 Become a better listener and you'll be able to design services that are more inclusive to less harm and are better for business. But how? Well, that's exactly what the book titled Time to Listen is all about and you'll get the key highlights from the author herself in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi everyone, it's Indy Young and this is the service design show number 165. Hi, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome back to the service design show. On this show we explore what's beneath the surface of service design and what are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure. All to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Indy Young. Indy is a researcher who teaches, writes and coaches about inclusive product strategy. Amongst many things Indy has pioneered, opportunity maps, mental model diagrams and thinking styles. If you're like most service design professionals, you already know the value qualitative data can bring to business. But often, qualitative data is still seen as less valid or as less credible. It's not seen as a useful tool to inform strategy. In our latest book Time to Listen, Indy provides a much needed process and framework to overcome this limiting belief, helping you to make smarter decisions and also design services that are more inclusive and less harmful without sacrificing business value. If anything, your services will become more profitable. As you might have guessed by the title of the book, this secret lies in becoming a better listener. In this episode we explore what that means for you as a professional. How do you actually do that? Is this something anyone can learn or is this a born talent? You'll hear us talk a lot about how to set up and structure listening sessions. But it is important to note that this interview in itself is not a listening session. There is a big difference in the dynamic between the two and you'll discover why throughout this conversation. By the end of this episode, you should have a good idea how you can turn open and honest conversations with your users into nothing less than one of your most valuable business assets. If you're interested in reading Indy's book, make sure to stick around till the end of the episode because we announce a contest where you can win a special edition of the book. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure you click that subscribe button and of course that bell icon to be notified when a new episode comes out. That about wraps it up for the introduction and now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Indy Yang. Welcome back to the show Indy. Thank you so much Mark, it's a pleasure to be back. It was episode 130, so 35 episodes ago that you were on and then we already talked about the book which we're going to dive in today but the book wasn't out there then yet it was July 2021 I think. Oh wow, so the book didn't come out until July 2022. Well. But it is now in physical form. Yeah, there it is. And I would love to dive into what eventually got into the book what got published what got censored and what has been taken into part two. But Indy before we can do that. Maybe some people haven't listened to episode 130 yet and have no 35. Oh 30. Yeah, we're at 165 right now. But they would like to know, okay, who is Indy and why is she on the show so could you maybe give a brief introduction. Yes, certainly. So I am an inclusivity researcher. This is the way that I've been managing to help people recognize that the that the cycles of research that we're doing in our orgs generally don't hit the inclusivity. Side of things. So that's what I'm doing is I'm out in the world trying to help everybody get to that point I'm giving lots of methods and if you follow me on LinkedIn, or Twitter or Instagram. And now mastodon but I have not figured that out yet. But I have a lot of helpful stuff out there, a lot of helpful stuff on my website. My whole goal is to try to help people, you know, pick up what skills that they want, figure out how to adapt those skills to the situation they're in and figure out how to, you know, help each other and listen. Awesome. Great. We have five question lightning round to get to know you a little bit better. I haven't checked which questions I asked you previously, but I think these one will be different. And if they are the same, then we'll be able to check if anything changed since the last time. So five questions for you. Please answer them as briefly and as quickly as possible. The first thing that comes to your mind. Ready. Ready. I do remember one of the old questions. So we'll see if you ask it again. We'll see. We'll see. The first one should be easy. Is there a book that you are currently reading? And if so, which one is it? Rating sweet grass by Robin Wall, camera. Okay. Interesting. We'll add a link in the show notes as always. Another question is what was your first job? Do you mean going all the way back to teenagers? And your professional job. So like, what was your unofficial job and your first professional? My first professional job was as a software designer at a. I can't even remember the name of the field, but it was. It was working on space. Well, stuff that goes into space and orbits the earth. Sounds like a satellite. Yeah. There we go. Thank you. It's a little early. I haven't booted up my mind. What is that word? And what was your teenage job? That that was just doing odd jobs for people around. We lived in a country kind of neighborhood and I would wash windows. I would, you know, clean gardens. I would clean houses. And my favorite part of it was where one of the neighbors hired me to clean the garden a couple of times and they had this giant vacuum. It was awesome. You could vacuum up the leaves. The pleasure of having a giant vacuum. All right. I'll take that one. We have to move on. This is a new question. So I definitely haven't asked that one before. What is your favorite meal? Your favorite food. Well, okay. I can answer the second part of that meal. I can't answer a favorite food. Chocolate. Chocolate. Okay. Yeah. I eat at least two ounces a day. Good for you. With a sip of wine would be helpful. Please. Let's talk about location. If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would you like to work from? I have worked from a lot of different places in the world and it actually doesn't make a difference. And in fact, when I was working from the big island, it was actually annoying to look out the window and see the palm trees and recognize how gorgeous it was outside. And I was still stuck inside. Yeah. I can imagine. I can imagine. Makes sense. And the last question I have to ask it because as a tradition, do you recall the first time you heard about the gun and touch with service design? You know, I think it was either Kim or it was one of my peers. And she was, I think, either in the UK or in the Netherlands. I think it was the UK and she's like service design, everything's service design here, but it's the same thing. Nice. Nice. Thank you for sharing these answers. Now we know a bit more about who you are and not just a professional, like we're trying to get a broader perspective on the guests on the show. So thank you, Indy. And now let's talk about the book. I had to write down the title. It's called Time to Listen. How giving people space to speak drives invention and inclusion. Yeah. I can never remember the subtitles of my books. Never. I always have to look them up. Time to listen. I can remember. Time to listen. Let's start with that because that's always an interesting story. The title. Like what's with the title? Well, I did a lot of social media. In, you know, sort of discussions with a lot of people and through a lot of different titles out there. And a lot of people, a lot of the ways that I was coming at it sounded too much. I was working with an editor who wanted to write a business book and everybody on social media was saying, that sounds like an airport book, but I don't want to read it. So I'm like, okay, we have to get something for less airport bookie. And the idea of time came into it. Listen always had to be in the title. The course that is the twin to this is called listening deeply. And I was just going to call the book the same thing. But the idea of time was really important. One, you can take it in two ways. One is that. We. It's hard to get time. It's also hard to keep track of time these days. What day is the week? Is it quick? Right? You have to think about it and dealing with time after the pandemic has also been a really interesting. Sort of thing that a lot of people are talking and writing about. And so time became like a part of it. In terms of. How do we make time for this? How do we take the time? To fit this in. I've always been talking about it in terms of, you know, it doesn't fit in your normal cycles. It is not a part of the agile cycle. It is not a part of any of your solution space cycles. It is separate. And therefore it takes a separate kind of time. And so I thought, okay, let's put time in there because time also means an imperative. Hey, it's time. We have gotten to this point where we have harmed a lot of people with the services we're creating. In ways that we don't even recognize. So I've had circulating on social media and I've talked about it in a bunch of talks. This first draft idea of talking about harms in different levels. Where we've got harms at the mild level, which is frustration and confusion and things like that. And that's, yeah, organizations understand that that can be a problem and they will look into that and try to fix it. But serious harms like being triggered, like, you know, maybe being interrupted, like feeling unwelcome. Like feeling as if you were not the type of person that they want here. That's serious harm and we're doing it. There's also something beyond that called lasting harm. And something beyond that called systemic harm, which is where it's gotten baked into our laws and our culture and stuff like that. So the imperative, it's time. It's time now. We've done enough harm. We need to face, like investigate, see, understand, dig into one of those verbs. Who we're trying to support and what they are trying to get done and the way that our solutions are messing it up for them are, you know, causing them distress, causing them, you know, to have to stop one thing and go do a different thing. I have many, many, many examples. So we could talk about that. There's also a lot of books that talk about the harms. For instance, Kat Holmes has written mismatch, which is this idea that, you know, a disabled person is not disabled. They are a whole person. They're only disabled by society. Society looks at them as disabled. And the way that we talk about it, the way that we support them is still quite harmful in a lot of ways. There's progress being made. So that's a really good example. There are a lot of other books and I talk about them in my presentations. You can go on my website and watch one of the presentations and see that screen and go and read those books. I'm not going to write a book about that. That's not my expertise. My expertise is understanding, is finding out, is developing a deep understanding based on patterns that are verifiable, that are repeatable, that any two researchers can find the same patterns and paying attention to that so that we can then start measuring, you know, is this thinking style being supported? Is that thinking style being harmed? What can we do? Where do we want to focus next? There's always going to be like, you know, 13 different areas you could focus and you can't do them all now. You can't do them even next year. It's something that takes years to get through, but you need a map. You need some sort of way to understand, okay, here are all the holes. Here are the gaps. And where do we want to focus first and why? And how do we do the best? The best good for the most people, not in terms of writing one service for all of them, creating one service for all of them, creating different services with different nuances. Awesome. That was an interesting explanation of the title and I feel that we have so many hooks to go into. You mentioned a few times I'm going to reference some elements that you mentioned. You mentioned a few times it's time for this and I could fill in the blank what this is, maybe listening, but what is this to you? What is it time for? It's time for listening. It's time for doing all these things. It's time to pay attention to the harms. That's what I'm saying. And I think we've got a little bit of a wave, even partially globally, in terms of, hey, it is important to stop harming. We've got a wave for sure. It is important to stop harming our planet. It is important to stop harming ecosystems. It's important to stop harming people as well. And there was something I put out in the U.S. we have this day after Thanksgiving where apparently everybody goes shopping for Christmas. I've never done it. I don't know if it still exists or if it's just a dream of the marketers, but they call it Black Friday. Not because something horrible has happened. And, you know, it's dismal and that kind of interpretation of it. Also that word, using the word black is like, is that calling into effect the race and like subjugating that word, but oddly, the title Black Friday actually refers to the idea that the vendors, the commercial vendors who are selling all this stuff are finally in the black. They're not in the red. So they're not, they've not sold enough stuff until the day after Thanksgiving, which is towards the end of November. So I'm like, okay, what kind of business model is that? But okay, all that aside. Anyway, so I put a tweet or a post out on Black Friday. I'm like, hey, you know, a lot of online vendors say, hey, you can have free shipping. If you meet this number, like criteria of how much you spend, right? Which when I'm reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she's talking about Indigenous American worldviews. And one of the worldviews is that we've become a very consumption oriented society, especially in the U.S. There are pockets that don't for sure, but it seems to be like the milieu of the U.S. is to like go out and shop. And you don't need those things. And by having, by recognizing that what we're doing, if we're providing, you know, goods or even services, but probably goods that we're going to have to ship physically and we're saying, hey, buy just a little bit more and we'll give you free shipping. That's encouraging over consumption. And I got some people like going, yeah, oh yeah, I see that. And other people are like, well, how's my business going to make a profit? I'm like, yeah, that's exactly the question. We have to rethink this. You shared a lot of things and I'm curious, who did you have in mind when you were writing this book? Like, who was your ideal reader? Did you have one? I had a couple. One ideal reader is a product manager or product strategist. I'm assuming that there's the equivalent title and service side of things. We just, on this side of the Atlantic, we tend to say product instead of service to me. I like to say solution because then that sort of encompasses everything. Anything you're doing to support somebody. And the people who are in charge of the strategy or in charge of the management of one of those parts of the things that you're creating was one of my key audiences. The other key audience is the people who are actually doing the research. And another key audience, especially for the beginning of the book, because I talk about how we're looking at understanding people. We're looking at building knowledge from the lens of our solution. And that limits the kind of knowledge that we're building. And it limits the kind of decisions that we make. And so I would like people to hire up in an organization to become aware of that. So that was a sort of tertiary audience. It's like, hey, let's frame our knowledge building by the person's purpose, not by our solution. But what is the person trying to address? And that purpose can be big or small or long term or short term. But let's look at it from that point of view. And that gives us, it takes away the lens of our solution and allows us to see really what that person is trying to get from, not just what they were trying to get done with relationship to our solution. How do you hope, maybe you've already got some feedback, how do you hope it will impact the practice of these product managers, service managers, solutions managers? I hope that, so some of the other work I'm doing, we're doing a workshop or mid-January about persuading your stakeholders. So some of the other work I'm doing is around positioning this in your world, getting budget for it, making it a priority, learning how to talk about it as something that should be a priority within your organization. And that's something that I hope eventually, I don't think it's going to happen right away, but especially if we can get people in positions of power and people who are coming in brand new to this, understanding the mindset of looking at people in terms of their purpose. A lot of this knowledge, a lot of the mixed methods, a lot of the ways that we do our product roadmap or service roadmap are going to shift. They're going to shift a little bit so that we're more inclusive, so that in the end, what we're doing is we're creating solutions that support, that don't harm a variety of thinking styles. A whole bunch of various approaches. Not just one approach, not just the thinking style that your team thinks is the main thinking style. Often this is just an assumption. How many scenarios and product roadmaps have you seen out there, especially scenarios where there's a character, but the character is not identified. Even if you have personas, they're not identified as one persona or another, it's just the character. And then it becomes like the average user. And that's the big thing that I want to shift. I want lots of different solutions out there that support the variety of thinking styles and variety of approaches to a person's purpose. This is where we're going to be able to address the harms that we're doing. Yeah, so the question that I also had around this, is that the problem with our current approach that it is, for lack of a better word, a lazy approach like going for the average user, I don't know. I don't think, yeah, for lack of a better, yeah, lazy is not the word for sure. We're learning. We're building this, right? I expect when I finally get to retire, more people are going to build it further. And then they're the next generation after them, they're going to build it further. We're still figuring this out. I think this goes for civic design as well. We're still figuring out how to do it better. We've got this technology. At first, the technologists are all like, ooh, technology can solve everything. And they don't have the human component involved. They also don't have the non-human people component involved. And it's slowly something that we're finally addressing. And I think it'll become a part of the way that we do things in the next 20, 50 years. And then the next 50 years after that, I mean, it's always going to evolve. We're going to get better if we're all still around. I would love to go in a bit deeper on like this part. So you mentioned that we have to make time for this because it falls outside of the agile cycle, the productivity. And then like, what is it that we actually need to do? And I guess that's what the book is about. What do we need to do? Yeah. What do we need to do? There are cute little sketch, cartoony diagrams of all the steps of what we need to do. We need a strategy space, first of all. There is strategy, but it tends to only be discussed among certain people at your organization. And there's more knowledge that can be built into the strategy that allows us to have a better, more inclusive strategy. So we need a strategy space, but to understand where to take that strategy or what to base it on, we need a problem space. And in the problem space, that's where we're looking at the person once, you know, once a year, once every other year, we're building some knowledge. We're picking a purpose. It might be some part of the purpose that our organization is interested in supporting, or it could be a slightly larger purpose. I talk a lot about how purposes come at different levels of granularity and what that means for the way that you build knowledge. I have a chapter in there about how to figure out. I also teach a course that gets into a lot more depth than the book on how to figure out how to, what knowledge you need and how to frame the way that you're going to build that knowledge that you need right now. And how to make sure you're not building knowledge that you don't need right now. Erica Hall has a book called Just Enough Research. That's a great title. You don't want to do research for research's sake. You want to do research to build knowledge that you need. And I'm saying the knowledge that we need is this, we need to build a better strategy that's more informed by what people are trying to address, rather than a strategy that's just, you know, let's take this piece of tech and make it into something people can use. You don't know how many people I have talked to. They're like, oh yeah, my manager told me to build a chat bot for that, right? Yeah. So stop being technology driven. But that, you know, that's painting technology in a bad light. And technology, it can be very helpful to humanity. But it is not right now helpful to all of humanity and is quite harmful to a lot of humanity. So this deeper knowledge and problem space is trying to understand first of all, what knowledge do we need? How are we going to frame it? We're going to frame it by a person's purpose. We're going to frame evaluative studies. We're going to frame generative studies. We're going to frame problem space studies by a person's purpose so that when we've got it in the strategy space, we can layer it all together on the same skeleton. It's easy. It's easy to see how it fits together because you're talking about a purpose or some sort of sub purpose. So that's the first step, the second step. Yeah, yeah, I will get, I hope we'll get into the second step because the second step is listening. Can you maybe color this first step with an example or a story so we need more strategy space and like, what does it look like? What does better look like in this case? Yeah, okay, so here's a good story. In, there was a big company that in, they were building their own towers, office towers downtown and then the pandemic hit. And then the office towers ended up getting finished and they wanted everybody to go back to the office towers in 2021 and not everybody was ready to do that. But that wasn't the only thing that was happening. They were losing people. People were doing this great resignation thing. They're like, oh yeah, if you look at the big data, it's just like, oh yeah, a lot of people are resigning now. Maybe they're being lazy or maybe they've decided to change careers. I don't know what they're guessing from the big data. But what we did was some knowledge building. What's going on? What's going through people's minds? Is it because they're being asked to come into this fancy new building downtown or is it something else? And it turns out after we did a whole bunch of listening sessions and this, I was just helping to guide the team. This was done by a lot of research team within the organization and headed up. The person who was helping define what knowledge we needed was one of the heads of HR. So the idea was, what goes through people's minds is they're considering the situation and maybe thinking about leaving. So we, the team listened to people who were in that situation and what came out of it was a bunch of things that weren't necessarily the things that you would have guessed. One was, hey, I took this job because I was promised X and Y and sure the pandemic came along and we're stringing me along, but it's been two years, two and a half years, maybe three years because I joined a while before the pandemic and I still haven't gotten X or Y in this job. I'm tired, I'm going to give up. This is not the job I want. So that's one of the findings. And as HR, how do you support that? There's ways to support that, right? There was another thinking style that was about, you know, things are really rocky right now and I've been seeing people actually getting laid off within this organization and then I see other people just leaving and I'm worried about my own job and I desperately need this job. So I'm going to, you know, sort of hunker down at my desk and work really hard and hope that that work and my, you know, value to the company is considered when they think about laying me off. Okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah, can I? Yeah, there's a couple more I could talk about, but as you can see, it's like for each one of those, for the person who's like, I didn't get X and Y or I'm going to hunker down and just like hope that people notice HR can do stuff. And it's different. HR can do stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's different stuff, yeah. You mentioned something really briefly, which I think is key to the entire story. And I can imagine that you sort of are so used to it that it's easy to overlook, but you mentioned, yeah, yeah, then they just listen to these people. We went into a listening session and then all this came out. Like if it was that easy, like everybody would be doing it. So what kind of magic happens in that short brief sentence? They just listen. Yeah, that's the whole reason for the book, right? When you listen in ordinary life, we're typically thinking. And when we're thinking, our cognition, our brain is full of our own thoughts and we miss what the other person is saying, or we miss parts of it. We maybe hear some keywords that make us think some other thoughts. So basically what I'm training people to do. And this is something that you can do like half asked at first and still get some pretty good knowledge out of the listening sessions. And then as you get better at it, things will get even deeper. So there's a way to measure it, but let me talk about listening first. Listening is all about building a sensor. Building a sensor in your mind for a couple of things so that you can pay rapt attention to that person so that you're really aware of everything that they're saying, what the subtexts are, what the connections, you know, like they said that word before and now they're saying this word again, but it's slightly different. What does it mean? That kind of thing, but you're not thinking about it. You're just noticing it's just a sensor. And the sensor is after a couple of things. One is, are we getting to their interior cognition? Okay, now to ask that question, I have to talk about these two other things. One is purpose, right? We actually come at these listening sessions with one germinal question, which is what went through your mind as you addressed that purpose in the past? We are not talking about your current in session cognition. We want memory mode. We want someone talking about their cognition from the past because it's really hard and awkward and leads to a bunch of circuitous, like I didn't really mean that, but I'll say it this way because I think that's what they want me to say, kind of stuff, right? So in the past, what was your interior cognition? The second thing is that we do not have a list of questions. We do not have a list. So list of questions makes some people freak out. I'm like, fine, write down some list of questions, but don't bring up any topics that they haven't brought up. Okay, that's the easier way. And that's like, oh, okay, fine. I have this list of questions for the just-in-case net, like I fall off the trapeze, right? But I'm just going to follow up on all the topics that they bring up, just like you're doing right now. Except you're doing it with the idea of informing your audience as opposed to getting to interior cognition. So that takes us back to interior cognition. Interior cognition is interthinking emotional reactions and guiding principles that went through somebody's mind in the past as they were addressing that purpose or some part of the purpose that to them is related to that purpose. Okay, so this allows us to hear about things that we didn't realize we needed to ask about. Yeah, and so the idea of interior cognition is that we are trying to develop cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is understanding somebody's inner thinking, emotional reactions, and guiding principles that went through their mind in the past. I frame it in the past because it's just so much easier for a person to talk about their interior cognition that way. So cognitive empathy is scalable. Cognitive empathy, if you ask 10 people, if you ask 20 people the same germinal question what went through your mind as you were addressing this purpose in the past, you're going to find patterns. So that's the way that we get empathy. Cognitive empathy, a very specific kind of empathy that's scalable in our org. That's the way that we can find patterns across a bunch of different people. So I did a bunch of listening sessions about what went through people's minds in a near-miss accident. Okay, this was interesting because everybody's near-miss accident was in a totally different context, right? Some people were in the swimming pool. Some people were in a car. Some people were about to go into the Twin Towers before it got bombed. There was a lot of... Some people were in Kiev when it got bombed by Russia. This is a lot of near-miss accidents. And you would think, how am I going to find patterns across those stories because they're very different? And the patterns come from the focus of mental attention. So that's the idea that when you're in a near-miss accident, there's the part of it where you're like, how do I get out of this safely? And there's also a part of it that's like, did anybody else get hurt? Can I help anybody? There's the part of it where you're maybe angry at the other person for causing this or for being irresponsible. Not everybody is going to think that, but there are focuses of mental attention that become the patterns. We don't know them in the beginning, but we find them from the bottom up. So this is abductive data synthesis, abductive research, not deductive research, where we come into it with a hypothesis. What we're doing is we're creating a load of information in that strategy space that we can start using in our solution space, and that's where we can start making some deductive hypothesis and start testing them. So many things to double-click on and to Google further, but I'll pick one. As you see, I'm sort of ripping the entire story apart, trying to be very selfish and learn more here. You mentioned patterns a few times, like patterns emerge and it's abductive. I totally get that. A question that might arise here is why does it matter? So you have these patterns. I'll ask two questions, and then it's up to you in which order you want to ask them. So why do these patterns matter? And the patterns that you might find might be different than I will find, or are they? This is like a layup. Yeah, exactly. That's a leading question because you and I know. This, okay, so why do the patterns matter? The patterns matter because with both quantitative and qualitative data, there's an empirical end of it where it's verifiably observed. Multiple different people will be able to see that. They'll be able to reproduce it. There's also a subjective end to both quantitative and qualitative where it's just a one-off. With qualitative, this happens a lot. You'll go, you'll do interviews, and you'll take one of those stories, or you'll make a story that come from like two or three people and use that story to get attention from your stakeholders. Okay, that's what we're doing. But that's not a pattern. It might be a pattern, but we don't know. There's this idea of like, oh, let's go out and listen to somebody once a week. But if you don't frame it by the same purpose, if you frame it by the solution, you're not going to get patterns and you're going to get, this is the quintessential like, the sales guy went out and this one client wants X feature. And so we'll go make X feature. And it turns out that there's nobody else who wants it or like very few other people who want it except that one client. And maybe that client has a big budget and you want to keep them happy. Okay, there's that as a reason for doing it. But if we don't look at the other ideas out there, the other things that people are trying to get done, we are harming the other people, right? So patterns are super important because otherwise it's just anecdotes, just one-off stories. We're basing our entire organization and strategy on one-off stories. Not a great idea. This is actually how a lot of startups go, you know, try to take off and they just don't, they get to the end of the runway and they crash because they're doing it from their own point of view. So if you take, and I've done this with a lot of startups, if we take some time, time again, right, to go and frame it by a person's purpose, get a whole bunch of stories that then have different focuses of mental attention that have affinity, you're like, oh, here's a pattern. All right, if we have that, then we know, okay, as we're going forward, trying to get off this runway, we're going to focus on just this part and we're going to do a really, really good job on that part. And we're going to support this thinking style for this particular part of the approach and maybe that thinking style too. But maybe just one thinking style to get off the runway and then we're going to start generating some income and we can move to the second thinking style. So that's what, that's why. So the idea of doing, let's see, the second question was the leading one, right? Yeah, so your patterns will be different than mine. So it's still subjective and like, how is that different than an, or more valuable than an anecdote? So it won't, our patterns will be the same because you and I both know what to look for. We're looking for those three things. We're looking for inner thinking, emotional reactions and guiding principles. These are the things that we pull out. So here's a little thing. When you first start, you'll do a listening session and you may end up pulling maybe 35 or 40 of those types of concepts, those three things out of a transcript. When you get really good at it and you're good at the other parts of the book where you're learning how to make sure a person's feeling safe and then you can get 120 concepts out of that same session. So you can get started, you can get concepts at the interior cognition level, the inner thinking, the emotional reactions and the guiding principles. When you're first starting out, it's just going to be fewer of them. And as you start going back through the transcripts or somebody else might be going through the transcripts because you're like, I hate doing that. They're going to say, hey, here's the places where you didn't notice that they were implying something that I call a pull tab. And you didn't pull that tab to get into what that interior cognition was. And so here's a way. So that's one of the other sensors is you're noticing pull tabs. You're noticing when there's something that sort of imply there might be something back in there. And you can ask about it. You can ask about it using a variety of approaches like microreflection or because or, you know, trying to ladder back in history. Like where did that come from? What was your thinking before that that built this? That made this happen? So there's a bunch of those techniques that you can use. Those are all in the book. And that helps us get from 35 concepts per transcript to 120. Now, granted, I don't always get up to 120 because sometimes the purpose that is just not. It's not conducive to real richness. And so you have to try really hard and you might get to 60 and that's good. I did a study right at the beginning of the pandemic with founders, entrepreneurs. They're a variety of types of entrepreneurs so that we could understand their thinking styles and so that we could support them better and understand a little bit about where the discrimination is happening. And what was really interesting was given someone who wanted to hear their interior cognition, we went deep. These founders, these entrepreneurs, they have a lot of interior cognition happening and we got to go really deep. Our listening sessions lasted way longer than an hour. We don't stop a listening session ever. It goes until it's done and we've gone through all the topics and the other person is happy. If the other person is starting to feel uncomfortable, then we'll figure out why and we'll stop it. So these are the kinds of sensors that are being built and that's how you can still do this even though you don't have your sensor completely built because you can still get something out of it. I like the metaphor that you had about pulling the tab. I'm going to steal that one from you for sure because here is a tab that I hadn't prepared for but I want to get into. One of the things you mentioned is you have to create a space for someone to share their story and you have to encourage them or guide them or help them in that listening session to express what they want to express. But you also mentioned and you also mentioned that when you get a transcript you're also able to extract some of these concepts, right? And then I have a question. Is it true that based on a transcript you're also able to extract some of these concepts? Yeah, it's one in the same basically. You will be trying to help the person unfold their interior cognition. The person as they start realizing that you're really interested in what they have to say and really interested in what they thought, what went through their mind, not their opinions, not their preferences. Those are exterior layer of things. And when they realize they've got somebody who's really interested, it starts building and more and more come out. In the session what you're constantly sensing is like are we at the interior cognition layer? Is there a pull tab? Is there something implied? Is there something that they're bringing back up again? And like wait, why are you mentioning this again, right? You can ask a lot of different questions about it to help them unfold their interior cognition using some of those techniques. And so the idea is that when we go through the transcript they're one in the same. We'll see those interior cognition topics, those concepts that we help them unfold. Okay, we may. So one of the things that happens when we're doing it in real time, things come out tangled. When you and I are talking, we'll maybe talk about two concepts at once or an inner thinking and emotional reaction all tangled up. And when we're looking at it in the transcript, we can untangle it. And that's really powerful because we can start to see it more clearly. We can also see, oh, you know, if I had only asked it this way or said this or noticed that they were like trying not to answer this question, then I would have done a better job. The concept of garbage in this garbage out applies here. The output of your conversation will be judged by the quality of how well you can listen, how well you can notice, how well you can recognize these steps and again, help somebody to express this. Now, I'm curious. Okay, let's say you have an expert listener in these sessions and you capture the result. Have you seen examples where technology steps in and helps us actually to analyze what has been said? Because if they're asking or the listening part is the, I think, maybe who requires the most human skill and being in the moment improvising, that's the hardest sort of to duplicate, maybe. The second part seems to be more deductive, more rational, more, I don't know, what's your take on this? Okay, so natural language processing. I would love to partner up with a team who's working at the forefront of natural language processing to build a tool that recognizes inner thinking, that recognizes emotional reaction, that recognizes a guiding principle, which is a personal rule. They are not easy to recognize. Okay, you and me as humans, we can recognize it. Once we know what they are, and we haven't actually gone into examples of what they are, which we might want to do, but once we know what they are, we can recognize it. Natural language processing has more to do with analytical deduction or reduction of words and syllables. So it doesn't recognize that yet. I think it can be trained to. I would like to work with somebody to do that, because we have to do it all by hand right now, and we have to recognize it. I'm super fascinated by this concept because AI and natural language processing, like large language models, the way and the speed at which these things are developing right now, extracting meaning and summarizing pieces of text, it's insane. This is maybe just a way to say that probably the human part of being actual in the conversation, making a connection, giving somebody time and space and attention to share their story, that's maybe the hardest part of this entire process. And then recognizing these concepts that's maybe still hard. It takes the human right now. I actually offer a service because it takes time, and not everybody has time and not everybody likes to do it. But let me tell you, oh, it makes you a better listener. Just if you want to become a better listener, this is the fastest path to becoming a better listener is to go through it and try to pull all those concepts out of a transcript seriously. I teach a really good course on it that's available on my website that I just went through it with a whole bunch of people in live practice and it brought tears to my eyes how well they could recognize these things after taking the course. I would love it if we could get national language processing going that direction. I don't see a lot of grad students or teams who are working, like raising their hands and saying, oh, hey, I want to do this. I had one person who was really interested in it, but I lost track of that person. And I don't think that he had a background in natural language processing, so I'm not sure if he was connected to the teams that were doing that. So if you're out there, Miguel, come back. Or somebody new who's maybe already... Or somebody new. Who's maybe already doing this? I wouldn't be surprised these days. Yeah. I have sort of a few questions to wrap up this conversation. One question that's always on my mind is, what are some of the common pitfalls or common mistakes you see people making when they try to adopt this or maybe, yeah, starting with this? There is one mistake that I see. Otherwise it's all just... You got to set that sensor up. You got to build the sensor. So it's not a mistake. It's just that the sensor isn't quite there yet. We'll build it and work on it and try again. The one thing that I see, though, is people saying to themselves, well, I've done interviews, and if you're going to ask me to do this without a list of questions and not analyze it, but instead synthesize it, then I don't believe you. This should be deductive. Abductive? No. And you're going to make me do this, then I'm going to act like a robot and I'm just going to, like, parrot back what the person says because it looks like that's what you're doing. So what is the thinking model there? I think the thinking model is I reject the ideas of abductive and of synthesis. Just because it's different, because it hasn't been something that a lot of organizations have done. Now, I have worked with a lot of organizations that have gotten a lot of value out of it. True, I've worked with a few startups where they still went off the end of the runway and crashed. But it is incredibly powerful. There was an airline that I worked with and did eight studies one after the other, which was really wonderful because we were able to build a really deep understanding that went beyond just, oh, we're going to support the business traveler because there were a bunch of different thinking styles. And in fact, a business traveler could be a different thinking style when they get on board with their toddler and their family to go see grandma. They're not in business travel thinking mode. And in fact, business travel isn't even the name of the thinking mode. The thinking mode that was most common was be productive and make the most out of this day. So as I'm traveling, I'm going to write the slide deck for whatever presentation I'm going to give or as I'm traveling, I'm going to go through my client list or write the emails that I need. As I'm traveling, I'm going to knit the sweater for my granddaughter who's just been born that I'm going to go visit. As I'm traveling, I'm going to read that book that I promised my friend I would read so I could talk to her about it in book club or whatever. Be productive can take a lot of different ways, right? It doesn't have to be associated with business. Yeah. Yeah. So rejecting synthesis and abductive reasoning. Yeah. I think that that's just the... That's the only way that I've seen people like really, really mess it up. All the other ways are just like, we're trying to make that sensor. And oops, I missed that. Or I got scared and I couldn't think of one of the techniques to say. There's a technique that's like earlier you said and you just bring up another topic that they already talked about or maybe you do that too many times and the person's all like, dude, I already told you everything through my mind about it. You're like, oops. It's just because, you know, I'm a little nervous or my sensor isn't built quite yet. That's okay. You have to go through it so you can build the sensor. That's not a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. So much to, again, double click upon, but now let's cycle back to the start of our conversation where we started, you know, the book. And I'm always curious, like if you go through the tedious process of sitting down and writing, I don't know how many words. Oh, per day? Well, in general, but did you encounter any new questions? Like while you were writing this, like I would love to figure this out, but we need to write a second book about it. Like was there a new question that sort of emerged for you? Not so much a new question. And there is going to be a second book coming out, which is going to be about thinking styles. So it's not in this book, but it is in the course. It wasn't a question that came up, but it was a little bit of a shift in vocabulary because when you use the word to listen, you imply that you're talking about someone who is not deaf doing this. You're talking about someone who maybe is, you know, listening. You're listening to somebody who's able to talk or even likes to talk. So one of the things that I did is I talked about how that word listen really just means communicate, take in, receive. And you can communicate, not necessarily by audio, but also by texting with somebody, doing a chat session with somebody, doing it written, doing it drawing, doing it over time. So it's not just one big session, but you know, it takes place for five minutes every morning for two weeks or something. So there's a lot. That was the thing that changed with this book was this idea that, you know, it can happen in a lot of ways. I knew this, but I had never said it that way. And so I'm saying it very clearly in this book, hey, choose the method, the medium, how to communicate, how to receive the communications that works for the person that you're listening to. And also that works for you. Listening beyond the ears. Listening with all your senses. Exactly. Listening with all your senses. It's really all about connecting your mind to their mind. And that's starting to sound Vulcan, but you know, that's what it is. We're trying, we're trying to get that connection. I used to joke, like if I had a telepathy server, I wouldn't need to do listening sessions because I could just, you know, maybe a telepathy server and a recording. So a person could say, okay, I'm going to turn on the recording of my thoughts as I'm addressing this purpose. And I'm going to turn it off as I'm not addressing it. And I'll turn it on again as I'm addressing it again, and I'll turn it off, you know, or whatever. And then I'll just go through all that. Right. The listening session is just a way for them to communicate to me how, you know, what inner thinking, what emotional reactions, what guiding principles, what set different things off in the past. Without going into a new rabbit hole. But I would almost say it's not even communicating to you. It's just making it tangible, getting it out of their head and into the world. And then for anyone who's interested in knowing what is there. Indeed, we really have to sort of find closure in our conversation. But there is one important thing we need to do. And that is a lot of fun because we've been on the show with attention with authors lately. I don't know why, but somehow it happened. And we've been doing a lot of giveaways of books. And we're going to do one here as well. The formula is the same as in the previous episodes. We're going to do a raffle. So you're going to ask us, you're going to give us a challenge. Ask us a question. And people need to respond to the question on this video or audio recording where they are listening. And then in about two weeks, we'll do a raffle amongst the correct answers. And then they will get a special copy of the book. Now the question is what is the question? What is the challenge that people need to... I get to give the challenge. You get to give the challenge, obviously. So as you're building that sensor, what are you listening to? What are you trying to help somebody unfold? And they don't have to have the book to know that. They just have to have listened. Have listened to me for the last 45 minutes. For the last 45 minutes. So leave an answer. And the instructions will be in the show notes how to enter this raffle. Indy, okay, final, final question. If somebody made it all the way here, what do you hope is the one thing that they will take away? I hope one thing that they'll take away is that this is a... This is not a quick fix. And you can come back and revisit this again later. And later and later and come back and keep coming back. I've got a lot of materials on the website. A lot of essays, a lot of recordings, a lot of presentations, a lot of videos. I've got the courses. I've got the books when you start to get into it. This doesn't have to be something you do right away. So that's the long takeaway. It's a long wave, right? It's like the swell at ocean. Take your own time. There's that word time again. That's encouraging and knowing that be prepared. Sort of be mindful of your own expectations, not to get discouraged and quit too soon. Indy, thank you for coming back on the show. I'm happy that the book is out there and that the message is out there. Who knows when we'll complete the trilogy? I'm sure there will be an opportunity for that. But for now, again, thank you for coming on and sharing what's been going on on your end. Yeah, it's been fun. Thank you, Mark. I really enjoyed this conversation with Indy and I hope you did as well. And got something useful out of it. If you want to participate in the contents and make chance to win a special edition of Indy's book, read all the details in the show notes. My name is Mark Fontaine. I want to thank you for tuning into the Service Design Show. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.