 You might be doing unintentional harm through the solutions that you put into this world as a service designer You need a better and different way of defining who you're designing for in order to fix this And that's what this episode is all about Here's the guest for this episode that the show begin. Hi, this is Indy Young and we're listening to the service design show episode 130 Hi, I'm Mark and welcome back to the service design show on this show We explore what's beneath the surface of service design What are the hidden things that make a difference between success and failure all to help you design Great services that have a positive impact on people and business our guest in this episode is a writer a coach and a sought-after Speaker she's also one of the co-founders of the legendary design studio adaptive pad. It's Indy Young So in this episode, we're going to break down the harmful myth of the average user Of course, you can't design for everyone. You don't have the resources So you have to make choices But how you define who you're designing for matters It matters a lot in the advocates for a research approach to defining users That is based on thinking styles and deep listening and the best part is when you do this type of research Well, it has a huge update for the people you're designing for for you as a practitioner and also for your Organization when you stick around till the end of this episode, you'll learn how you can take this approach and apply it in your own practice it's really not that hard and How you can overcome the big challenge of getting your boss or client interested in actually investing in it We post a new video on this channel at least once a week So if you're interested in content that is going to help you to level up your service design career Make sure you click that subscribe button and that bar icon to be notified when new videos come out So that's all for the intro and now let's jump into the conversation with Indy Young Welcome to the show Indy Hi, Mark. Happy that we were able to make this happen Good that you're on Yeah, yeah, so that's that's a that's an interesting introduction anyway Indy For the people who haven't googled you yet. I've said something about you in the introduction But could you give like a brief background of who you are and what you did so far and what you're doing today? Oh What am I doing today? I'm talking to you mark. What else? There we are Yeah, it's taken us a while to get this organized So maybe that was why I have the pause in the intro, but I am one of the Founders of adaptive path for those who know who that was That was a kind of a pioneering Design agency. Well, really it was user experience. I am not a designer. I got my degree in computer science I'm a software engineer. I started life as a software engineer and that was when I Realized that we were Not paying enough attention to how people are trying to get their thing done and so that became my Big career. I've written a couple of books about it for Rosenfeld media. I'm writing another book about listening I teach courses online now to help more and more people understand this because both what I'm really passionate about is Getting our teams working more collaboratively and I'm not talking about the The logistics of the collaboration, but the enthusiasm of the goal I think we all believe in the same thing We're using different vocabulary between the different sectors of each business and there's a little bit of you know Shall we say hiccups? That occur and a lot of the software that's coming out is pretty dismal In fact when people yeah, but when people ask me, what's your favorite app or something? I'm like, I have no favorite app I have a lot of hated apps. I Am hounded by minor and medium harm every day that I work so This is true of others and this is true to a much greater degree Serious harm and even systemic harm to some members of our society around the globe. So this is what I am really interested in doing is starting to bring our our Incredible minds and our craft toward Supporting not only like let's put the human in the center Let's actually put a whole bunch of different humans in the center. Let's take different perspectives Let's stop making one kind of software that's supposed to work for everybody Because this is actually going to serve our businesses. This is going to serve our orgs. This is going to serve our governments our education facilities it's going to help us By Multiplying the kinds of solutions that we have out there so that they're more tailored for different thinking styles So this is my great passion project and it's almost a summary of the entire episode And that's just in the intro people listening there's so much coming up It's it's really interesting because you have a computer science Background I don't speak to a lot of service designers or people in the service design space who do have that I have that as well. So I can relate to a lot of things that you're mentioning And I we have to promise to the people who are watching and listening to this episode of we won't just be talking about Software this is applicable to Services as well. So don't worry if you just into the service design show and thinking that you're going to just hear about software No, that's okay Indy let's do 60-second question rapid-fire round five questions I haven't prepared you for this because that's exactly the point of this Rapid-fire question around just answer them as quickly as possible And we'll know a little bit more about who you are. Are you ready? Sure Don't ask me what my favorite app is. I won't I won't I promise I'm going to ask you what's always in your fridge. Ah Beats golden beats Okay, that's the first Now you're you're writing a book, but I'm curious. Which one are you reading at this moment? If any, I reading a lot of them. Um, I I've just finished going through my partner's older books on black history and black experience and I am Also adopting a book that Vivian Castillo recommended for the summer Which title of lose me right now, but it's about setting boundaries Well, add a link in the show notes to that book Next question is which superpower would you like to have? Telepathy With a recording device. Well, okay. Where we're getting close these days And some companies already have that What did you want to become when you were a kid an architect? Mm-hmm That's what we do here quite often on the show and Finally This is the service design show. I'm really curious. What was your first encounter with service design? Probably as a teenager Trying to set up my first business We called ourselves the Tesla teens because we we lived on a road called Tesla Road Had nothing to do with the future Elon And we had to figure out how to make money amongst ourselves So that was that was we did some service design around that how to present ourselves how to get the word out Hmm cool. Yeah, and I think every business is a service business these days So everybody has been doing service design just most people don't know that it actually has a name Yeah, I should actually say the kinds of services we did was like I would house clean I would Clean gardens I would wash windows, you know that kind of stuff. So yeah, yeah fair enough So in the You mentioned already a little bit about what we're going to address today. I was looking up your book list and the mental models book list and practical Empathy right practical empathy. Yeah, and the mental models book I did know that but it was actually the first book published by Rosenfield Media, which is quite 2008. Yeah Can you Share a little bit about what the next book is going to be about or do you want to keep that for yourself? No, not a secret at all. My next neck I'll tell you about the next next book, which is the one that I've been meaning to write for years, but I've been Really learning how to teach it and that is about thinking styles this idea of different thinking styles Replaces the former idea of like, oh, let's design for different personas and let's let's invent a new persona Yes, there's there's solid ways of doing personas thinking styles are archetypes That represent different philosophic approaches to the same purpose And what's interesting is a lot of people like oh, I'm gonna design this thing and it's for a Product owner right and they design it by role so Even within a role you can have different thinking styles you have a purpose you have different approaches You learn things differently. You have different false guiding principles and ways of thinking So that's the next next book But my editor told me because the foundation of that is listening deeply that we needed to get the foundation book out first So I'm doing a book on listening deeply. I'm still we're trying to land on a good title for it and So that's the the name listening deeply is just the name of the course that I teach And can we get a date? I Can't even get a date from her so I'm gonna say the listening deeply foundation book probably by the end of 2021 Early 2022 and the thinking styles, but probably the end of 2022. Okay. Okay. If things go well, yeah Yeah, sitting deeply sounds like a topic that I would love to dig into more This is definitely something that I've been exploring in the past year at least Fantastic. Yeah Yeah It's just incredibly powerful It's it's more than you think. Yeah, so your explorations probably taught you that It's there's there seems to be like a strong need for this skill at this moment You already mentioned something about what you're passionate about What you're into these days What is the thing out of those things that you mentioned that you would like to address with the community in this conversation? Um, I there's so much, right? I think one of the things especially Within service design and within people who are designing within government agencies People are particularly passionate about perspective taking and this idea that The way that we think is naturally biased We all each have a whole set of life experiences And we each have one of these human brains that that is geared to make snap judgments We want to recognize that tiger coming at us really fast, right? So we're good at the snap judgments and so We come at what we're deciding as a team as an organization Quite often with all these assumptions that are sort of unconscious with this unconscious bias So so we we unconsciously and unintentionally create things that are unequal That don't help each type of person each type of thinking style In a way that each of those persons can get equal access Or in a way that removes Barriers equally for everybody or that equalizes cost or prices and payments and things like that. So um, I think that's the big thing is that we're We want to take perspective We're passionate about taking perspective, but we're not very well trained In it. We're not very well trained in recognizing our assumptions And we can get better. It's not hard to get better and we can get better in little steps You don't have to like study this for four years first so um Yeah, a lot of questions come up, but maybe if let's rewind a little bit like Um, how did we get here and how did you become interested in this topic? um so I have um My entire career has been a trajectory toward this It has been incremental discovery trajectory. So everybody who's listening to this if you're in the beginning of your career, you're like, well, how do I pick? um You don't have to pick and you don't have to like have it like all packaged up and you know where you're going I know people who are like that who can like have a goal and and work toward it But it it works differently for everybody And so for for me, it was definitely incremental. It started out with the realization that We were trying to design software that represents a process without Understanding how different people use it differently And so I brought that into this Company I was working for it was a supercomputer company and Brought that also into my consulting that I did after that Trying to truly And this is just the basics of user experience right trying to truly understand different approaches But along the way I realized That There are different types of understanding people and a lot of the way that we understand people is through the lens of our organization We are looking at people only through this little narrow aperture of the way that we want to support them or the way that we think we support them And oftentimes We're only doing research that helps us evaluate how we are supporting them Or even worse we call getting feedback research. Um feedback is not research. Um, we don't When we want to do generative research where we can like come up with new ideas We don't necessarily frame it correctly When we want to do opportunity research where we want to come up with better understanding of those different perspectives And come up with the things that go into the strategy box before we start coming up with new ideas Um, there's very few people out there doing that because we're all under the thumb Of let's get this done in a hurry So, um, I want to empower us to get out from under that thumb And and at the same time bring incredible value to our businesses to our orgs to whoever we are working with So, um, did that answer the question? Oh I don't know. It doesn't really uh, it doesn't matter too much. It was uh, it leads to new questions and What what i'm getting from your story and this is also what i've recognized in my Careers and service designers that often our clients want to understand customers rather than people And there's and there's a big difference there. Um I'm curious you mentioned like there's uh, a huge uptake potential uptake for organizations What is that uptake and Yeah, what is that uptake for them? What is that update exactly? Um, I think what there's three things that I kind of start off this conversation with Um, one of which we already mentioned is that we're all biased, right? We all have these human brains We all have our own experiences and we don't necessarily recognize that we're creating Unequal solutions and those solutions can be harmful But the third thing is that somehow we ended up with this idea of making digital solutions um That represent processes now if we're thinking about service design a service design Often will follow a process and use digital tools to achieve it, right? Um, and so this idea of process helping people get things done faster and speed being like the god that we all kneel before Um, why speed? I don't know. Why not quality? Why not? More time with our family. I don't know what you know more time of nature or more. Um better Interaction with uh with our planet, um, I'm trying to say things in a neutral way, right? So the the the third thing is that we're In this speed we're we're just creating one solution um, and we're making that solution like a creep we're Glomming on like extra things like wasps with their mud nests We're gloming on extra things that can sort of help like this weird situation that we heard about of that weird situation Those weird situations are known in the process world as edge cases Like this is how that process normally works But when you are in a humid condition, um or some or you know, you're working with 100 people instead of 10, you know, this is how you do it differently and those are called edge cases and somehow When we've got marketing working in our businesses and when we've got product people working in our businesses going like Okay, how are we going to do this fast and like nail the most amount of people with the least amount of effort, right? And so that becomes the average user And then somehow glommed into that average user is that there's edge case people And there's no such thing as an edge case human on this planet. So There you go. I see you ready. Yeah, I want to dig into this because I um The average user or the average consumer or the average Whatever you want to call them um When when we're designing solutions, we have to make choices, right? There are limitations or restrictions So we have to make design decisions and that means that you have to focus on certain needs desires How how is this compatible with what you're saying? And if so How so? Yeah, I think we're not being Wide-eyed enough. We're not being intentional enough We don't understand the harm we're doing when we're making those decisions Yeah, we don't plan for the future. So let's say that you are let's see. Um, I don't know What example shall we use? Uh Let's say you're in government, right and let's say that you're trying to Re-up the um the plan your government has for people who have been laid off or are out of work unemployment Right some sort of insurance or payment or food stamps or whatever um, and you uh, you have this plan out there There are several different things people are supposed to come and sign up for it when they need it um, and You get You get some some problems showing up Um, and you're like, okay, let's let's solve these problems. Maybe the problems are that um Uh, there are different size families and they need different size solutions, right? So let's just look at it by size of family Um, or let's look at it by maybe we'll get more sophisticated and we're going to look at it by The cost of living where they are Right and that's considered very sophisticated And there's way more that we can do if we could actually understand what's going through the minds of these people Who find themselves in these situations will suddenly realize that there is another Um, you know 100,000 people out there who are not on the programs Out of certain choices or out of certain thinking styles or philosophies that they hold, right? Um, we don't have anything supporting them whatsoever. So let's say that we just have those two thinking styles Um, the person who knows about it and takes it and the person who doesn't know about it and doesn't take it Um, or maybe a third one the person who knows about it and does not take it for a certain reason Right and there are you can think several reasons for not taking it Um, do we plan for this? Do we even know that that exists? Um, what I would like us to be is more intentional and like get this understanding and so okay Yeah, well, we're still only for the next five years going to focus on the people who embrace it and reach out for it Um, because there's still a lot of low hanging fruit there that we can fix But now we are also planning for these other two groups And we're going to start work on maybe one of those groups in the background while we're still Taking care of some of the low hanging fruit here and what we're going to be doing is look within each of those groups and see if there are more Splinters of thinking styles that we can support differently Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah So Yeah, no way. So I think what you what you said is there's constraints and time is also a constraint And humans who are working on this are also a constraint, right? resources um pushing things through various congresses and government, you know policy bodies and stuff those are constraints, right? Um, and yes, we have to work through there But let's not just be like going. Oh, I think it would be a great idea to go and look by coastal living in that neighborhood Just because we thought of it Let's instead understand what they're thinking and go by that so I hope that a lot of people who are listening to this episode already have some sort of Uh deeper understanding of qualitative research and uh what the benefits are We've talked a lot about this on the show and I think it's a it's a key key practice within uh within our field One of the things things that I haven't encountered or heard a lot in relationship to qualitative research and understanding motivations of people needs desires pains fears all that kind of Our thinking styles and you've already used those words a few times How help me understand what do you mean with thinking styles? Yeah, uh, let me walk you back just a little bit my book practical empathy was actually a redo of the book mental model diagrams It's essentially the same thing But I discovered that The pieces of information there are There are pieces of information that represent people's minds better than others There is something called surface and something called depth at surface Are the things that we generally represent to one another We'll explain why something happened or how it's supposed to work We'll give people our preferences or opinions about things. We'll do scene setting We may talk about our emotions But we certainly don't talk about the things at depth and there's three things at depth the three things are actually exactly what to describe Cognitive empathy someone's inner thinking Someone's emotional reactions and someone's guiding principles If you can understand those three things Then you can be them you can perspective take you can get outside of yourself and be an actor and be them and play their character In a different context Now the thing about qualitative research is there's a lot of bad qualitative research out there and it ends up I'm not calling names. I think we all are learning together There's a lot of us joining new. Um, so i'm not telling you you're doing a bad job. Um What i'm saying is uh, a lot of people who have had Um encounters with qualitative research that doesn't help that is not applicable Want to throw the whole baby out with the bath water and what they've encountered is is poorly done poorly framed Research that doesn't give patterns with qualitative research validity and solidity Is measured by the patterns that come out and so if you're encountering like a one-off Oh, look this person said this so we should do it this way or that person said that so we should do it that way Um, those are not patterns. Those are called anecdotes and we cannot apply anecdotes. Those are not valid They are not they are not something that we can use without risk to guide our business decisions So what we need out of our qualitative data are patterns and to get patterns you have to very carefully Sometimes it takes me three months to figure out how exactly okay only once it took me three months. Usually it takes me two weeks To figure out exactly how to frame the study What are we going to study and when we're doing this kind of qualitative research? The question what are we going to study? If we're trying to understand other people's perspectives as they are accomplishing the thing they're trying to do We're going to study their purpose And what's really interesting? I've written a bit. We're not going to get into this but I've written a bit is if we actually Frame our other studies like in a value tip and even feedback if we frame those by What people are trying to do their purpose and they're thinking toward the purpose if we frame all of that then we can like Match that data together and see much bigger pictures. We can get layered data pictures Which is I've seen it a couple of times. It's like jaw dropping I I can imagine That we're already so deep into this topic. We need we need to get back to Sort of where we started and I recognize a lot of the things you're saying about doing good qualitative research and again recalling from my own experience it was um, sometimes You first have to find this research question by interacting with Well, how with people? I was almost going to say the target audience or whatever But you you interact with people who have a challenge and then sort of the research question emerges That's right. Sometimes too. It's it's really, um, I do a lot of interacting with stakeholders I do a lot of listening sessions with stakeholders to try to understand what What is the knowledge that we're missing? What is this piece that we're missing that we can't put our finger on right now? And so we talk around it and then you see that missing piece in the middle um, and that's then how I can form a A study, right? What are we going to study? What knowledge do we need? That's the only reason you ever do research and if you don't need knowledge, um, then you don't need to do research If we would Contrast this approach Versus let's say the established approach or the current approach like what are the things that? What's the biggest difference at the end? What will? A business organization government what will be different for them when they use yeah This yeah, it'll it'll be actionable um, these are not I often hear people say well researchers like to do research Um, they don't care about the business as much and so what is interesting? um in the approach where we're trying to Get a better understanding of what the futures can be Um, it's all applicable. It's all um in smaller pieces. It's not like oh, I've got this insight that um Oh, I don't know to take our example from earlier You know, maybe one of our insights is that certain people um Don't like to buy vegetables with their food stamps or something and so all of a sudden you go and you're like Oh, wow, let's solve that problem. You know That insight is just like it's not really a pattern maybe maybe you see it in a couple of people Or maybe it's something that came out of a survey. You don't know why You don't know why what what's behind that, right? Is it truly because they don't like to eat their vegetables and you're just assuming that or is it because they grow their own vegetables? In some sort of community garden. Yeah. Yeah, so what do you yeah? It's it's not informing decision-making or it's not informing smarter or Yeah, better decision-making, right? That's yeah that It's sending us off on like these wild goose hunts that um That don't lead us to where we want to go And in fact the whole or often doesn't know where it wants to go. It's just being led by the nodes um And I don't that yeah, I don't think that that's very smart because what has happened so far is that we've got a bunch of software And services I call them solutions. That's my generic word. We've got a bunch of solutions out there that that actually hurt people so We we need to pay better attention to that we need to be more sure about where we're headed Even if we can't even if we don't if we've got the constraints that can't get us there right now It's on our map And we can start putting things in place to get us there. We've got a plan So let's assume somebody Is a service design practitioner and they they're listening to this and They feel that they want to do justice to the practice. They want to do justice to all the people out there They have good intentions How where do we start because you said it's not that hard What would be some Initial starting points that you could help them to nudge them in the right direction to to make sure that that the solutions that they Help to bring into this world don't do harm Right. Yeah, that's um, so I think we mentioned earlier about listening deeply in the power of listening and I think one of the most powerful things to do right now Is to learn how to listen and then begin building relationships by listening deeply with all of your colleagues and your stakeholders um, this I think is a It's an extremely powerful way Um, I talked in the very beginning of the show about like getting us to collaborate better It's an extremely powerful way of understanding other people's guiding principles and understanding Where we match and where our vocabulary is causing friction that is unnecessary Or where they don't match and where we can Build respect for a different person's uh guiding principle and recognize what they're after Um and and be able to support that as well as our own guiding principles so to speak So I know that's a weird answer to that question. No, it isn't yeah, well I'm curious how I'm not a fan of definitions, but uh, what are some key components of deeply listening or listening deeply Yeah, yeah, the key component is recognizing when someone is speaking at surface and recognizing when they're speaking at depth and um, if you are in a listening session You will people will speak at surface and then go down to depth and then go up to surface Then go down to depth and your job is to try to entice them down to depth We're not used to speaking to one another like this um, and we are not used to feeling heard and that Very powerful moment when you recognize someone else hears you um is uh one of the things that helps us Get people to depth. So what we do is a lot of support We we we support them to show that we are hearing them that we're not judging them We do something I call microreflection To help them continue a little bit of their story or continue the next step down into depth I do something where I take them back in history. So if they get stuck talking about say a preference Well, where did that form? And often we will go back years and years and years and we will see where it formed and get the inner thinking Get the guiding principle behind that um, sometimes When people get down to that level of depth Then they go they take off my god. I've got somebody listening to me That's rare. Um, and it feels amazing and so A lot of the time when people are confident in their trust with you if you build that rapport correctly and they will keep going And you will get incredible amounts Of depth and what I mean by depth is those three things They're inner thinking at that point in time when they were trying to you know, do something Or their reactions And what those reactions set off maybe more reactions Maybe more inner thinking and what their guiding principles are that they use to make their decisions in that point in time So this is all very tied to a A an experience That they are going through as they're trying to accomplish something and we try not to speak in generalities We try not to ask them. Well, how do you blah blah blah? Um, instead it's what went through your mind as you the last time you blah blah, right? So there are nutshell. Yeah and uh You're you're bringing so many memories back to me so I'm uh constantly reflecting on my my years as a service designer and I recall these kind of conversations and um research studies where When you would have conversations like this and you would have notes or you had you'd have a diary or something like that people would want to keep Your notes because it was so personal and if you put that into contrast Of the thing people are used to which is service like people hate doing a survey, right? And they they want to get done with it in a short amount of time as possible Compared to what you're describing and listening deeply being heard like They won't they won't stop talking It's it's I always found it surprising how quickly you can actually get to depth with people And how quickly they're open to to share if you're genuinely interested Yes, exactly. One of the other tricks too is that I do them mostly by audio only And the audio only serves as a shield for that person to um to hold on to As they're starting to develop trust with you It also allows for quicker Trust and less distraction To happen Then having a visual compared to visual. Yeah visual or in person. Yeah, there are certain times when I'll do in person But they're rare. I usually do it audio only. It's very interesting. Yeah let's uh transition a bit into the Aspect that I know you have strong opinions about and that is how do we get um business to be more open to to this approach because like Quote on quote selling user research selling qualitative research To companies that have a three month six month 12 month horizon That's that's super tough. So what have you found? Yeah, I've um, I've not found a lot of Success like brilliant success stories where you can go. Oh, I want to be like them There are a lot of success stories that are small And it has all been driven by people who are passionate about Being able to see a little bit farther Into that horizon and being able to see other perspectives. So when it's driven by those people Usually we'll get You know some sort of a study off and these studies these are things you do once every couple of years You they're also cumulative people's inner thinking doesn't shift that much Whereas evaluative you can layer that on top of these I call them opportunity maps You can layer that on top of the opportunity maps and then erase it once your solution changes and layer in new evaluative data And so this is the way that this data layering and the the connection to how We are improving in our support for this thinking style And Improving in our understanding of this other thinking style. We haven't quite yet supported Right and being able to layer that on top of this opportunity map as well It makes people hungry To start supporting that other thinking style as well So this is um Generally, I'll see it Get off the ground and then something like a merger will happen and it gets disappeared um I just ran into somebody last week who is working at a company Where exactly that happened and it got disappeared for about 10 years and she's going to go unearth it Because it's all still valid data It's all still valid that opportunity map is completely valid. Um, it's just you know We can layer more data on top of it and and and start to see like, okay How well have we supported this thinking style? How? Weekly have we supported that thinking style? um And and go from there right make some choices make some eyes open kind of choices about what we want to get done next Me yeah businesses are all about making choices I I sometimes feel that they already feel that they've made the choice of who they are serving And they're just sticking with that and they're just trying to crank out As much for as little investment as they can, you know And that's that's fine. Lots of businesses can proceed that way Like I said, if you don't think you need knowledge, don't do research those businesses might be that way um There are going to be other businesses who do decide to get that knowledge and We'll end up with all of those customers Because those customers will feel heard. Yeah Yeah, and you mentioned like uh, it's usually individuals, but i'm curious What have you have you seen and speaking about patterns? Have you seen some patterns emerge from What types of individuals what types of businesses are more receptable to this? Who yeah, it's been all over the map. Um, I see insurance come up a lot. I see health care come a lot Government is now a big contender of of doing these so um, but that is to say, I mean like I've worked with people who are making, um Heavy equipment So all sorts of different, um Areas um What is the pattern of that person? Um, I think that person feels Uh, like they can Make a shift They feel within their organization like either they are connected to an executive champion Or they know how to connect to uh, some sort of higher level stakeholder who can champion this Um, or they themselves are at that level So I've seen that yeah Yeah Because I think you need that kind of support because this is this is a long-term investment like it's foundational and uh the correlation to uh Like the direct return on investment is usually quite loose So you have to sort of have faith that this is actually a smart thing To be to be doing right and then therefore you need people who have a bit of longer horizon Yeah, it's a different kind of research. Teresa Torres Um, who's a product talk um product uh person She says there's you know the long-term knowledge and there's the week on week knowledge that we need and when I say knowledge I mean research right and she says you have to have a long term Or your organization is not going to be around in another 10 years Yeah, and who and the hair hair is the major challenge Who cares about the 10-year horizon of an organization these days, right? You know, yeah government environment that might that that's hopefully the case but that might be different In a lot of commercial settings, uh, we should be happy when people have a six month horizon Um, and that's that that that's what makes it so challenging. Um What have you actually come to think of it all those examples that I gave are people who Organizations in fields who have long-term horizons. I mean heavy equipment. That's long-term horizon Sure, right. Yeah. Yeah, and and you like you mentioned in the beginning you sort of have to feel their responsibility to do this Yeah, I think there at the there's one outlier and that is the entrepreneur um the person who Um, so we actually did a study about entrepreneurs and there are five different thinking styles that we discovered Um, and there's one type of thinking style is like I love being in business Um, I don't care what it is That's a thinking style. Um, there there's you know, a whole bunch of other ones We're like, oh, I've got this thing and the world has to have it because it'll make the world a better place I'm gonna save the world. Um Different thinking style. Uh, they're a little bit more Uh focused on their solution Whereas that thinking style works like I just love being in business and it doesn't matter what the thing is They are the ones who go out and do this research and I have done this with several entrepreneurs over and over again Where they map it out first like before I even get funding What am I doing? What what's Problems am I solving for whom? Um, I've got some ideas. Let's go poke into those And then and get some better data about which direction to go. So that's another Area because it uncovers opportunities Yes, and pivot points too. Hmm. Yeah What when you speak to people about this, you know, when you teach people when you coach people What is what is a common common misconception around? uh The notion of thinking styles and qualitative research. Maybe people are saying yeah, but we do we we're already doing this like What are some common misconceptions? um I think it isn't necessarily a misconception but an assumption that they that The way that they're doing it is the is right and doing a good job I think it is maybe a A Trust in the process that may be misplaced. Um, they I've got this Diagram out there that tries to chart all these different data collection techniques quant and qual across opportunity generative and evaluative research and um And when people look at that they're like, oh my god, I'm taking this to my stakeholders because we only do this one thing I Didn't realize like we could do all these other things. Um, that would actually be better suited for the knowledge that we need Um, and this even this question like why do research when you don't think you need knowledge? You're you're a company you've got a short time horizon and everybody else around you's hiring researchers So you're like, okay, I guess I have to hire researchers. Why? Hey Right If that's not your thing if you think you know it, you know what you're doing. Why are you doing that? Um, I I think it's a mistake, but you know, there's there's lucky Uh, there's lucky tickets out there all the time and I think in our history The ones that we glorify are the people who pulled the lucky ticket, right? Like the Jeff Bezos or the Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, right? They like just were there at the right time the right place and so they got lucky and now it's my turn I'm going to go try to find that lucky ticket Um, it's hard to find those lucky tickets. The low hanging fruit is gone And if you want the higher up fruit We need knowledge. We need a plan. We need to know how to get it. Otherwise someone else is going to take it That's uh, that that's a really good Inside I'm curious you've been uh, this topic must be on your mind these days a lot because you're writing again What do you feel are some questions still left unexplored for you? What what keeps you awake? Um One of the things that I'm talking to Erica Hall from mule design about is this Being able to connect with our stakeholders and being able to connect with our colleagues Um, and I think that this is like this is ripe Right now for solving. Um, I think if we don't solve it we're, um We're in trouble of shaking apart Um, not every organization has this problem and in fact one of the thinking styles Out of that research about entrepreneurs was the thinking style about i'm building an organ I'm building people together. I'm building a team Right, the product is less important than the team. I'm building Which is a really interesting thinking style. Um, and hopefully you know if if we can Get techniques out there, um for and she and I both believe listening Is the technique to use and if we can get that technique out there and in progress Not only will it help us understand how other people think within our business But it will help even like if you're a manager and you're tasked with Helping people in their careers in your team As well as managing, you know their output or whatever Listening is a great tool for that um listening Finding patterns. I I frequently will get called into clients where they're like Nobody's agreeing and so I will go and do listening sessions with everybody and say okay here are the patterns Guess what you all agree on this thing and here's the place where you disagree And then we can talk about that so Solving that that's interesting. Um, the other thing that I'm interested in right now uh, two other things is, um I've always been doing applied research. There's a lot of academic research Out there that is very similar to what I'm doing So I'm just trying to tie this back to those routes so that people In academia can see oh, um, like if I wanted to get out of academia and go into applied research I could do this and this is the same thing. They're just we're all using different words for it. And then the third thing is, um Jobs to be done There are several different ways of doing jobs to be done Frameworks around it and I'm exploring all of those and trying to see what is it that I'm doing That's the same and what is it that I'm doing that's different? There are a lot of people out there who are tying what I do to jobs to be done end surveys and things Because it seems to be working for their clients and I want to understand that a little bit as well Yeah, we recently had Jim Kalbach On the show I think a few episodes ago We didn't talk about jobs to be done. But he has one of the books out there. Yeah. Yeah what um I'm curious if people want to dig deeper into this. What are some recommended resources? To start with I I have a ton of lists Of your head like your top three or something um, so It really depends on if you are of more of a research bent or if you're more of a product or a service bent um, if you're more of a research bent And you want to understand like academic Like background to you could look at mixed methods. It's a book by sam ladner um, uh, if you're interested in the The harms that our software is doing Has done try to get your hand or arms around that um, we've got um Of course Weapons of math destruction by kathy o'neill And then a couple of other books from the past like um designed for real life and technically wrong by sarah walked our butcher Eric meyer was in there too We've got race after technology and mismatch and design justice so Those are some interesting ones. I actually put design justice into a pile that's more like solution oriented Like how are we going to solve for this? um, so that's just for books. Um, I also have I host a bunch of people's uh essays Um, who haven't got to the book level on my um website under knowledge essays and What is it called the link will be in the show notes. There we go essays and recordings So there's a bunch of their work out there too. People are talking about this a lot um, there's somebody in greece who just reached it out to me where we're like, you know, we need to Teach quality what how to recognize quality research or how to recognize when it's not quality research so we can get better um So that's another area to look into. There's nothing necessarily written about that yet And if you're interested in it, yeah, yeah, there's a lot and that's a good sign and um, maybe it's um It hasn't surfaced yet to the broad community, but I hope episodes like this contribute to greater awareness for this If people remember, yeah, if people remember one thing from this conversation, what do you hope it is? um That's a hard question to answer. I'm never good at ones Fours give me four things One thing I guess I would say listening. Um is something to explore because it's such a powerful tool Um, what makes it powerful the thing that it builds which is trust feeling heard um Those two things are amazing powerful outputs of listening. So maybe that's the one thing you could take away from this That's the place to start at least and uh, and uh, I really like that because it's it's we do it so much Listening, but we do it so unconsciously often and it's actually something you can practice get better at and Read more benefits from so yeah, absolutely agree Yeah, once once you start recognizing what's coming out of a person's mouth and whether it's surface in depth all of a sudden You're all your conversations are different Yeah, yeah, and and uh I hope people who have been listening to this episode The next time we'll be listening from a different perspective and a richer perspective In the we have to wrap it up at this point and now we could continue. Maybe you will do a uh Sequel when the book is out. That would be nice. Yeah, and that would be great Um, let's let's plan this because we uh, we know how long it took for us to get onto this call Right if we start planning now, it'll happen. That will be a good moment Maybe also a bit of social pressure to get the book out there Anyway, I I wish you a lot of luck and thanks for sharing and addressing this topic with uh with the service design show community What is your biggest takeaway from this conversation with indy? Leave a comment down below and if you made it all the way here Awesome good for you. Apparently you're enjoying conversations like this So if you haven't done so already make sure to click that subscribe button to be notified when new videos come out I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being here and I look forward to see you in the next video