THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast
Indi Young on Listening & Cognition
Descripción
Indi Young [https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/] is a researcher, author, and consultant focused on understanding how people think. She developed the mental models method and is the author of Practical Empathy [https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Empathy-Collaboration-Creativity-Your/dp/1933820489], Mental Models [https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Models-Aligning-Strategy-Behavior-ebook/dp/B004VFUOQ0?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1], and Time to Listen [https://www.amazon.com/Time-Listen-Invention-Inclusion-Assumptions-ebook/dp/B0B5NMLTF8?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1]. Her work emphasizes listening, qualitative rigor, and designing systems that support different ways of thinking in practice. And, she has a great substack, Indi Young [https://indiyoung.substack.com/]. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their story. And she has this question, which I just think is really beautiful, so I use it, but because it’s so big, I over-explain it before I ask. Because I want to make sure that you know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? I love that that question comes from your neighbor, too. I come from, well, my neighbor is actually a Buddhist meditation teacher, so neighbors are influential. Neighbors is a good word. I would say that I come from the edges of things. I am not a typical anything, and this is true of my entire family. Well, not entire, you know, there’s always, maybe most of the family is black sheep, and there’s a few who aren’t, I don’t know. But, yeah, I’ve never really been the person that anything was designed for. I remember sitting in math class in seventh grade, understanding what the teacher was talking about, but understanding also that the students weren’t understanding, but being way too shy to raise my hand and say, Miss Betsy, if you had just said this, then I think these guys wouldn’t be asking these questions. You know, it’s just I’m not smarter than anyone. I just see things. I can see things, I guess. I don’t know. Everybody can see things. But one of the things that’s interesting is I just visited my dad’s cousin, 87, last weekend, along with my cousin. And we were listening to family stories. And my dad’s cousin is full of vigor and has had a very adventurous life that is not like any other life you would expect. She was a horse trainer and rider, specifically Arabian, specifically endurance trail riding, which is a reenactment of the Pony Express. The original one of those was called Tennis Cup. And it runs from, it’s a hundred mile race that runs across the Sierras following the Pony Express mail trail that used to go across the Sierras. And she was instrumental. I mean, she rode that a bunch of times. I remember as a kid, I would look at the pictures of her going over Cougar Rock, which is an iconic place to take a photo of a horse, jumping up over a rock. And I was just in love. And so, of course, I also followed that path for a little bit. I am not rich enough to have horses on my own. But that was fabulous. She went on, I mean, she ended up working at a county jail for a while. She had just all these different adventures. And one of the things that I keep getting reminded of when I’m visiting her is that the family on her side, on my dad’s side, came to California in 1849. The third year that the Carson Pass was open. I think it was, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t Carson Pass. It was a little bit north of that. But they came over at the exact same month as the Donner Party. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And we have family stories about how typically awful the Donner Party was and how poorly they treated their Native American guides. And stories of how we built, I don’t know, we were, the family was doing something to build. It’s called, it’s the Greenewalt Party. That’s the name of the party that your family came to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we’re, apparently, and we were the ones who, we went over, we built something so that we could go over it. And the Donner Party wanted to just use our stuff and whatever. Oh, wow. It’s, yeah. And we’re like, no, we’re going to go over it first. And then you’re going to come right on our heels because there’s a big storm coming. And apparently they were miffed and didn’t and stayed. And so you’re like, wow, OK. Few weeks later, we were part of the people coming back to help rescue them. Oh, my gosh. Right. So I think that, I mean, it’s a great little story because it talks about where we come from. I never, yeah, it’s not, we’re not a competitive minded family. We are a let’s cooperate and collaborate and work with our neighbors and get things done so that we all can move forward kind of a family. And that has completely bled into everything I’ve done in my career. I’m trying to help. Originally I grew up in Silicon Valley. It was not called that when I grew up, nor were there any of the tech bros there. There was no money there. There was Hewlett Packard. And I remember Apple being down the road from us in its very original form with a little rainbow Apple logo, although they didn’t. I mean, you only saw the rainbow logo Apple in some brochure because I never saw the actual logo on a building. I don’t think they were big enough for that. Where were you personally? What was the town you grew up in? Oh, that was called Los Altos. Yeah, I call it Los Altos now because there’s no way I can move back. Yeah, but it was like everybody that I knew, I got into computer science not because I wanted to, because it was something. So the story, once I got into it, let me tell that part of it. Once I got into it, everybody was a deep thinker. Everybody thought things through. That was the flavor of the people who were getting into the early computing. And it wasn’t something where I want to make money quick. That was not the goal. The goal was to figure out how these machines might be used for certain things and what that would look like and what the repercussions might be or how we could build on that. It was always about building on things. And then it did start shifting and I can tell you stories about that. But my whole goal with my career is to try to teach Silicon Valley to think more broadly to think about the edges, because the edges are half your market, literally half your market. And I have heard VPs and I don’t know, CTOs and stuff these days stand up and say, oh, we’re not interested in that market because that’s not enough income for us, not enough profit for us. It’s not worth it. Even though, you know, A, it should be worth it because they’re humans, too. I have this good example with a Netflix subscription plan, but it’s worth it because they’re human, too. But it’s also worth it because it’s not going to cost you that much. It’s software. It’s not going to cost you that much. So, yeah. Yeah. I’m curious. I want to get into those stories, but I always enjoy hanging out in the origins. So you’re in Los Altos. What did you, did you have a, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading. Yeah, I think, you know, all through grade school, especially fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, I was the student where the teacher would say, speak up. We can’t hear you. But they would also come to me and say, hey, you might want to read this book. And so I read, you know, I read Tolkien. I read Dune. I read all of that before I was out of fifth grade. I just loved reading. And of course, I go back and reread them. And then I go back. I have a list. This list is in Excel spreadsheets. That’s a very core thing to me is spreadsheets. The list goes all the way back to the 70s of books that I’ve read. And then I go back and I reread them and I get a completely different message out of them. And then I’ll go back and I’ll reread them. And this still happens. This happens with, I just reread the N.K. Jemisin Stone Sky series or whatever. It’s a series of three books. And it’s speculative fiction. We don’t call it science fiction anymore because that was the old guy’s way, you know, science. It’s like, no, this is more about understanding how people interact and how people would interact and what society would look like and what government would look like in the future. And in that series, it’s, you know, what, 40,000 years in the future of Earth? And we’re right back where we were during colonial times with respect to the government and the slaves and all of this. So interestingly, I read that for the first time, probably right before the pandemic, maybe a couple of years before the pandemic. And I just reread it last month. And a whole new message comes out. I mean, I caught all, I’ll highlight these things. And then I caught a bunch, you know, I caught a bunch of stuff the first time through. But then I’m like, oh, wait, there’s the lower message. And so next time I read it in another, you know, decade, I’ll find even more message. It would be really awesome. So reading has always been my thing. I wanted to be a writer. I remember my dad, we were standing in the kitchen. I think we were drying dishes or something. And my dad said, come here, I want you to watch this show. This show is called Nova. And it was the very first iteration of Nova, which was, you know, a science show, an early version of a science show. And in their intro, they had some computer graphics, early computer graphics, showing the logo coming together. And he’s all, you know, they did that on a computer. Would you be interested in computers maybe? Because I think you could earn a living on computers and then have writing as your hobby. Something to do on the side. He is also the man who told me, get into something where you provide a service. And instead, well, I don’t know, I provide a service, but nobody wants my service right now with AI. Nobody wants to know about the humans. Yes, yes. Well, now we’re talking. So how do you, let’s catch this up. So you tell us where you are now and the work that you’re doing. What is the work that you’re doing in your office? Well, the work that I do, of course, has many levels at it. And so it’s hard to explain. But I was with my team, I’ve got this Tuesday team of folks who are mostly laid off or retired, who get together and we love thinking together. And we’re trying to think together about a better way to describe this that works in the world of AI. And basically, it is that most of the products that we’re creating are designed to be an average. It is, here’s the product, most people can use it. I think there’s stories around why I think it derived that way. But most people don’t think the same way. They think in wildly different ways, even though they’re approaching the same goal, the same purpose or intent. And that’s completely lost. And in a digital product, as opposed to a physical product, but even those can change. And I’ve got stories about that, washing machine stories. In a digital product, it’s really easy to have multiple versions of it that match different thinking styles. So one of the key differences that I do is most teams look at what they’re doing from the point of view of the product, the solution, the service, the thing, the policy that we’re making. And I’m building a policy and it’s all about policy. And they forget. And actually, Brian O’Neill has this newsletter that I just read the first paragraph and it exactly says this. It’s like he does it for data dashboards and stuff. It’s like all the data is great, all the interface is great, but they forget. Way back in the beginning to ask the people what they were trying to get done. They forget that perspective. And that’s what my whole career has been about. It’s like, let’s go figure out that perspective. I don’t care what you’re building. When I come in to a client, they really want to show me what they’ve got. And I said, listen, let’s leave that for the later. I don’t want to look at it now. I don’t care. What I want to do is talk to you about what you think people are trying to get done. And let’s find those people so I can find out how they’re thinking about it. Right. I’m interested in their cognition. The way that I teach how to listen involves layers. I use an analogy of a spherical candy that you might have eaten that has layers. As a kid, you suck off the outer layer and it’s a different color underneath or a different flavor or something. And that’s basically when we’re interacting with each other conversationally, we tend not to go deep. We just stick with those outer layers. And that’s how we think about communicating. Dave Gray had this book called Liminal Thinking a while ago. He has this cartoon and a little sketch he drew where basically two people are trying to communicate with each other, but they’re only communicating with that outer layer. And so a lot gets missed. The foundational stuff gets missed. I work with teams who are sick to death of trying to fight with the other team to get things done. A lot of strife and a lot of friction. And I teach them how to listen. And all of a sudden, they can see that even they are just throwing spears back at the other people. They’re not attempting to get deep. Neither party is attempting to understand what actually is going through your mind and what actually might be emotional reactions you’re having, what actually might be personal rules that you’ve got under there. And once you get to that layer, all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, yeah, no, we’ve got the same personal rules in general. Or, oh, no, we’ve got very different personal rules. So let’s have a discussion about that. I’m sorry. There’s so many questions. When do people pick up the phone? I’m just so excited to talk to you about your work and about how you help people listen. I love the analogy of the lollipop, if that’s what it was, and that we stay at the surface and listening isn’t a skill or it’s not an instinct for a lot of organizations. I’m curious, what gets those organizations to the point that they ask for help? What do you find? When do you find people come to you? That is exactly what my Tuesday team and I are exploring right now. Because all in the past, people have come to me because they are at the point that they understand this is missing already. They’re already converts in a certain respect. They may have read something of mine. They may have seen a talk. I’ve given a lot of talks. I would admit that a lot of my talks are at a level that demands that the audience understand some more deep concepts. I’m realizing I need to learn how to speak at a more outer layer to draw people in, which I need to learn how to do. But there’s always something. So that’s how they would find out about me. Or it would be somebody telling somebody, oh, I was working with this new method. It increased our qualified leads in the worst winter month that we ever, normally we don’t get a lot of leads, but it increased it up and above the levels that we get in the summer by a third or two thirds. And people are like, oh, interesting. How did you do that? And so that’s how it worked. I’ve never had to, I’m not a very good marketer. Well, I have a lot of identification with that. I’m curious, because you talked about when you entered this world, that everybody was a deep thinker. People weren’t in it for money. And you didn’t start out as a listener or a researcher. I’m just curious, is that right? I mean, I’m just curious, what’s the arc of your career been and how did you come to really cherish listening and make it a focus for you? In the very beginning, as a young software engineer, you’re right, I was not doing that. I was on a team. This is spectacular. I wanted to move somewhere where I didn’t know the street names. And so I accepted the job in Denver, which was actually, it turned out to be a job in, it was in the aerospace industry. And it ended up being a job in a tiny Air Force Base way the hell out on the planes. But I landed my first day with five other women engineers. And I’m like, hey, this is weird. We’re all saying this to each other. This is weird. It was the guy who was, probably he was a feminist, probably, because we didn’t speak in those words, but probably he’s like, damn it, we need to hire people. These are fantastic thinkers. And so he’s like, I’m just going to do a glut on gender, gender and specific on women. And so we show up looking at each other, like, wow, how did this happen? This is great. We worked together. It was a really fascinating job until I saw at this Air Force Base, a guy with his, he has pimples. So he’s still, he’s not 20 yet. And he has this big automatic machine gun looped over his shoulder in the cafeteria. And I’m like, he swings around to get something. We’ve got his tray in front of him. And I’m like, dude, you’ve got potato salad on your gun. OK, this is enough. I’m out of here. What was the job there? What were you there to do? We were writing software. We were writing software specifically, I think I can talk about this, to make a testbed for Star Wars. And Star Wars was all these satellites that were supposed to shoot down missiles before they arrive on our soil. So it was, I mean, we had a five star general, of course, come because we’re five women in a giant cubicle. And they’re like, I got to see this, right? So different in those days. But it was, I thought it was interesting work because I really hate war. And I thought, well, let’s make it a game. Let’s make it a game that the people who love war can play without killing our people, our young people who still have pimples on their face and don’t deserve to die. But that’s not what it was. And I was done. And so the next thing that I did was basically join a company that was a spinoff from Cray. So I had been using, we were programming with the Cray computer. It’s a supercomputer back in those days. And there was a spinoff that was like, okay, we’re going to do a supercomputer, but with an operating system and with an interface. And so I was in charge of the interface. What would the visual interface look like? And that was super fun. And again, I mean, you get a chance to deeply think about things. But at the same time, it was a really small group of us. What was the state of the art for user interface? Was there any? Oh, that’s actually worth talking about. Motif, I think was the name of the operating system. It was a visual operating system. So I don’t know if you know, Xerox Star was the first visual operating system before Apple. And we had, and in college, I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and we had a bunch of Xerox Star machines that we got to, we were programming with them in the beginning. And it was a windowed interface, which was fantastic. I also love the fact that it had a way to get at the keyboard and use different keyboards. So if you didn’t want the QWERTY keyboard, you could use a Dvorak keyboard, which was supposed to be more efficient in terms of the English language. And the QWERTY is more mechanically efficient, meant for typewriter. And so you could just change it. I was a touch typist, so you don’t look at the keyboard. And you could learn how to use a Dvorak keyboard by having the little icon of where the keys are laid out on the screen. It was beautiful. Xerox did some great work. So anyway, we were building something. I think I ended up going with the operating system that I think was Sun Microsystems had pioneered. And it had the word tool in it. And I can’t remember why. But it didn’t have color in it. And the other one I think was called Motif. And it had color in it. And that one took off because it had color. But the one that Sun Microsystems did, and I think it was them. I could be wrong. I loved it better because they had more thought behind it. For example, the scroll bar. So right now, think of a scroll bar. You have to go find where it is. Move your mouse to it. Grab it. Move it down. Move it up. Figure out what speed it’s scrolling at. Use your little scroll bar thingy on your mouse, which I’ve never learned how to use, to affect that. And the Sun Microsystems one, it was not that. It was an elevator. On a cord. And the elevator had, at the top, a little way to just go up little bit by little bit. And at the bottom, another way to go down by a little bit, little bit. But you were keeping your mouse there. You didn’t have to move your mouse all over the place. And then you could move it up and down the cord if you wanted to go farther and faster. It was just some little bits. That’s the one I can remember. This was a long time ago. And so at what point did you, I mean, you develop mental models. At what point did you become a person that was really committed to listening? It was pretty much around that time I started thinking, okay, we are designing for other software engineers or scientists even. It was called SSI, supercomputer. Shoot, I can’t remember. It was called SSI, whatever it was. But at that point, if they really wanted to double down on software, who else are we programming for? At that point, as a programmer, you were expected to go understand the standard operating procedure, the standard way people did a thing. And so I would go and talk to all these people and try to figure out the standard way they would do a thing and then figure out a good interface for it. So that’s the point where I realized, okay, this is what it’s like to talk to people. But just a little bit later, I was working as a consultant. So I switched off out of SSI and became a consultant using something called PenPoint as an operating system. It was the early tablet. And sorry, I keep pausing because I’m trying to remember what was the word for that? We would bring the tablet around wherever we would go. We would go more places than I go now, out to a cafe or on a train or whatever. And people are like, what’s that? And it was a tablet that recognized handwriting. So for example, doctors, there was a particular doctor that hired me to help him figure out how to do patient charts in a way that would work for him. And he would carry it around. Recently, there was an Apple ad or something I saw that it felt like an alternate or parallel timeline that it seemed there was a real excitement about being able to turn handwriting into digital text around that time. And it just never took off. That was early 90s. I think it didn’t take off because NEC was the one who was providing the hardware. And they bought the company that did the software and killed it. There’s always some blunt explanation. There’s always something, yeah. And anyway, now we’ve got voice. So it was interesting because I was starting to work with the individuals who wanted to craft this thing in a way that matched the way they were thinking. There was one client who owned a bunch of satellites that would take pictures of the earth and they would sell them to the government and other corporations that would do things like mapping. This is well before Google Maps. And it was somewhat expensive. It was a business, right? And they hired me because they wanted maybe to expand. This is actually one of the ways you asked me that question earlier. One of the ways that people will reach out to me is because we want to do something different. We think there’s an opportunity to do something different. I’ve got a lot of stories around that. And this particular satellite company, they must have wanted to expand their market or something. They might have sensed that bigger things were coming. Who knows, right? And so I’m there. I’m like, well, give me a bunch of your clients and let me go talk to them. And give me some people that you’re talking to to potentially become clients. And let me go talk to them too, half and half, because I don’t want to just talk to people who use this stuff. But at that point in time, they were using that stuff to do something else. It wasn’t using the solution, the imagery. And we’re going to talk about getting the imagery. It was, what are you trying to do with the imagery? Right? And how do you think about it? And after all of that, and I put the information together, I’m like, oh my God, there’s a huge mismatch. There’s some stuff that, and I did this vertically instead of horizontally, like the skyline. The first one was vertical. And it’s like, yeah, the vendor has this and the people are trying to do this. Only I had it, the people first. The people are trying to do this. The vendor supports it. People are trying to do this. The vendor supports it. People are trying to do this. Crickets. And I’m like, there’s your opportunity. And the other guy who brought me on, the other consultant brought me on to do the research. I remember we were sitting in the taxi going back to the Pasadena airport. And he’s like, oh my God, you have to copyright that. That is amazing. And I’m like, I’m not going to copyright it. I want it to live and grow. If you copyright it and you try to control it, then it dies. So I’m not going to copyright it. It’s something that I’m going to expand into the world. Right? So there’s just some, certain things about the way that I think are not because of my family. We’re not competitive that way. We are collaborative. We’re moving forward. So that’s, yeah. How has the practice changed or how has the world changed? I mean, it’s been, you’ve been at this for quite a while and I’m just, I’m always curious to hear people talk about, I mean, I’m always interested in the role of listening, the role of qualitative. What’s your sense of how it’s changed in your career? There’s a few changes that have happened. The early change was that people started to realize that qualitative is just as valuable as quant. In the early days, people thought there was one spectrum and the good stuff quant was at the good end and the bad stuff, the iffy, guessy stuff was the qual and it was at the bad end. And they started realizing, no, they’re both their own spectrum. They both have an empirical end and they both have a subjective and we’re like, you’re guessing. And there was a lot of qual out there where people would go and listen to one or two stories and they would say, hey, here’s our pattern. And I was like, no, that’s subjective qual. And so I think one of the big changes was that there were a bunch of people who realized there was qualitative data that was actually verifiable and repeatable and therefore empirical. The whole reason for qualitative, the whole way that you can find out whether it’s verifiable is whether patterns come out of it, which is not something that people using quant could understand easily. I’ve always been a words person. I wanted to be a writer. The SAT, I got 100% on the English side. Words are awesome. I think I’m losing a lot of them now. But yeah, so I think that was one of the changes is that, yay, people are getting it, that there is value in these words and that social sciences are still a science. I want to linger here a little bit because this is where things get, I guess, significant in a way. I mean, you call yourself a qualitative data scientist, which seems very intentional. And I’m just wondering, what is the role or what is the value of qualitative for somebody who is mostly in the quantitative realm, to your point? I mean, I encounter lots of people. I love your analogy. It’s a spectrum. The qualitative is on the fuzzy, subjective side of things. But how do you help people see that they’re distinct? And what is the value that you articulate around qualitative? What does it do that nothing else does? What qualitative does, and when I try to convince people it works and it doesn’t work, right? There are some people for whom they will never trust it. But what qualitative brings is an understanding that people are like little galaxies and they have a lot going on in their minds. And what’s going on in their minds cannot be reduced to a Cartesian map. It changes. It’s what you think changes based on your inputs, your context, your mood. You don’t do the same thing twice, necessarily. There are guiding principles or personal roles, I call them, that underlay this. And most of the time, people don’t mess around with their personal roles. They stick with them. When they are messing around with them, it’s when you feel like, the words like your hands start to sweat a little bit because I’m going against this thing that I always believe is the right thing to do. So this might be a good time to talk about the pieces. So one of the things that I do when I’m convincing someone is I say, there’s a bunch of words that people say, which are just that outer layer. And that outer layer, as many surveys as you’d like, is going to produce a bunch of numbers that mean nothing because your survey is about those outer layers. And you’re going to make a decision based on this survey that people, really like blah, blah, blah. But like is a preference. And the preference is going to change based on who they’re next to. Right? You’re going to make a business decision based on it, and it’s not going to go down so well. And you’re going to forget that you made that decision because it was the result of a survey about preferences or a survey that maybe even there was a time when surveys were terrible because people always thought, I’ve got Survey Monkey. I can just write a bunch of questions. So no, but they would try to write surveys about what’s going on in people’s minds. And you cannot capture it in multiple choice. Right? Those days, I would say the only good survey is an essay. And people don’t want to fill in the blank because that’s a lot of writing. So the only good survey is to do listening sessions. And the only good survey I say now is a survey where these are facts you would say about yourself. Right? Not personal rules, not preferences, not inner thinking, not emotional reactions, but facts like I am five foot four. And why must we be so careful about the questions that we ask in that way? Because I’m alluding to the idea that when people try to lay out someone’s inner world into a survey format, they’re never going to capture all the potentials. So every time I look at a survey, let’s take... Okay. I also hate these universal personality types. There’s this intent or love of let’s have a model of how everybody thinks. Horoscopes, Myers-Briggs, whatever personality test you took at the last place you were employed so you’d get along with your fellow employees better. Right? There’s no universal. There’s no universal. So Myers-Briggs, I keep, my cousins were really into it. So I try taking it and it’s like a hundred multiple choice questions. There are no answers for me. There was maybe one in 10 questions. I’m like, oh yeah, that answer matches me. But the rest of it, it doesn’t match. Yeah. It’s just not there. Right? So you cannot collect that kind of information in survey format. I don’t think it’s ethical to do it because you’re doing a disservice to the organization who’s trying to use it. Or you’re just building some sort of nice scammy universal model about personalities and selling it. So, okay, whatever. Doing a listening session is the only way and doing it carefully and beautifully is the only way to get an understanding of a person’s inner world. So in a listening session, we bring no list of questions. We only bring a germinal question. Germinal meaning a little seed and from which the conversation is going to grow. And that germinal question and every listening session is framed around a thing someone’s focused on addressing. I call it a purpose because I want to say something higher than a goal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of jobs to be done as a methodology. Yeah. They say it’s, somebody’s job and their jobs are always very discreet, very small. In a listening session, I go with a little bit bigger jobs, right? So to speak, I don’t like to use the word job. They have it. I don’t like to use the word goal either because a lot of these things are things that you never are going to ever accomplish. You’re just working at them as a part of your life. I did a listening, a study for a company making washing machines. And our study was about how do you take care of your clothing? And in fact, the other part of it, that germinal question is that we focus it on the past. So how did you take care of your clothing over the past month or two? Okay. Also, you’ll notice we didn’t ask about the solution, the washing machine. We asked about what people were trying to get done. Okay. So there’s a bunch of stuff that goes into that thinking that goes into the way we form a germinal question. And that also influences recruiting and who we want to hear from. There’s other things that the company is interested in, in terms of how they want to expand or how they want to innovate that goes into recruiting as well, but it doesn’t go into the germinal question. Yeah. I’m doing a study right now or helping a team form a study with doctors diagnosing stroke. They’ve done a ton of other kinds of studies. They want to do a study in this methodology because it’s maybe going to be the key to them understanding what’s going on. Yeah, I’m curious. I’m so curious to know more about what you do in the listening session. You say that there’s no guide, there’s no list of questions, but how do you talk about your approach? What happens there and what’s your role as the interviewer, the researcher? How do you even think about what you’re doing there? Can you just say more about what’s happening in there and what you’re doing? You are free in there. I have heard Sam Ladner and Steve Portigal in their podcast. They have this great podcast, something like Off the Path. In one of them, they’re like, God, I wish I could just be free. But no, they’ve got these lists of questions and they’re both incredible researchers and they get a lot of stuff, but they are stuck within that list of questions. That’s mainly because their client wants to know about the solution and we haven’t framed it by what are people trying to get done. I think they do frame by what people are getting done, but it isn’t from a cognitive point of view or it isn’t from... I don’t know. It’s interesting. They actually do a really good job within the constraints that they’re in. I don’t have an academic background in anthropology, so I didn’t know that you had to be constrained that way. And so when I started out, that satellite company, the next time I did this, I think it was for a big investment company, I’m not going to ask you about your accounts. I’m going to ask you about what you’re trying to get done. So it’s got to be some specific thing. And the org was well, we do all these things. We do all of them. We’re well, okay, we’ll do all those studies then. What do you mean? We’ve got to frame it by the thing people are trying to get done. So within a listening session, let’s take that example of the washing machine one, taking care of your clothing. People will say, a lot of the time, maybe a third of the time, they’ll say, well, where do you want me to start? I’m what just went through your mind right now? But the beautiful thing is that usually I have had an intro session with them first. And we do intro sessions, 15, 20 minutes to make sure that the person is comfortable with this kind of inner action. It is not a survey spoken out loud, right? Yeah. I am not going to lead you through a list of questions. And we will get a bunch of candidates. We will do intro sessions with them. And in that intro session, we’ll find out if they’re comfortable. And we’ll also find out if they can speak about their inner thinking. And there was one candidate. This was for a study about, it was a company that makes small appliances. And they just wanted to what else can we do? What are people doing in the kitchen, right? Well, you can’t just say, what are you doing in the kitchen? That’s not specific enough. You can’t say, what are you doing when you make dinner? Because a lot of people make dinner in a lot of different ways. So we decided on what went through your mind as you were cooking dinner in the mindset of feeling like a creative home chef. Okay. Very specific. Is that the germinal question? Yeah, that’s the germinal question. It’s what went through your mind. It’s in the past. And it’s about this purpose that people have. Yeah. I use that word purpose. I know I teach this globally. And there are countries this guy in South Africa. He’s all purpose means something totally different to us. I’m okay, good. Call it intent. I really identify with all the language in the models around benefit, jobs to be done, motivations, mindsets. I feel I also have a pile of language in that space too. That’s I’m not really... So I’m just connecting with that. That’s it’s beautiful though. Keep going though. So you have a germinal question. Yes, you have a germinal question. And generally people have thought about this germinal question since you had the intro session. A few of them, maybe a third of them, maybe a quarter, I don’t know. We’ll say, well, where do you want me to start? Because they’ve thought about it so much. There’s a ton, right? You, you always start your listening sessions, which is what this is sort of. There, there’s a reason why it isn’t exactly. With a question about where people come from. Right. So it’s a way of, okay, let’s get started there. It does not matter where we start, because what’s going to happen is that the person’s going to bring up a story. I’m going to try to get them to bring up a story. So within the clothing thing, there was someone who was a model. And taking care of clothing is important to that person. And they told me, I don’t remember how we started, but one of the things was, when they get a job, they’re looking at what the requirements are of the job. And then they know exactly what they’re going to grab. They have organized their clothing in a way that is, in reaction to the types of job descriptions that they get for the modeling gigs. Right. And that’s not true of this other person who was a widow, his wife had passed away. He still wants to appear neat and pressed. He doesn’t want to give up, because there’s that big, deep black hole when your partner has died and he doesn’t want to fall his way of not falling into the big, deep black hole is with his clothing. Right. And so we’re getting all these stories. When we get these stories, what we’re interested in is two things. Well actually a lot of things, but one of them is let’s make sure that we’re building trust with this person because the person’s not going to just go out and tell you their inner thoughts if they’re not sure who they’re talking to. Right. This is why a listening session has to be one-on-one. It can’t be multiple people because you guard yourself. Maybe subconsciously, you’re just not going to talk about certain things. Right. And I don’t want people to talk about stuff that they would never tell anyone, but I do want them to talk about their inner thinking, their emotional reactions and their personal rules. And I want us to sense. So this is the other thing we’re doing. When people are just explaining to us how they do them things, how the necklaces are organized on the racks going down her hallway, part of her clothing. Right. But why? Right. I want to understand what’s underneath that. Well, they might get an opinion. They might tell me because this is better. But why? I don’t want to stick with just the opinion. Where did that come from? When you first started doing it, do you remember what was going through your mind? And it was oh yeah, it was that day when I was at my friend’s apartment and she was trying to get ready to go out. We were going out and she couldn’t find the necklace that she wanted or, whatever. Right. And I’m I never want to make anyone late, including myself. We were late to the concert. I never want to make any, so I have to organize this so that I don’t meet people late. Right. So my personal rule then got formed. Well, maybe the personal rule was I don’t like being late, but that thinking of making my necklaces all organized as a part of that personal rule of I don’t want to ever be late. Maybe it was related. Maybe it wasn’t. I’m making up this example because I’m not going to tell you people’s actual thinking. The, the, the, what happens outside of this is important. After we look for patterns and this is important and I want to touch on this, maybe again later, but we’re not just looking at one person’s story and then surfacing that story, that story, meaning that inner thought, that trip back in memory. We were in the apartment. My friend couldn’t find her necklace. We were going to be late. Right. It gets rolled up with other people’s stories where they have the same focus of mental attention. So it might not be about necklaces. Necklaces are nouns. It might not be about feeling in a rush, but it might be, or it might not be about a personal rule of not being late, but it might be. These little things are focuses of mental attention. So when we analyze the data, what we’re doing is we’re using an affinity technique of what is the person focused on in that moment? What is the bigger thing? Yeah, they’re trying to find the necklace. What else were they focused on? They were focused on trying to get the concert before the gates shut or something, or maybe meeting friends in front of the Coliseum or wherever they’re going. And letting that friend down or thinking about how the last time they went out with that friend and they were late, the friend said, okay, you get one more shot and then I’m not going to concerts with you again. They might’ve been thinking all of that, but we’re doing focus of mental attention. And the focus of mental attention is what shows up as those towers in the skyline. Those towers contain the stories. The stories might be totally different. I have a study that I’ve been doing for many years about what went through your mind as you experienced a near miss incident. And those incidents are all varied. And what kind of, I’m curious, how do you, what kinds of questions you, I mean, you’ve written about listening and listening deeply. What have you learned? And what do you teach about how to help people tell these stories or uncover these stories? So the things, and I teach, we’ve, I’ve got a course and I’ve got a book and I’ve been teaching at various levels throughout the career specifically began with just people who wanted to have a job and work with me. And so I teach one off and so I’ve just gotten better and better and better at it. And part of what I’m teaching is when you try to form trust with someone, you do it by those little words, like, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah. Your tone of voice, you do it by understanding how they speak and trying to not speak yourself in a very opposite way. So if the person’s very quick, very fast, then you will have very fast questions. You wouldn’t be going, oh yeah. And having a space. You would do it their way. I teach people some of the ideas to let go of your judgment. Well, we’re certainly letting go of whatever the client wants. I don’t care about the client. I don’t care about their product. I care about this person, what they’re trying to get done. So you try to keep the product and the client out of the conversation. But more than that, you try to keep your judgment out of it. So you might hear someone saying something that they believe that you’re like, oh no, you’re a little fringe on that. That’s a judgment. You let go of it. You’re like, oh, totally. I can see how. So you’re thinking around that, just be there, be there for them. You are not lying. You are being there for them. Have you ever heard of Harleen? I’m sorry. Go ahead. Have you ever heard of Harlene Anderson? Does that name ring a bell? No. I’m going to send you these links, but she was a therapist and I have some footage of her talking about training therapists. And one of the things she talks about, everything you’re saying reminds me is resonating with interesting. Yeah. But she talks about how you ask questions not to get answers, but as a way of participating in the conversation. Yes. Exactly. Well, that’s actually a good segue because the other part of this is like, well, what do I ask? You go into this with no questions. A lot of people are like, that’s like asking you to cross a tight rope between two cliffs with no net. I’m going to freeze up. How did you come to this? How did you come to this way of doing it? That’s a harder question to answer. Let me answer the first question. Write that one down, bookmark it. So the idea is to calm people down to say, there’s no cliff. You’re just with this person. You’re trying to understand this person. All you’re trying to do is sense what layer of this jawbreaker. That’s the candy that I talk about. What layer are we at? Are we at sort of this description layer explanation scene setting? That’s all going to happen. Don’t try, you’re not going to ask them not to talk about this. You need it. But then are we getting, oh, here’s a preference. Can I ask, are they going to explain their preference? And here’s an opinion. Oh yeah. They’re explaining where the opinion came from. Good. Once they start hearing the kinds of questions that you’re asking, they start expanding themselves. They get into it. They start expanding. They also will, even if you mess up and you let a little accidental way of your talking into their conversation and they’re like, okay, oops, that’s broken. You can recover because of all the rest of the questions. They’re like, okay, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. You can recover it in most cases. People are enthralled by the feeling of feeling heard, of being listened to. It’s like nothing else. And so they’re willing to allow you a couple mistakes. They’re not willing to allow you outright judgment. That’s the end of it. Turn it off. But when you’re in it, there are types of questions that I teach people. There are types of questions for getting behind the preference and the opinion. But a lot of the time, there’s going to be some part of inner thinking that’s got more to it. And I’ll say, they’ll say, so my wife used to hang the clothing out to dry on the lines and I’m a little reluctant to do that. And I’m like, because we live in San Francisco where it’s foggy a lot of the time. I’m not sure things are going to dry out. And I’m like, well, what went through your mind the last time you were thinking about this? So there’s two types of questions there. There’s a because, a continue question. You could say and. I don’t say the word why very often. Because works a lot better. It doesn’t interrupt. The second one was what went through your mind? Just the last time. That’s another kind of question. So I’m teaching people kinds of questions. In the book, you can actually see the chapters on the edges from the bleed over. And the chapter on the types of questions is the biggest part of the book. So yeah, there’s a bunch of different ways. And what you’re doing is just sensing as you’re going. You’re sensing when they’re talked out on this one topic. You’re sensing when there’s another topic that they drop onto the table. And the way I think about this is it’s a jawbreaker. A jawbreaker, that candy with the layers, is a topic. They drop it onto the table. They might drop two more. And you’re not going to dive into each one of them right then. Because they’re in the middle of this other jawbreaker that they’re talking about. And every jawbreaker has these layers. They’ll speak at every layer or most layers. Or maybe only the outer layer. Maybe only the interior layer. The interior layers where the inner thinking, the emotional reactions. And the personal rules are. There might only be one of those, not all three. So for each topic, all you’re trying to do is circle around to see if we can get them the center of that jawbreaker. And sense whether they’re done with that jawbreaker. Or follow them when they drop another topic. And they jump to it. Follow them and maybe come back to this other jawbreaker. That’s beautiful. I tell people, you’re not allowed to write notes. You’re recording this. You need to focus on this person. You need to stay on top of what they’re saying. If you write notes, you’re focused on your notes. So all you’re allowed is to write down a topic, a jawbreaker. That they might have dropped and not gone to. That you can jump into later. I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this. There’s more I want to ask you. We’re kind of near the end of time. So I want to end with a provocative question that stumped me. And it’s, so somebody had invited me to answer the question. What would you say to a CMO or a senior leadership? Why invest in face-to-face qualitative when in this age of synthetic users and synthetic panels? What do you tell them? What makes it worthwhile? The all the synthetic stuff is designed around the way people are using a product. It is designed. Sure. It’s getting qualitative, but it’s not designed to pick out cognition. It’s not designed to emphasize cognition. It’s not designed to see that wild variety of the way people think. So the thing that comes out of this, there’s the skylines that I talked about with the towers and the stories inside. There’s also thinking styles. And thinking styles are key to convincing the organization that it’s worthwhile to support thinking styles other than what they usually support. So normally an organization will say, oh, we’ve got personas. The personas are basically the roles people play. So we’ve got a product for this persona here. This persona does such and such a role. And the role is actually the purpose. The role is the goal. Within that goal, there’s going to be two, three, four thinking styles. And your solution is supporting either an ugly amalgamation of them, an average of them, or one specific kind that’s the kind that’s most prevalent at the way the people think in the organization that’s making the solution. What’s an example of a thinking style? Okay. So for the washing machine, there was a thinking style around appear well-dressed. Stains. Oh, my God. Stains. Some people wanted, they had certain styles, different styles of clothing. Some buttoned down and everything. Some of them really lovely, stretchy, slouchy things, but they were designed. They were very styly. Style doesn’t matter. But keeping that style as good as it was when it was in the store, when you discovered it and fell in love with it, or as good as it was when you were a younger person wearing that same clothing, preserve the style, preservationist, that kind of a thing. Okay. There’s another thinking style around it’ll be fine. Clothing is going to cover me and I will be good. Maybe I’ll wear the color shirt that I need to wear for work. Just make sure there’s no stains. Okay. Stains are a universal. There’s another one that’s a separationist. I don’t want cross-contamination. This came from several different places. One person working at a hospital in the emergency room. Another person had a baby. They got a whole separate tiny washing machine for them for baby’s clothes that goes in the tub. And another person had kids that played a lot of soccer and went and played outdoors. And she didn’t want that clothing in with the kitchen towels, drying the dishes. Separationist. So now your washing machine. You’ve got your washing machine. It’s got the panel. Right now the washing machine is designed to surface how the mechanics work. You want hot water or cold water? You want it to spin fast or slow? Has nothing to do with those thinking styles. So you could make it work for one of the thinking styles. But what? When you sell the thing in the beautiful ideal future, you sell the thing. You walk in, whether you’re going to buy it in person or online, and you’re going to talk about how I like my clothing to be in my world. How do I take care of clothing? And then I’m going to select the washing machine that does that. Behind the scenes, it can be the same dang washing machine. Just has a different software that runs on the panel that talks about what you’re trying to get out of it. And so if you sell that washing machine or sell that house and someone else comes in, they can press a button and pick out their thinking style. And the front end changes. It’s beautiful. I mean, in my own relationship with my washing machine indicates that those washing machine companies need your help. There’s a significant language barrier and thinking style barrier between myself and those manufacturers. Again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation and sharing your time with me. I could talk to you for another hour about all the work that you’ve shared and the wisdom that you’ve shared with all of us. I just thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Peter. This was a lovely conversation. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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