The Lived and Living Experience and Expertise (LX) Lens
Strength-test your LX project
Answer 10 questions and receive your project strength snapshot.
Take The LX Project Strength Test to see whether your project has the foundations for clear purpose, genuine influence, supported participation, shared meaning-making and accountable follow-through.
- Takes around 3 minutes
- Free to complete
- Receive your score and focus areas instantly
Strength-test your LX project
Answer 10 questions and receive your project strength snapshot.
Take The LX Project Strength Test to see whether your project has the foundations for clear purpose, genuine influence, supported participation, shared meaning-making and accountable follow-through.
- Takes around 3 minutes
- Free to complete
- Receive your score and focus areas instantly
What do we mean by lived and living experience and expertise?
The LX Lens uses this phrase deliberately.
The words matter because projects involve people in different ways, at different stages, and with different kinds of knowledge. The LX Lens brings together these different ways of contributing because effective projects need more than stories. They need lived and living experience and expertise to meaningfully shape the work.
Lived experience
Personal knowledge from having been there.
Lived experience refers to what people know through their own direct experience of distress, harm, service use, recovery, caring, exclusion, survival, healing or change.
It can bring insight into what services, systems, language, relationships and decisions feel like from the inside.
Living experience
Personal knowledge from what is current, ongoing or actively lived.
Living experience recognises that people may not be “past” their experience, or may chose to live meaningful, self-directed lives without recovery, abstinence or clinical ideas of wellness.
It helps reveal what people are navigating now and what supports dignity and choice.
Expertise from our experiences
Experience plus reflection, development and application.
Expertise is going beyond our own story. It can include reflection, analysis, practice wisdom, peer work, advocacy, research, leadership, facilitation, service design or system reform.
LX is interested in how our experiences can be built on to add impact to project work: shaping purpose, influence, participation, meaning-making and follow-through.
Expertise from working life
Skills and knowledge developed through study and work.
People may also bring expertise from paid, voluntary, professional, community or creative work. This can include project work, research, facilitation, education, strategy, governance, service delivery, communication or leadership.
LX recognises that strong project work often draws on both personal knowledge and working-life capability.
