Why Fast Innovation Fails, and What Indi Young Says to Do Instead

Scott Kinka (00:26.38)

My guest today says that the future of business won’t belong to the fast innovators, it will belong to the deepest listeners. We’re joined today by Indi Young. She’s a pioneer in human-centered strategy, qualitative data science, and she’s the author of several reads, including Time to Listen. I was telling her in the pre that I’m a, I don’t know, about a quarter of the way in. We’re exploring why empathy is the most under-leveraged data set in enterprise strategy, how leaders can…escape the trap of building for the average user and why the real innovation edge is human variety. She spent two decades helping organizations, like Microsoft, a big airline, a big fast-food restaurant, helped a Google team, Healthwise, HP, several universities, Rackspace, Samsung, Sybase, several insurance companies, and a few start-ups, structure their strategy around mental models, cognitive empathy, and what she calls data science that listens. Her philosophy, innovation doesn’t start with better technology, it starts with better listening. So with that said, Indy, how’d I do? First off, did we get you?

Indi Young (01:21.769)

my god, can I get that? That is like beautifully done.

Scott Kinka (01:25.678)

Okay, well, you can, you’re gonna have it and you can use this. So I have just started reading the book. I’ll admit I’m a little nervous. And the reason I say that is I think I’ve never actually listened to anyone after 30 years in this business as a tech leader, as a CTO developing software and solutions as a cloud provider. And now I’m interviewing you and right on page 29, you tell me that that’s not actually listening either. So I’m sweating a little bit.

as we go, but I hope we do okay.

Indi Young (01:56.022)

Yeah, yeah. is the listening is not a skill that we’re taught as kids, at least not in this country. There are countries where it’s taught, but it’s just like not a thing. Yeah.

Scott Kinka (02:04.888)

Well, maybe we’ll get into a little bit of that. So I found it so interesting. Before we get into it though, I mean, we’ve shared a lot about your professional background, your pioneering work and product strategy. Tell us a little bit about you personally, just so everybody understands. Anything you’d like to share, where you are, what you do outside of writing interesting tomes on business listening. Give us Beyond the Resonance.

Indi Young (02:26.36)

Yeah, yeah. Well, my whole life is really wrapped up in this. It’s kind of my baby. And so outside of it, I do find time to, I’ve got a big garden, vegetable garden. And so we do a lot of growing of our own food and hiking around on trails. We’re north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco area. So lots of trails here.

Scott Kinka (02:50.456)

fantastic. And there’s lots of listening to do in the garden. No one’s talking back for the most part.

Indi Young (02:55.518)

You know? Yeah. Well, the birds are really, really up to it. I’m like, one of us has to crack the code. They they’re saying things.

Scott Kinka (03:02.604)

Yeah, I love that.

They certainly are. Well, tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing now. So like who, who are the kinds of companies and leaders you’re advising? What are they asking you to help with most often?

Indi Young (03:15.71)

so what a lot of people, and it’s a real range. can’t just say, I’m probably shouldn’t say the company names, but there are people who are in tech. There are people, you know, building like hardware tech. There are people who are building hardware for, consumers. There are people in healthcare. There are people in universities. everybody’s really concerned about.

Scott Kinka (03:35.982)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (03:43.704)

Who is it? How do we really understand who these people are in a way that we can not lose them? It seems a lot of question about not losing them. so that’s what I do. I help people understand really clearly within certain frameworks and framing things. You’re probably just about at that chapter in the book. The framing things is the one where everybody’s head kind of explodes because

That’s the key to turning around how we understand people. Oftentimes we understand people through the lens of our business or through the lens of our solution, because they are a market to us. They are our audience. We have a relationship like that. But when we drop that and we reframe it by what is that person addressing? What are they trying to get done? How did they get it done? And

take a look at the real depth that we can understand in there and then match it with what we’re doing or not, then we can clearly, clearly see what, you know, what, pathways forward we have, what are the areas where we can help people better? Where are the areas we can help in ways that we never considered helping before? And maybe nobody else did either. Yeah.

Scott Kinka (05:09.198)

I mean, it’s super interesting. It’s a great kind of corollary into something I scratched down. loved, and it was in the book and also in some of the other readings that I’ve done, your focus, you use the phrase problem space research, right? Kind of like that idea. you know, in tech, we’re like, we’re solutioning for something, right? And those things seem like they’re in wild disagreement.

Indi Young (05:23.65)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Kinka (05:37.642)

sometimes, right? Like, you know, why, why do you think that sort of focusing on the problems space is, sort of, you know, different and necessary in today’s tech driven.

Indi Young (05:38.584)

It’s…

Indi Young (05:51.296)

Yeah, it’s supposed to be a finely tuned machine, problem space and solution space. We’re supposed to be kind of chugging along without any friction, shall we say. That doesn’t always happen. And people put it down to ops, operations. Like maybe people aren’t listening to each other. We need to do it this way. But I think it is a lot because of framing. We are used to.

Scott Kinka (05:56.183)

Yeah.

Indi Young (06:20.824)

understanding our operations in terms of a process, right? There is a process that’s supposed to do the best process and let’s go get the subject matter experts and figure out what the edge cases are for doing that process when contexts are different and we’ll map that all out. And that is fine, but it’s not everything because we’ve got humans in the loop. And since we’ve got humans in the loop, we’ve got people

approaching the same process in different ways. We’ve got different people’s personal rules affecting the way that they do the process differently. We’ve got people’s emotional reactions giving us a little bit of friction there as well. And it could be positive friction, but it’s about the understanding of the person in the loop and looking at those people, not as individuals.

but as thinking styles. There are just a few thinking styles within each area, each purpose or goal or intention that we’re framing by. And that’s kind of how I’m looking at things.

Scott Kinka (07:37.25)

interesting. Park that for one second because what I want to do is just take a step back because, you know, our listeners are IT people, they’re CIOs, they’re tech leaders, maybe they work on the product side. And I want to I wanted to just sort of frame like, why should I listen to Indie? Right. mean, you and you get that out kind of early on right in the book, which was which is really written from a perspective of of UX, you know, kind of product design. Right. Which

Indi Young (07:39.608)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (08:04.662)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Scott Kinka (08:05.624)

So you have a background, can you just tell us a little bit about your background there? how, how you, you kind of started there and ended up sort of building thesis around this category.

Indi Young (08:08.663)

Yeah.

Indi Young (08:13.56)

Yeah. Oh my God. I started up as a software engineer. So, um, the, the idea, the, the, the place that I moved toward was this embracing of reality, embracing of complexity, being able to understand, um, not only the people that we’re building for, but also the P the teams that are doing the building. So a lot of like I’ve had, um,

Scott Kinka (08:17.709)

Yeah.

Indi Young (08:43.64)

I guess I can say a sector, insurance companies come saying, hey, we’re having issues with our employees. We need to understand those issues so we can support them better so that we don’t lose them. That was at least the angle then. Might not be the angle in these days. But the idea was that we can apply what

My method is not only to the people that we’re trying to build solutions for external to our company or organization, but also internal because we are also doing ops. We’re building things for our own employees. We’re building processes. We’re building guidelines and rules. We’re building ways to communicate. And all of that is something that we need to understand through the lens of what is someone trying to get done.

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (09:45.294)

And is it, I always ask this question of all of my guests. You we kind of jumped right in because you’re, we wanted to talk about it and kind of the work that you’re doing are intrinsically attached. But I always ask people, and maybe it’s obvious given the way we started this, but what’s your superpower? Every executive, every writer, every thought leader has a superpower. What’s yours?

Indi Young (10:06.582)

You know, I normally would answer listening, but I think it’s also listening framing, framing listening. It’s knowing when to listen and when not to listen. Yeah. And it’s knowing what, within what boundary or what framework we are listening. What is the framework that will actually answer the question, the problem we have, how do we identify what that problem is? Sometimes we get partway done with some listening sessions and it helps.

Scott Kinka (10:12.8)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (10:36.054)

re-identify what the problem is.

Scott Kinka (10:40.814)

So why do you think, I mean, it seems basic. And I guess maybe you already answered this question when you said we’re not really taught as children to listen. And maybe that’s the answer. But it feels to me like, I, maybe you’ll correct me on this. It feels like in technology, we’re probably worse listeners than other industries. I mean, I don’t know. It feels like something that’s so basic. Do you think that that’s the case in product and technology strategy? Is any worse off?

Indi Young (11:01.599)

Nah.

Scott Kinka (11:08.418)

than maybe other functional areas inside of a business or in other industries.

Indi Young (11:12.704)

actually don’t like making generalities like that. If we’re going to generalize by a role, it’s going to be wrong for more than half of the people in that role. So, so the, the idea is that anyone who is not a narcissist can become a good listener. And, and I’m using the narcissist not necessarily, and it’s like technical definitions, a narcissist, meaning someone who doesn’t

Scott Kinka (11:15.874)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (11:23.416)

Yeah.

Indi Young (11:41.216)

realize other minds are out there. Right? They’re only looking at things through their own mind and their own self and that lens and never try looking at the world through someone else. don’t, you could not have ever looked through someone else’s lens, but recognize that it exists and become a listener.

Scott Kinka (11:57.166)

Got it.

Scott Kinka (12:09.422)

got it. No, that makes sense. I want to just as it maybe as a basis for most of the rest of the conversation, because we’re talking about sort of how to build a framework or a framing that encompasses as many people in the business as possible, not just sort of the norm. Let’s just take a minute and sort of get that together. So like very early on in time to listen, as an example, you talked about like, there’s never, there really isn’t a norm in a user base. Like maybe there’s a question to people in the middle.

Indi Young (12:10.05)

Yeah.

Indi Young (12:24.106)

Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Kinka (12:38.776)

But at end of the day, I you just gave a 50 % number. Maybe there’s 50 % in the middle, but that means there’s 50 % that aren’t, which means you’re alienating. Just talk to me a little bit about, you can’t design for the norm when there really isn’t one, but yet you’ve kind of got to build one product or deliver one solution. if I’m just an IT leader listening to this and

Indi Young (12:59.02)

You’ve got to build one product. Well, yeah.

Scott Kinka (13:06.274)

and I’m to put it in my day and they’re like, I, know, right now my project is I’ve got to buy a piece of software that does X for the business, right? And they want to do this better, different, more effectively than the last time they did that exercise. Like what’s kind of the one golden piece of advice you’d give them in terms of, you know, listening, right? To the business to make the most appropriate decision. Like, let’s try to like drill it down to the super practical.

Indi Young (13:33.944)

So like the decision is I need to select a tool and purchase it that will do X. Is that okay? All right. So, and I have done this study before for a software company. Yeah. And the idea is that what is there’s two questions here. Is that actually the solution or the problem that we’re trying to solve? You said we’re trying to solve for X.

Scott Kinka (13:41.964)

Sure, yep, 100%.

Scott Kinka (13:47.062)

Okay. Good.

Scott Kinka (13:59.479)

Hmm.

Indi Young (14:01.878)

Right? So we could do a study around is that, is X the thing? There might be something else going on. Or we could accept that we’ve already established that X is the thing. And we could do a study around how is it that people approach X and which of my choices supports as many of those people as possible. Now, by doing it individually, you’re not

Yeah, it’s going to be impossible. what you want to do is do it empirically in terms of qualitative data patterns. So there’s this classic, idea that you’ve got quantitative data and you’ve got qualitative data. And a lot of people believe that qualitative data is just shitty quantitative data. Right. Yeah. So.

Scott Kinka (14:53.646)

Right. Unnormalized quantitative data. Right. I totally get it. Yeah. 100%.

Indi Young (15:00.544)

Yeah, so that’s not true. Qualitative data and quantitative data both measure different things. They’re completely different continuums. Each has a shitty end, which we call subjective, and a really glorious, very reliable end, which we call empirical. This is true of quant, which measures the amount of things, the number of things, and it’s true for qual, which measures patterns.

A lot of people say quant are numbers and qual are words. They’re like, no, qual is the meanings in the patterns. So when we, I’m going to say when we apply it, when we apply, I know there’s so many little details that we can jump down rabbit holes on. Um, but when we apply it to the situation, let’s say we don’t quite think we absolutely know what X is.

Scott Kinka (15:38.798)

So when I was, go, I’m fire away. I’m not listening, go for it.

Scott Kinka (15:48.334)

How I know.

Indi Young (15:58.36)

we’re going to go and we’re going to listen to a bunch of people who we think are trying to solve X and we’re going to look at the patterns coming out of that and we’re going to realize that either yes it is X and these little subsections of X that we never realized before or no it’s actually Y and all of Y is subsections because we can get those patterns out of that data.

Scott Kinka (16:24.174)

So is this a discovery needs analysis is a very typical IT thing to do, right? I’m going to go and I’m going to create myself a feature list that I need to meet with this based on what the business is hearing. And then we try to approach IT a little bit softer and we go, now we’re going to take that and we’re going to validate that through something qualitative, right? We’ll do a survey. We’ll test across multiple functions. We’ll see if we were right based on that.

Typically, we’re not, you know, in IT running after the qualitative portion of that except for maybe if it’s the CEO complaining, right? So if I’m, you know, if I’m chasing this, I have my needs analysis, I’ve created kind of a document that I’m working off of out of that discovery. Maybe I go get some qualitative data out of the business after that. If you’re going to go get quantitative data, like the CTO in the business, CIO of the business is not going to talk to every employee in the business. Where do they go? Do they like?

look for patterns in the qualitative data and then go kind of quantitatively try to back that up and validate it. Like I’m just, know, if I’m trying to look at it practically, if you just want to make next decision right, is that a reason for approaching it?

Indi Young (17:33.696)

Yeah. Yeah. How do you, how are you going to marry it? So now I get to introduce this idea of a visual called a mental model skyline. Okay. The word mental model means something different to a lot of people in the world. The way that I am using it, which is one of its definitions is the way for your team. Who’s trying to figure this out to understand.

a set of people that they’re trying to figure it out for. Okay. It’s a, it’s a skyline, like a city skyline. It looks like a bunch of towers of different heights. And inside of each tower are patterns, the word patterns, the quotes, little summaries in people’s words of what they were talking about when they were focused on this particular thing mentally. Underneath each of those towers.

This is where it maps to the solution. So you might have two solutions that you’re looking at, and you’re going to map them under there and see which ones support which towers. The quant then comes in when we take a section. We’re like, hey, this is a really important section. Both of these options are meeting it, but we’re not sure how they’re meeting it based on thinking style.

So we can go and do some surveys. We can ask people which thinking style they are and to answer a bunch of stuff. We can do that same thing for some quant data coming out of traffic, maybe some quant data from another person who’s a client of one of those solutions. And they’re willing to give us some data about internal usage, perhaps.

I’ve heard of that happening. And that gets mapped onto the skyline. So now the super important area where it looks like the two solutions or options are gonna support us, when we map that data on there, one of those solutions shows up as being a better choice for your situation. Okay.

Scott Kinka (19:26.35)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (19:54.328)

Yeah, and.

Indi Young (19:54.572)

But we have this visual, which is important because typically I will be using this visual over 10 years. It’s a strategic tool so that you have an idea probably if you’re thinking about using it strategically, when we set out to do our data collection, when we set out to do our listening sessions with people, we’re not

only going to be asking about that one thing that this tool can solve. We’re to be asking them about sort of this bigger thing that they’re focused on. Their bigger thing is their purpose. It could be called a goal. It could be called an intention. I like calling it a purpose because I want it to be a bigger envelope so that we can understand more and see farther down the road. And then we get to use this diagram, this city skyline, this mental model skyline.

the next year, the next year, the next year, know, whenever we’re coming up against the next thing that we want to try to enable, we can see it right there. We can layer in the new options. We can layer in the new data and be able to see things there.

Ha ha ha.

Scott Kinka (21:13.294)

I’m with you and I’m just trying think about it. It’s sort of in the application from it. this something that you’ve got to track over that time or are there lessons to be applied for short-term decision-making?

Indi Young (21:18.05)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (21:25.112)

No, you can, yeah, yeah, there’s short-term decision-making out of it too. There’s also the idea, I mentioned the word thinking styles and thinking styles are, well, it comes from psychology, I almost called it philosophy. It comes from psychology. This guy, Robert Sternberg, invented it back in the 90s and he uses it.

pretty universally. I use it very specifically within this certain frame. But the idea of a thinking style is that we all can like we’re doing something like maybe you and I are both hunting for a new job. Now, we both have the ability to hunt for a new job, but we have different styles of hunting for a new job. And let’s say that we’re siblings and our mother’s still alive and she’s looking at us hunting for jobs and saying,

Scott, you’re doing a great job. Indy, you’re not doing a very good job hunting for jobs. And it’s because mother’s looking at our different style and saying, I like Scott’s style better than Indy’s style.

Scott Kinka (22:33.806)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (22:37.474)

It is more aligned with perhaps the way that the mother would stylistically think about that item. It doesn’t make anyone wrong.

Indi Young (22:42.744)

Right, yeah, or maybe she’s got some guiding principles or personal rules around it or something. Yeah.

Scott Kinka (22:49.23)

So take that back to the UI UX work or take that back to the application selection work. Is that where sort of the, not what’s the job to be done, but how you would look at an application and sort of natively think to accomplish that job is really the thinking style.

Indi Young (22:53.484)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (23:08.236)

Yes. Yeah. That’s, that’s the thinking style. Yeah. Yeah. And so the idea is that when we are, if we’re trying to select two options and we’re just going to do it without looking at any of this, there are going to be thinking styles that are not supported. now generally when we do this at the IT level, we’re forcing everybody inside our org to use this tool. And if it doesn’t match a person’s style,

Scott Kinka (23:12.45)

Okay.

Scott Kinka (23:27.265)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (23:35.928)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (23:38.274)

they’re going to fake it, right? not gonna, they’re gonna just like press buttons and fill out things to make it go away. And then they’re gonna do their work the way that they normally would do it according to their thinking style. And it’s gonna cause friction. So what if we could see that it wasn’t serving one thinking style and…

Scott Kinka (23:42.807)

Okay.

Scott Kinka (23:56.398)

Got it.

Indi Young (24:03.298)

do some sort of customization so that it would support the other thinking style.

Scott Kinka (24:09.238)

Yeah. Well, I think particularly like in like more broad based software systems like CRM or ERP where there’s, you know, there’s it’s object oriented and there’s more than one way to solve the same problem. Right. Some people like CRM is a really good example. You know, some people want to go to one screen and enter contact company opportunity, deal, stage date, whatever, enter, go. Right.

Indi Young (24:18.547)

Mm. Mm.

Indi Young (24:31.158)

Right. Yeah.

Indi Young (24:37.557)

huh.

Scott Kinka (24:38.37)

Let’s think about it way more object oriented. So you could go into the contact screen and add one, and then you can go into the company screen and attach the contact to it. you could, so like those, it’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. think that intrinsically as IT, we would be like, how can we simplify the number of clicks? Like that’s a thinking style, right? I want it to be something like, how do I, most efficient, most time efficient, the way there’s one way to measure that. Is that, is that a good example? Like you’re, sort of,

We go down this trend where we think the thing that we’re striving for in system selection or system development or prioritization is wrapped around some metric that is a general metric, right? And not really think about that there might just be maybe the way the process of the information is to kind of non-sequentially go through it or maybe, you know, users of that are neurodivergent might think about that in a slightly different way or is that sort of a way I should be thinking about applying that?

Indi Young (25:29.142)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (25:34.872)

That’s sort of what I’m getting at. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I think that the issue is that while it works fine for one thinking style, it’s not working for another thinking style or maybe another couple of thinking styles. so back to this idea of like 50%, I like to think of it as like, there’s a, you are,

doing the dishes or something. You’ve got a bunch of bubbles, right? Sometimes there’s one big bubble and there’s a bunch of little bubbles around it. Okay, you got that in your head? The big bubble is the only one we’re solving for. All the little bubbles around it were not, right? And we, I mean, if we want to have a frictionless, if we want to have a machine that’s working, if we want operations that are going to work with less friction, it would.

Scott Kinka (26:05.198)

Yep. Yep.

Indi Young (26:26.494)

certainly behoove us to understand what those little bubbles are and try to make it work for them too. Right? Yeah. And it, I mean, it’s not a, a lot of people are like, well we just have to train them. There was this one story where there’s say a VC type of firm. They’re trying to help their, their people. The, I don’t know, they’re not in a portfolio cause they’re not actually the VC. They’re just helping people.

Scott Kinka (26:33.406)

1. That makes perfect sense.

Indi Young (26:55.574)

get funding right helping people spin up a business and when they get in front of a funder they need to give a pitch right and so these people the founders they’re just they’re not clicking they’re not making that much sense for the funders and so this company they’re like let me train you how to do a pitch let me train you how to pitch use these words blah blah blah okay

Scott Kinka (27:07.181)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (27:24.662)

Little word about these founders. These founders are from underserved economic areas and they’re trying to invest in their own economic area to bring it back up. They’re trying to invest in their own main street. They’re trying to build their own companies and hire their neighbors. Okay. There’s a certain way of thinking that just does not work with the words that you’re supposed to use in a pitch in front of a thunder. Now,

Scott Kinka (27:51.501)

Yeah.

Indi Young (27:54.168)

true, any funder who would be attracted to this group of entrepreneurs would know about that.

Indi Young (28:05.93)

So the idea is instead of training the founders to speak a language that just is not in their heart, we train the funders to understand how these people are talking about it. Right?

Scott Kinka (28:19.811)

Yeah.

Completely. your, you know, it’s partly know yourself, know your audience, right? I mean, that’s a little bit kind of the, I’m a big fan of the, you know, kind of emotional intelligence concepts. Like you, you know, fits in that a little bit. Like kind of got to get, like, yeah, I’m bringing something to the party. You’re bringing something to the party. Our contexts don’t match, but we’ve got a, the third, probably the most important thing is what’s the context that we’re in together right now, right? That we build for.

Indi Young (28:36.568)

Yeah.

Indi Young (28:46.634)

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, beautiful.

Scott Kinka (28:49.37)

And it is interesting, think you, it’s kind of like that if you think about that in systems, the systems design, right? It’s like, what’s the most empathetic way that we can, we can get to the, to the end point, considering the aggregate, you know, all of the employees in the business, all of the little bubbles, right? The long tail in the business, very often as you add up as long as larger than the big bubble, if you put all that together.

Indi Young (28:54.648)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (29:11.574)

That’s why I come up with that 50 % number.

Scott Kinka (29:14.606)

Yeah, I think that you’re probably right. think, you know, it’s certainly challenging. I wonder, you know, I want to get into one other topic before I ask you a couple of fun questions. And I want to just bring AI into this. And I had a completely different question prepared around AI, frankly, than before we started this conversation. And it was going to kind of be around like, you know, we’ve had, we’re having so many conversations about kind of recognizing humanity and AI and, know, in the whole nine yards. But

Now I’m thinking about it a little bit different, which is, is AI a potential solver here to some of this problem, right? Which is, you know, when we do systems design, it’s UI, UX based where I’ve got sort of a linear path to fill out a function, fill out form, fill out form, fill out form, press button, move on to the next process. And I’ve had to build that one way, right? And I think one of the potential opportunities that we have with AI is,

sort of alternative methods of interfacing with the system, right? You know, where it can be thought-based, maybe, you know, thinking styles at the end of the day are different ways of writing prompts, but the AI doesn’t care. It just needs to get your information out of you in whatever way you’re thinking style is. Is AI an opportunity for us to, to build more inclusive systems at the end of the day, because we don’t have to create one UI.

Indi Young (30:18.072)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott Kinka (30:42.936)

to use.

Indi Young (30:44.374)

Right. I think that the solution or the path that I would follow is to train our AIs to recognize thinking styles. Not to train our AIs to find thinking styles. They won’t be able to do that. Not yet. I’ve been trying. They can’t do it. Not yet. But we can certainly tell them, hey, here are our thinking styles within this frame.

Scott Kinka (30:55.32)

OK.

Scott Kinka (31:06.267)

Ha

Indi Young (31:14.53)

We have seven frames within our org that are of interest to us. So these are the thinking styles within each of those frames. And as you work with somebody within one of those frames, you can identify them by the way that they’re interacting with you, what their thinking style is. Or you can, if you don’t get that from them, you can ask them through a series of little questions.

and identify what their thinking style is and then guide them to an approach that matches their thinking style. Which means, it means in the background, we’re doing the work to understand the thinking style, at least for now. I’ve been trying this every year so far, no dice. But we identify the thinking styles in advance, but we also identify like, would a solution look like in general?

Scott Kinka (32:03.32)

Yeah.

Indi Young (32:13.24)

for that thinking style? One of the ways that I like to talk about it is a sandbox. So let’s say a solution is a sandbox and what toys should we throw in the sandbox for this thinking style versus which toys should we throw in the sandbox for that thinking style, right? If we tell our AIs, so I’m very much not a fan of like just

Scott Kinka (32:24.29)

Mm-hmm.

Indi Young (32:40.1)

a chat GPT AI type of thing. I’m thinking agentive, right? I’m also thinking coded agentive. I think it needs to have some framework around it so that it has knowledge of your specific domain. There’s some words around that that some of the AI folks use. There’s a woman who runs Bast, B-A-S-T, is the Egyptian cat goddess.

Scott Kinka (32:52.654)

Okay.

Indi Young (33:09.584)

and she uses, she uses that word. I’m not remembering it right now. It might be ontological or something like that. but it’s the idea of like giving the, like specifying the knowledge, not just like, I’m going to feed you a whole bunch of other authors books and then you’ll know quote unquote, no, we’re going to tell you what it is. Here are the rules. These are the ways that, that we’ve learned as humans.

Scott Kinka (33:10.254)

Okay.

Indi Young (33:39.042)

Here are the ways that people think, have thinking styles coming in here. And now you can mash it up in however you can to meet the scenario that you’re in.

Scott Kinka (33:54.638)

Got it. Yeah. And I think intrinsically, if you’re careful.

Indi Young (33:55.416)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (33:59.916)

you know, as a, as the listener, right? mean, in a lot of ways, the interesting part about AI is that, know, you, what you would hope is it wouldn’t come, it wouldn’t come to the listening in which case paying attention to your prompt or whatever the ask is or what have you, with a similar level of internal bias as a human who’s translating, like you’re, you’re missing the bias trans my bias translator when I’m taking in whatever it is that you have, you have coming in. mean, there’s a whole,

My head’s spinning. It could probably spin off my shoulders right now if we go, but there’s certainly a lot there. Well, I mean, with that in mind, and I mean, we could probably do this for another hour and maybe we’ll do this again at some point in the future. I want to just get, I want to ask, can I ask you a couple of fun questions at the end? Are you up for it? All right. Okay. You know what? The answer is always chocolate. So I think we’re going to get you. So I’m reading, I’m reading time to listen right now. What are you reading?

Indi Young (34:32.311)

Ha ha ha

Indi Young (34:43.938)

Sure, Yeah, the answer is chocolate.

Scott Kinka (34:57.134)

Is there something, what’s a good book that you didn’t write that you want to tell people that they should be paying attention?

Indi Young (34:58.034)

yeah.

Ooh, I just read Stories Are Weapons by Annalee Newitz. This year I want to learn how to create casts of characters and write very framed stories around that feature thinking styles to give us a way of talking within our organization about what the possibilities are, what the opportunities are, the path that is open, right?

Scott Kinka (35:04.744)

Ooh, okay. Tell me, okay, tell me more.

Indi Young (35:29.494)

as a way of communicating that. And so I thought I’d learn how to write stories from this book, but no, it’s book about propaganda. It’s a book about the roots of propaganda, recent use of propaganda, current use of propaganda. And it was mind blowing. Yeah, it was really mind blowing. My partner said though that I was moaning as I was reading the first chapter, so.

Scott Kinka (35:37.262)

I like it.

Scott Kinka (35:42.112)

Okay.

Scott Kinka (35:49.742)

I need that going. Okay.

Scott Kinka (35:57.614)

You

All right. I want to check it out though. I mean, find this whole area of academia and systems thought and all that’s so interesting because in a lot of ways you’re like, the more you try to…

Indi Young (36:01.022)

And yeah, I was not happy. Yeah.

Scott Kinka (36:18.894)

kind of meet all of the thinking styles in your business, it’s almost antithetical to the idea, because you’re still trying to put them in your little compartments. Because you can’t have 700 employees and 700 thinking styles. So eventually, you’re going to get down to a broader generalization, if we’re being honest. But it’s super interesting to think about.

Indi Young (36:28.971)

Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Indi Young (36:37.804)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Scott Kinka (36:43.502)

you know, how we would apply that. And I can see why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s like, you’re almost trying to like figure out how to storytell to figure out, you know, we use the idea of personas. I think we need to be more open to that without trying to overgeneralize inside of them. But I think propaganda is a really interesting thing because you’re, you know, you’re generally trying to sub segment to convince somebody of something, you know what I mean? In propaganda, propaganda is rarely pointed at everyone, right? At the end of the day, if you take it that

Indi Young (36:55.372)

Right, yeah.

Indi Young (37:03.256)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Indi Young (37:08.408)

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing that she says about propaganda is that you’re never ever going to convince anyone of anything that’s not already in their heart. And as a listener, yeah, I know that’s why I was moaning. Okay. That is that is why. Yes, because you’re thinking about the people who

Scott Kinka (37:10.294)

It’s generally pointed in a point where I’m trying to convince somebody of something or change of mind.

Scott Kinka (37:25.26)

Ooh, that’s hard to hear when you think about some like really hard propaganda campaign stories over time, right?

Indi Young (37:36.896)

in your own life who are listening to the propaganda and you’re like, which, but part of listening. So when we get to the core of listening, we’re looking for people’s inner thinking, emotional reaction and personal roles as they did something in the past. This is all memory work. personal roles are the things that people hold in their heart, emotional reactions, right?

Scott Kinka (37:41.622)

It’s really hard to think, yeah.

Indi Young (38:06.316)

They hold them in the heart. It’s interesting because if you can become a listener within your family or within your friends, for those people who are listening to propaganda, can we see what it is that the prop, what it is that that we could hit? Like when I was talking to Robin Beers, who’s a fabulous organizational.

psychology type person. She, and I were having this conversation of propaganda and it’s like, ick, we don’t want to do propaganda. We don’t want to like mess with people’s minds. and so, you know, we’re going to like be hands off and like, wait a minute, cause I’ve been thinking about this for a month or two now. It was like, if we can understand what those personal rules are that are good at, as opposed to.

fearful that are, to put the inclusive word on it, more human oriented, right? We could aim stories at that.

Scott Kinka (39:18.424)

people respond to the propaganda for a reason why, and it probably is from some kind of embedded belief system that you need to understand to be able to influence them positively. Like it’s super interesting.

Indi Young (39:29.12)

Yeah, but, you could look, I don’t know. Cause I also have a chapter at the end of that book about self care. Because when you’re listening to people, things happen in your own brain and your own heart. I felt like we don’t have to go listen to their, those ones that are already being targeted. but we could maybe listen to the ones that are in a brighter light, right. In not such a darker space.

Scott Kinka (39:40.22)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Scott Kinka (39:59.67)

No, I totally get it. Again, so much to think about. Two more questions and then I’ll let you get about your day. I know you’re all good. What do you think of as a widely accepted practice in customer research or product design that you believe is completely broken and needs to change? And this is a hot take.

Indi Young (40:00.78)

Hahaha!

I know, sorry.

Indi Young (40:18.296)

Of course I’m going to say personas, because they are, they have been, I don’t know if this rated, right. In a lot of organizations, they are used in a way that they were not intended, never intended. so I would like people to start talking about characters.

This is the, this is the time of like peak TV. We all sit in front of that TV and we watch episodes with the same characters and those characters do zaining things and really smart things. And it all depends on context. And you can start to see their personal rules and you can start to realize when they’re trying a certain thinking style in a certain context or reverting to another thinking style.

in a certain context. that I think is way stronger than these personas, the way that they’ve been inviscinated. So there’s my hot take, sorry.

Scott Kinka (41:25.516)

Okay, I like that. No, that’s a good hot take. I’m gonna get a hot take back from you. Here we go. I ask everybody this question. And if you’ve seen an episode, you may have heard me ask. So I hope that you’re surprised by this. We love our end of the world dystopian stories right now, whatever the future is. Something happens, whatever that is. And we’re living in a different future and you have one app that still works on your phone and you get to choose which one it is.

Indi Young (41:38.68)

Ha

Indi Young (41:54.548)

Email, email, email. I don’t really have that many apps on my phone right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Kinka (41:54.668)

which app still works. Email. just, that’s the one. That’s where you’re living.

Yeah, I like that. you wouldn’t believe some of the answers that I get. So, Hey, in a lot of ways to your point, you just said it depends on context. Like usually I get to like, well, what kind of future are we talking about here? Like if there’s nobody to email, then maybe flashlight, like you get, you get things like that.

Indi Young (42:16.426)

I know, yeah, yeah. Yesterday, all of Spain and Portugal were without not only electricity, but mobile data, mobile connectivity. It was all down. And I’m working with a bunch of people over there and they’re like, seven hours without hearing from my three year old son and knowing if he was okay. Yeah, right. You’re like, man.

Scott Kinka (42:28.472)

What the?

Scott Kinka (42:37.772)

Yeah.

It’s see it listed at siesta time they had a great time.

Indi Young (42:45.93)

Some of them did, some of them had a very vulnerable and frightening time. Yeah.

Scott Kinka (42:49.754)

I understand. realize. Indy, if our listeners found this insightful and I’m sure that they have, how can they learn more about you, your work, your courses, your books? What’s

Indi Young (42:55.105)

Yeah.

Indi Young (43:00.296)

Indieyoung.com, that’s the website and you might find it interesting to also follow me on LinkedIn. I post three times a week, very fun posts or get my newsletter.

Scott Kinka (43:02.477)

Okay?

Scott Kinka (43:18.488)

Well, fantastic. So indyyoung.com and that’s, I mean, it’s spelled everywhere where they’re saying the name of this episode, but you know, it’s I N D I, right? So, well, this was an absolute pleasure. I had a lot of fun. when, when our podcast marketing team kind of passed your, your profile by me, I’m like, this could be a really interesting conversation in the light of the other conversations that we have that are very much solution oriented, right? It’s a little bit of a counterpoint, to the approach that we take.

Indi Young (43:24.408)

Yep.

Indi Young (43:43.861)

Right?

Scott Kinka (43:47.906)

you know, very often on the show. It was a pleasure to chat with you today. I really appreciate your time.

Indi Young (43:52.276)

It was great talking to you. You have an amazing mind.

Scott Kinka (43:54.658)

Well, awesome. Well, thank you. This was fun. And you all have amazing minds out there for staying with us through this episode. And I’m sure you’re challenged and thinking about it and we’re thrilled you were here with us. And that is a wrap on this episode of the Bridgecast. If this today’s conversation gave you something to think about, and I’m sure it did, please make sure that you hit subscribe. You leave us a review, share it with your team and get the story out there. We’ll see you soon on another episode.

is it? Indy, thank you so much. I mean, it was super fun. That was great. I’m going to finish the book and send you an email, I’m sure with questions in it. Like I said, yeah, we could do that. Absolutely. Well, I want to, yeah, I’ll do that.

Indi Young (44:25.216)

Yay!