Edge cases: Don't use this phrase to describe groups of people. Edge cases only apply to a process. Edge cases are other ways to do the process when the context is slightly different, like "it's below freezing" or "several people are out sick today."

In a listening session there is no list of questions. I was chatting with a group of @andypolaine.bsky.social's students at the #LucerneUniversity describing how to focus on building trust and helping the person in the session explain what their inner thinking was at a past moment in time.

JJG once told me he thinks Skylines and Thinking Styles are like trumpets. "Not every band needs them." I think the method is more like a song-writer who seems to know exactly what you're feeling. Your band will not have much success without them.

Have you seen this show called #TedLasso? It's about a London-based football team owner who hires a little-known American-football coach, with the hope that he will flail and the team will go down in flames. (She wants to get even with her ex-husband, who owns 49% of the London football team.)

"Business value doesn't come from selling quality items, it comes from good stories." Erika Hall, podcast THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING with @Peter Spear. Stories, pitches, ads ... hype. That's how people convince each other of things. And that is how business works now.

I create alt text for all the diagrams and boxes & arrows in my course slides, as a part of making the handouts accessible. I wondered if #AI could help me with alt text. "Sure thing! We can!" the cheerful answer came ... "Just press the 'generate alt text' button!"

🧵 What does this photo make you think? To me, it represents loud noise and how humanity intrudes on every other being without giving them the least thought. I'll tell you why I took this photo. It was a break from work after a conference in Vancouver on the west coast of Canada.

So many teams at this point are exploring what, exactly, AI fwn be used for. Tey Bannerman had a great phrase for this in his lightning talk at EPICpeople 2026, "What parts of human judgment and context are essential and what parts are inefficiencies we can optimize away?"

I don't want to become one more ad on your feed. Social media only shows one post and then a bunch of paid-for posts. I also don't want AI involved in making my posts ... we are getting inundated by AI posts being responded to by other AI.

🧵 Organizations don't think their employees need inspiration for creative thinking anymore. Who of you is still encouraged to take courses? Which orgs still have training workshops to usher in new ways of thinking? I hear that Leadership only approves occassional professional development now.

🧵 I'm embarrassed. The other day I asked Google search AI a price comparison question that I didn't need to ask. I had run out of lotion. It's winter here, and I let myself use lotion to offset dry, itchy skin. It's locally produced, but the producer does not sell direct.

🧵 Is creative thinking dead? (No! But Leadership thinks they don't need it.) Leadership says "weak signals are fine for ideation." I hear of product craftspeople being urged to chat with a few users of their solution or just ask AI.

Listening Deeply is life-changing for product creators and designers! 25% DISCOUNT on right now: PREP4FTS. If you want in on the new upcoming Finding Thinking Styles course, you'll need to learn how to listen deeply.

When a person tells you what happened, and how they were thinking at the time, they don't tell a sequential, straight story. They bring up one topic, which flows to another, then they hop off to a third, then back to the second, etc. You can embrace this tangle of topics. Here is how:

Hey team leaders 🐦‍⬛ If you are interested in my upcoming course on Thinking Styles (which are fantastically different than personas), it will be released in mid-May. ⚠️First, make sure everyone on the team has taken the pre-requisite, either the course Listening Deeply or the book Time to Listen.

1/2 📢 In preparation for the start of my 🎉ALL NEW course🎉 on Finding Thinking Styles, here is a 25% discount on the pre-requisite course Listening Deeply! PREP4FTS (prepare for Finding Thinking Styles) Listening Deeply enables your org to shape up the solutions it offers, via:

There's a saying that standing on the sidelines watching harm unfold is basically the same as doing the harm yourself. Everyone who creates products (or services, policies, programs) nods. What if your team could look at people by thinking style? Start w/ listening deeply. medium.com/inclusive-so...

1/3 Hilariously, our mindset hasn't shifted since the 80's (or probably forever!) about making stuff. We always focus our energy on the current solution, and any extra ideas will go into the next version. We have a saying, "That will go in version 2.0."

Your solution, if a person even thinks of it, is one of many ways they make progress on their own purpose/intention/goal. Think about these kinds of "tools": - social - mental - manual - mechanical - digital - service - policy, rules

Demographic assumptions: A person's demographics don't cause their inner thinking, emotional reactions, or personal rules (except in experiences of discrimination).

Me, I like fresh starts. I am a minimalist which manifests as having everything put away. My partner is a just-in-case-ist, which means buy extra to be prepared for the unexpected. Awareness of this kind of variety is core to your team’s ability to generate deep ideas. medium.com/inclusive-so...

Summary: For each concept write a summary using their words. Use this formula, to make it easier to see patterns in the second part of data synthesis: verb + key point + supporting details. The key point is what the person is verb-ing.

Comb transcripts for concepts: Search each transcript for all the inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules. Gather repeats into single concepts, and untangle clumped ones, so that you can write a summary for each concept.

The user spent 30 minutes trying to find where to "allow" a call in on their mobile phone from a doctor that is not in their contacts list. She used to know how, but the phone updated. The help files did not get updated, though.

New year's resolution: schedule a lunch or a coffee with one decision-maker a week. Cut across departments. And rotate around to the start of your decision-makers list again, so that you have at least four or five chances in the year to have 1-to-1 listening sessions with them over lunch or coffee.

A friend told me about an org where the researchers are so protective of their work that they only let the product folks see a "report." And my friend's complaint is that the PM's don't get the benefit of knowing the audience.

🎁 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.