(In a working session you work on an artifact, and those who didn't attend the session can catch up by seeing what was done when they go to work on the artifact with the group next time.)

Ask your team to switch to working sessions. Collaborate out loud together. Get everything done within the session. If there are leftovers, vote either to schedule another working session, or demote the importance of whatever didn't get done.

And we are working on Saturdays. And after dinner during the week, trying to make progress on goals that either change or were not actually what was meant in the first place. 😵‍💫

In this era of efficiency (🤮) how often do you have to check the AI summaries of meetings you could not attend because of another meeting or deadline? In a matter of two weeks you feel hopelessly behind. We are all speed-reading and skimming, and embarrassingly we are losing key details.

🧵 Meetings or working sessions: which do you do? Meetings typicaly cause more work to be done afterward. By contrast, working sessions (or collaboration sessions) have "no homework." All the work is finished in the session by the people present.

Course - Finding Thinking Styles - Finding Thinking Styles In Finding Thinking Styles, you’ll learn a reliable, repeatable process for grouping people by how they think, not by shallow demographics, behaviors, or statistics. You’ll lea...

So many people get harmed trying to adapt the solution to their own thinking style. If your team can "see with many eyes" then you get rid of the assumption that there is only one solution. Your team can create several ways for the solution to work, each supporting a different thinking style.

Many teams limit their thinking by assuming they are only making one solution that must work for "everyone." And that solution gets implemented according to the thinking style of the team. So many other approaches get ignored.

Resources - Resources Pick up new mindsets, whether you are experienced or relatively new to Data Science That Listens Explore these options for a variety of price levels FREE Content Persuade your stakeholders. ...

Listening sessions are a chance for you to make the decision-maker feel heard. Eventually, when they see what you're doing, they will invite you to say something, too.

The outcome: you will occupy the minds of decision-makers. indiyoung.com/resources/#p...

a) 12+ (How many are the same person? Does it feel like a relationship is starting?)
b) 3-11 (Excellent! How does it feel? What's your secret to getting the meetings?)
c) 1-2 (Good!!! Can you keep going?)
d) 0 (Barriers exist. What are they?)

So far this year, how many lunches or coffees have you had with decision-makers in your org?

Is there something that you deliver along with the mental model skyline to help communicate those findings? How do you convey them in a concise way?

Netflix: You get laid off. More time to watch shows, but less money to pay the monthly fee. Wouldn't you like to lower your bill by half or more in exchange for limiting how many hours per week you watch?

It would be helpful to this thinking style to give them a way to control their monthly surcharges through controlling the amount of water they use.

Water Bill: There are monthly administration and infrastructure rebuilding surcharges, and every household pays the same amount. For many people, the surcharges are 4x the amount they pay for the actual water they use.

Slack: Choose either "free" with the feature of losing everything older than 90 days, or pay per user. (Personally, I'm not a big org that can pay $8.75 for each of the 890 members ($7,788 per month), when most of them only log in once in a while if at all.)

There is no way to make up for the additional charge by using less. An equitable monthly surcharge would be based on income + usage. Instead they put the same size hurdle in front of people of different means.

Electricity Bill: "We're adding an equitable monthly surcharge of $24 to everyone per month. For those of you with high bills, it will actually lower your bill. For those of you with low bills, it's only $6 more per month than usual."

-----

Zoom: Choose either "free" or pay for all these options, including the gee-whiz things. There's no way to choose just the options I need: such as 2-3 hour meeting length, cloud storage, and unique meeting IDs.

🧵 What is it with subscriptions?! They all follow pattern of having a "free" version then bouncing up to a many-featured option with higher pricing? Why is the "one little step" up always missing, when it's a very common thinking style? ("Use just enough for what I need.")

––

Get the "I SPY: Data Science that Listens" game here:

🔍 indiyoung.com/wp-content/u...

Edge cases: Don't use this phrase to describe groups of people. Edge cases only apply to a process. Edge cases are other ways to do the process when the context is slightly different, like "it's below freezing" or "several people are out sick today."

Students wondered, then, if there is danger of messing up so badly that they lose the participant's trust.

In a listening session there is no list of questions. I was chatting with a group of @andypolaine.bsky.social's students at the #LucerneUniversity describing how to focus on building trust and helping the person in the session explain what their inner thinking was at a past moment in time.

Method - Download image & list (pdf) Download visual description (docx, rtf, pdf) Taking the Perspective of People, to Build a Future for Your Org 🧭 Start in the problem space – Ask a variety of people how the...

Returning to the music analogy--what we're doing when we collapse to one solution is the elevator music of product & service creation.

And we *know* that the variety of music out there, all the styles (including random tunes that we hum), is part of the energy and vitality of humanity.

Your team wants to create solutions that expand people's humanity, but the contraints of the org force you to collapse ideas to one "easiest path" average idea.

The world ends up with many solutions that constrain people's humanity.

JJG once told me he thinks Skylines and Thinking Styles are like trumpets. "Not every band needs them."

I think the method is more like a song-writer who seems to know exactly what you're feeling. Your band will not have much success without them.

Course – Listening Deeply - Listening Deeply Listening deeply is a powerful skill. Most people are surprised to learn how much their own inner voice and emotions distract them from truly hearing another person. This course teach...

What do you do when you need to understand peers or potential customers from a different culture than your own?

25% discount (PREP4FTS) on the course Listening Deeply! indiyoung.com/listening-de... (discount expires at the end of March)

It's for an American audience, so we laugh at ourselves when the coach references one of our own childhood cartoons that utterly misses his peers.

When it comes to listening deeply, the same cultural mis-communications can break trust.

In first season of this show, the writers double down on the theme of cultural mis-communications. The American coach makes comments that mean something to to him, but are baffling to the Londoners, and vice versa.

Have you seen this show called #TedLasso? It's about a London-based football team owner who hires a little-known American-football coach, with the hope that he will flail and the team will go down in flames. (She wants to get even with her ex-husband, who owns 49% of the London football team.)