Strategic Research: Listening Deeply.
Listening deeply is a powerful skill. In this workshop you'll learn to cut through the noise of your own mind to truly understand your customers' needs. Elevate your understanding and establish deeper connections for solutions that are valuable to people and to your org.
For who?
This workshop is for people in roles that guide the vision of supporting a broader variety of people.
This includes leaders, strategists, market researchers, market definers, and anyone involved in creating solutions (product, design, development, discovery, testing).
It includes people in official or unofficial roles.
It includes people who have years of experience, have gotten started, or have recently become interested in this area.
If you are a researcher, a listening session is very different than an interview. Learn how to let the participant direct the conversation and how to encourage the participant to uncover a trio of concept types that provide the richness of understanding you need in your data.
If you are a leader or team member, listening deeply is how you build relationships, giving other people the gift of feeling heard. By understanding people’s interior cognition, you can collaborate with less strife and misunderstanding.
What is the value?
This workshop shows you how to build a thorough and accurate understanding of people’s interior cognition. You can use this understanding in a few ways:
Gap analysis between your solution features and people’s interior cognition, using a mental model diagram (skyline)
Capitalize upon gaps between yourself and your competitors, allowing your strategy to lead in new directions
Help your organization develop strategies that support more thinking styles, even thinking styles judged as negative or wrong
People can feel heard, respected, and access new abilities to help them address their goal.
Product design strategy often seeks to change a person’s buying decisions or to manipulate a person’s behavior. Such a product-focused mindset has driven our organizations into a corner. Even when product design teams want to benefit a person, they discover how they’ve harmed them instead by not recognizing their thinking and approaches.
Luckily, organizations don’t function by rigid laws; business, education, government, and science are all based on people.
Listening deeply changes everything.
Deep listening lets your team understand the gaps between the org's solutions and the true variety of approaches and thinking styles among people. Together, Indi and Lad have encouraging stories to tell about how this kind of work has made real value for people, grown markets for orgs, and changed the direction of innovation in exciting ways.
This workshop will energize you and give you confidence to expand your own organization's process for product strategy. It's data science that listens.
This workshop covers:
Indi and Lad will introduce you to the key elements of strategic research based on people's interior cognition. Each short lecture is followed by rich examples, fun exercises, and illuminating discussion.
You will also receive a copy of the book Time to Listen as a part of your ticket, which will help you apply these topics:
- How strategic research helps your org
- The strategic research mindset
- Beyond reflections: Pull tabs & Five question types
- Demo listening session
- Comfortable enough: Let go of your own cognition
- Comfortable enough: Make a safe space
- Pin to a place & time
- Find the roots
- Part 1 Qualitative data synthesis: Concepts & summaries
- Part 2 Qualitative data synthesis: Emergent patterns
The emphasis will be on exercises and giving everyone a chance to try out the techniques.
Schedule
Indi Young
Indi is a qualitative data researcher who runs studies, guides teams, writes, and teaches about strategic work in the problem space, where the focus is on people and their goals, not users, ideas, or solutions. Her method of helping people unfold their inner thinking, emotional reactions, and guiding principles provides actionable, empirical patterns to allow orgs to measure and improve the value they provide to people. It is data science that listens.
Indi has written three books, 'Time to Listen,' 'Practical Empathy,' and 'Mental Models' which cover her method for using mental model skylines and thinking styles to guide inclusive and responsible product strategy. Her goal is to help teams push past the boundaries of their org's perspectives. She builds knowledge and community via posts, essays, her newsletter, and Practice Groups that pair with her series of courses. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was active from 2001-2014.
Lad Decker
Lad is the vice president of research and specializes in foundational research, mental models, and thinking-styles. She is endlessly fascinated with human nature and how we look at the same thing differently. Lad enjoys leading UX practitioners and managers as a coach-mentor informed by over twenty-five years of experience with a broad range of clients and industries conducting research, strategy, and design.
Some of Lad's favorite clients are newly learning to master UX themselves to ambitiously lead positive change in the world. She believes that creating humane experiences with technology is the key responsibility of UX leaders.
As a way to deliberately step away from technology to the analog world, Lad is also an artist and painter studying human conflict, inspired by her interests in international relations, great-power competition, and the Cold War.
Lad has been Indi's research partner for decades, and she will be bringing her world of expertise to make the workshop an even more magnificent experience.
Tickets
We're really excited that you join us for this workshop.
Listening deeply
Listening deeply
(e.g. self-employed, boss hopeless getting budget, unemployed, student)
What's next
FAQs
Got questions? Swing by our information hub and let us help you find what you need.
No. The full-day workshops are separate events and are not included in the uxcon '24 ticket.
Please check our FAQs about how to get to the conference venue. The Co-Innovation Factory is in the same area.
You can find all the info here.