone who they are, but by helping them ask better questions of their own experience.
What drew me in? What made me pull back? What surprised me? What gave me confidence? Did I enjoy solving the problem, designing the solution, explaining the idea, working with others, or helping someone else? Did I dislike the subject, or was something about this particular experience getting in the way?
Those questions are not meant to classify people.
They are meant to help people understand themselves.
One learner put it almost exactly this way:
“I thought I liked aerospace engineering. What I had not realized was how different it could feel in theory versus practice. Once I experienced both, I knew I was much more drawn to the practical side.”
And this does not end with school. Throughout our lives, we keep entering new environments, trying unfamiliar things, taking on new work, and encountering possibilities we could not have anticipated.
Across all of those experiences, the person is the continuing thread. Contexts change, and so do we.
I have come to think of experiences a little like prisms.
A prism does not define what passes through it. It changes what comes into view from a particular angle.
An experience can do something similar. It can bring an interest or hesitation into view, strengthen confidence, create friction, or reveal a possibility that was not visible before.
Experiences do not define us. They bring things into view.
The path through those experiences is more like a spiral than a straight line. We carry ourselves forward, but the context changes, the angle changes, and we change.
One experience gives us a moment. Over time, those moments can become a fuller story.
The Goal Is Not a Final Answer
This is not about identifying someone’s path early, predicting what they should become, or arriving at a permanent answer to the question, “Who am I?”
It is about becoming increasingly capable of asking:
What am I learning about myself from this experience, and what might I want to explore next?
Self-understanding should grow with experience rather than harden into a label.
Eventually, the questions that had followed us through all of these experiences came together:
Could we make this kind of understanding practical, not only for one person in one conversation, but across a program or organization while experiences were still happening?
That question became Vzable.
Seeing Tells Us Something. Hearing Can Tell Us More.
The settings differ: classrooms, youth programs, museums, colleges, workplaces, and community organizations. But the underlying question is the same:
How is this experience landing for the person living it?
Organizations can track attendance, completion, scores, credentials, projects, and outcomes.
Those measures matter.
But they do not always show how the people taking part interacted with and felt about the experience.
Vzable adds that first-person view.
A learner or participant can describe what drew them in, where they pulled back, what surprised them, what made them more confident, and what made them want to keep going.
That perspective does not replace the judgment of an educator, mentor, coach, manager, or program leader.
It gives them more to work with.
Hearing directly from the person may help those supporting them make more sense of what they are seeing in time to respond thoughtfully.
Maybe that leads to a conversation. Maybe something changes. Maybe nothing needs to change, but the person carries a better understanding of themselves into what comes next.
Listen. Understand. Respond.
Over time, one principle behind Vzable has become clearer:
Vzable should leave people more capable than it found them.
People should have a voice in making sense of their own experience.
In practice, that means three things:
Listen. We give people a brief way to express how an anticipated or actual experience is landing for them in that moment and context.
Understand. We help bring those first-person perspectives into clearer view so learners and the people supporting them can make more sense of what they are hearing.
Respond. People decide what, if anything, to discuss, explore, adapt, or carry into the next experience.
Vzable does not diagnose people, assign fixed labels, predict who they will become, or make decisions for them.
The educator still interprets. The mentor still asks questions. The learner still owns their story.
And if Vzable succeeds, people should not become dependent on technology to understand themselves.
They should become better at doing it themselves.
Becoming Better Explorers of What Comes Next
When I look back, I do not see a neat path that was visible from the beginning.
I see experiences. People who opened doors. Things I tried without knowing where they might lead. Interests that became visible only because I encountered something new.
I suspect most lives look more like that than the tidy paths we construct afterward.
We cannot hand someone a complete map of their future.
Nor should we.
Their path belongs to them.
But perhaps we can help people become better explorers of it.
Because none of us knows what we do not know.
And every new experience gives us another chance to see a little more.
By Michael S. LoPresti, Founder of Vzable
