🎁 Last December Jess (my illustrator) and I made this BEAUTIFUL gift for you! Full of color and packed with illustrations. Have fun finding each thing on the list! It even has a coloring version 🌱 #HappyHolidays –– Get the "I SPY: Data Science that Listens" here: 🔍 indiyoung.com/wp-content/u...

It's near the end of the year, your budget is gone 💸; you're sweating the deadlines, late nights make you yawn 🥱. Inside at your core, curiosity and kindness still live 💗; for some rest then some new views--anything you would give 🧠.

That was fun! I just finished a five-week private Team Practice Group for Listening Deeply! Got education budget?? Join me for your own Private team practice group some day! Permanent discounts, up to 30% off

1/2 You know how teams tend to converge on one solution? In digital, this is really common. Why not allow a few solutions? There is a history behind this. While fashion, art, plays, books, tv shows all revel in variety, digital and mechanical things tend to narrow down.

🧵 These past few years, does it seem to you like everybody starts with a solution, but nobody makes time for generating ideas? By now, I hope there are teams who are ready to switch gears and set up idea camps. They will camp near a rich flow of knowledge and come up with several ideas.

Listening deeply helps people connect. 🤝 If you are trying to build someone’s trust in you, listening deeply is a super-connector for relationship-building among peers and with leadership.

Listening sessions are a novel interview technique, with space to truly follow the conversation through twists and turns. You are free to learn about the topics a person brings up without time cut-offs or scripted questions.

If you work in government or healthcare, the focus is on supporting a greater share of the #population. An intentional, guided way to increase your support for people is to follow a mental model skyline, built from listening sessions about what people are focused on in their lives.

"All of my career I’ve been tilting at the windmill of tech’s process of speeding along to launch. While the practitioners may be aware of the quandary, the orgs as entities enjoy speed like an addiction.

When you are creating a basket of ideas, you try to think like the people you serve. During this work, speak aloud what people are thinking, using "I" instead of "they." One of my team members says, "I get more juice out of it when I say the quote as that person." 💡

Under the stress of making solutions within quick deadlines, teams don't have time to ground their ideas in the complexity of how humans think while addressing an intention or purpose. Stress and lack of time kill ideas, especially if the team is trying to create new ideas they didn't have before.

🧵 Listening deeply help teams broaden their mindsets to serve people they vilify. “The loud passenger,” “the by-the-book cook,” and “the partying campers” are all humans with cognition which is totally reasonable from their own point of view.

Thinking styles are not like personalities or horoscopes. Thinking styles are specific to ONE thing people are addressing. So I make characters separate from thinking styles. There is not the same number of characters as there are thinking styles. 📣 NEW COURSE on Thinking Styles soon!

A #listening session its not about coverage of topics your org needs answers to. It's more like a tour, so your org can build a better strategy to support more people.

There are teams that are innovative, and there are teams that stay focused on the features of their solutions. The innovative teams rely on durable knowledge that was built earlier about people’s personal rules, emotional states, and thinking style.

Back when teams were encoding processes–making formerly manual things automated, digital, or scaled–there wasn’t a “come up with ideas” phase. There was a process, the team explored all parts of it, and they encoded it.

Many people think they will get #research #insights directly from an interview transcript. That's not always true. ⚠️ Strategic insights don't come from transcripts. ⚠️ Strategic insights come from gaps in how your org supports patterns of interior cognition.

Strangely, I see more and more people writing that UX means "user interface." (?!) And that strategic, system-wide decisions are what #PMs and #CX do. This is ironic because back when we invented UX as a name, it was an effort to move away from being restricted to the role of user interface. 🙃

Organizations engage in making solutions in several different ways. Two of these approaches are the most difficult. Can you guess which two? 1. Look for opportunities for new ways to support people 2. Mend existing solutions so they work for more situations

Ideas gel after you absorb enough information around you. For a team, this step has not always gotten a lot of love and care. When you look at it as a #watercycle, it's pretty clear that ideas need knowledge (rain) to grow.

#Founders, #entrepreneurs, #productmanagers, are you solving a problem that you know personally? If so, can your next problem be something outside your personal experience? Because this is where the complex problems are.

Historically, software was considered part of the hardware. So I think most software gets treated as if it has the same aspects of physical things. (Games escaped this trap.) When building physical things, we can figure out how to speed it up, scale it, calculate it more precisely, measure it, etc.

Are you framing your own studies? Setting the scope of what to find out? Are you a #founder, #servicedesigner, or #productmanager wanting to #innovate? Framing a study by what a person is trying to get done, instead a product or service, can allow very different & powerful ideas to arise.

#Innovation is supporting what people are already half solving and also enhancing their outcomes. Something already exists in their minds. How do we find out what exists in people's minds? Listening sessions.

"Edge case" is used to describe part of a process or system. It's how the things can work given certain circumstances. Like if it's below freezing, if a key ingredient it not available, or if there are not enough players.

Mending existing solutions is a key type of #innovation. But we call it "maintenance," and we don't glorify it. Some orgs actually despise maintenance work. It's like we only want to work on new "things"... when new _ideas_ are what help us fill in the cracks of systems that we have already created.

We can finally make many solutions out of one! 📢 I'm giving a keynote at #UX Masterclass in #Bengaluru 📅 10-Oct-2025

Emergent data synthesis is the opposite of top-down categorization or tagging. It helps us perserve the intention and meaning of what people communicated to us.

A person has a skill or ability, yes. But that person also has thinking styles when they are using that skill. Their thinking style might reflect past experiences or current circumstances.

We can finally make many solutions out of one! 📢 I'm giving a keynote at #UX Masterclass in #Bengaluru 📅 10-Oct-2025

👀 Peek at 3 lessons from the #ListeningDeeply course: Pin to a place & time: Help the person more easily communicate about their interior cognition by asking about a particular event in the past.

🧵 Innovation is not just building what people want; it is building what people are already half-solving in other ways. How do you what people are already half-solving? Listening sessions. Listen to people who are half-solving a similar thing. Learn about their cognition.

A positive #ROI is the goal. But does your org have a threshold as to HOW positive? Like, do decision-makers turn down ideas that will bring positive ROI, but not "enough" ROI? Do they ignore ideas that fall a bit outside their worldview?

What's inside a mental model skyline? It is built from deep listening sessions, where we listen for a person's inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules a past time they addressed this purpose/intention.

🧵 Businesses tend to approach research as if they are using the #ScientificMethod. In other words, they try to create a hypothesis or theory based on an idea or some reasoning. Then they create a “test” based on observation to prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Humans are social creatures, even if we are introverts. So at work, it's powerful to recognize and support that aspect humanity when we are collaborating together.

When you create products & services for humans, humans are the point. You know there is more to a process than just the steps. Listening deeply is a way to encounter all the interesting parts of people’s approaches. Visualize the parts as a whole in a mental model skyline.

3 reversals from “the usual” for durable knowledge (the people space), where our goal is to understand other people’s cognitive context … and resist cognitive bias 1. Frame knowledge by people’s purpose/intention (not by org’s solutions, not "using" the org's solutions)

There's a lot of power in giving managers super listening skills. A manager is trying to help their team become more than the individuals they are (so they can turn a $50k budget into $500k outcome for people and for the org).

Here is how managers use the durable knowlege to guide teams to the next gap, opportunity, or need. It's like driving a machine on a roadmap, using pointers from the organization and the people (as represented in the mental model skyline with thinking styles).

Find the roots: In a listening session you are looking for a person's inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules in memory mode. But you will also hear opinions and preferences.

When teams are able to think about a way of approaching something that is different than what they've seen before, different thinking styles with regard to a purpose/intention, then the team is aided in creating a variety of front ends.

Here's a narrated version of the diagram that shows where/when to make durable knowledge about people (cognition) versus the cyclical #UserResearch that comes in the team's build space. 📣 This is part of the introduction to my upcoming NEW COURSE on Thinking Styles. It's gonna be SO GOOD!

🧵 Are you a #UX researcher in #Berlin, Germany? Employed.world is hosting UX Researchers Meetup #6 (in person) on thursday 28th August at bUM kreuzberg Berlin, Germany and I am coming online to chat with the UX researchers in Berlin community about listening deeply & thinking styles.

🧵 Not all orgs seek to extract #data, use your time to see #ads, and profit from it. If you're lucky, your org has "old-fashioned" goals of supporting people, providing something that will make life a little better, without strings attached. (Other than purchasing it.)

🧵1/2 Our default human mode of listening (in a conversation) is to think of what to say next. 😆 You can train yourself to actually listen for short periods of time. It feels so different than our default mode that it takes effort.

🧵 I'm laughing because for 20 years we've been trying to get teams to spend time understanding potential users at a deeper level. And still, team managers don't see the VALUE. The VALUE to the ORG is not measured by dashboard items like engagement, churn, purchases, purchases, etc.

🧵 Session Mode: is the rest of an interview that is not about memories. It's when the person is setting the scene for the listener, or explaining something so that the listener knows enough to understand the person's memories.

I begin the book #TimeToListen with a story about designing for averages in an airplane cockpit. That is a good story because it shows how the "business" used research to be able to reduce costs, back near the start of the 1900's.

Here's my essay on Medium, for a non-LI-platform experience. (Also slightly updated text.) (Also slightly sad.) medium.com/inclusive-so...