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Data Science That Listens with Indi Young
103 Plays28 days ago
Today on the show, we have Indi Young, who is known for data science that listens. Indi is a problem-discovery researcher who makes tools that support inclusive and responsible solutions for a broader variety of thinking styles. She teaches courses online, writes books & essays, presents talks and does podcast appearances, and pens helpful posts on LinkedIn.
HOSTS
- Andrea Goulet LinkedIn | andreagoulet.com
- Ray Myers LinkedIn | Craft vs Cruft on YouTube
ABOUT EMPATHY IN TECH
Empathy in Tech is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry by:
- Closing the empathy skills gap by treating empathy as a technical skill.
- Teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, actionable training.
- Building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes.
- Promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice.
Learn more at empathyintech.com
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Transcript
Cognitive Biases in Tech Systems
00:00:01
Speaker
We're putting our own cognitive bias into the system, right? We're only serving a non-existent thinking style or our own thinking style. And that gets baked into the system. People who think differently will never be served. And as it gets deeper and deeper into the systems, it gets harder and harder for us to root it out.
Introduction to 'Empathy in Tech'
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to Empathy in Tech, where we explore the deeply technical side of empathy.
00:00:29
Speaker
and the critical need for empathy in technology. I'm Andrea Goulet. And I'm Ray Myers. And today on the show we have Indi Young, who is known for data science that listens. Indi is a problem discovery researcher who makes tools that support inclusive and responsible solutions for a broader variety of thinking styles.
00:00:50
Speaker
She teaches courses online, writes books and essays, presents talks, and does lots of podcast appearances. and She also pens very helpful posts on LinkedIn.
The Impact of 'Practical Empathy'
00:01:01
Speaker
Indi, I'm so glad you're here. I am too. It's been a year, hasn't it? It has been a year. yeah so You are actually, I've talked to you before, because we've become friends over the years, but you are the person who made me realize that empathy truly is a technical skill, and your book, Practical Empathy, that you wrote years ago,
00:01:28
Speaker
I have been getting pushback ah this, you know, around 2010, 2011 was when I started thinking like empathy is because I came from kind of the UX branding world and I was like, no, empathy is important. But I was getting so much pushback in the software industry. And one of the things is like, no, it can't possibly be technical. But when I read your book, you were like, here are all the different types of empathy and here is exactly how you use it. And I was like, aha. so show people I was like.
00:01:58
Speaker
Read this book. It is technical because anything that you can break down into eight different subtypes, that's technical.
Tech Layoffs and Empathy's Role
00:02:06
Speaker
So tell us a little bit about your journey and um how you have used empathy in your work and you know a little bit about kind of where we have where we are right now.
00:02:18
Speaker
Ah, um yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, um there have been a whole ton of layoffs in the past two, three years, especially in the world of research and design, also product people getting laid off. And so I don't think that our empathy curve is still ah going up.
00:02:40
Speaker
um Although, you know, everybody's explaining that all, all the layoffs away as, oh, they overhired during the pandemic. um And so I'm not quite sure. how to deal with that um those excuses, right? Because as an organization, no matter if you're a for-profit or a nonprofit, whether you work in some government organization or you work in educational and organization, or if you're even trying to understand the people within your own organization,
00:03:13
Speaker
This kind of understanding is incredibly valuable.
Empathy vs. AI Perception Shift
00:03:18
Speaker
It's risky not to have it. um You are going to be falling into all the ruts of cognitive bias if you don't have this knowledge and perspective. and So it's it's mystifying why it's become like back in 2008, 2010, you're getting pushback. I mean, now the pushback is not that it's not technical. The pushback is ah we don't need you people. Mm hmm. Yeah. Or we don't have time for that. That's another. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. you or We'll just have the
Personas vs. Thinking Styles
00:03:53
Speaker
A.I. invent, um you know, interviews. Yeah.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, i'm I'm definitely seeing that too. And there's this interesting juxtaposition because on one end, there's a lot of research that shows just how critical this is, how empathy and communication are these skills that modern technologists absolutely need. But the other end, you know, there is this kind of reshuffling in organizations of Is it real? So yeah, we're in this really interesting place. So take us back a little bit to, you know, before you were writing the book and like how you got to this place of what I love about your work is thinking styles. So you typically we hear personas, which are kind of demographic representations of your audience. But you think about things very differently and it has really influenced the way I think about
00:04:51
Speaker
you know, how we understand um people that we're interacting with when we don't necessarily have access to them face to face. Yeah. So let me give you an example. So I've done. So what I do typically is I teach teams how to do this and then I work with teams um who want to learn it or don't want to do it. And I'll just do the research for them. um And by I, I mean me and a big team that's quite global.
00:05:21
Speaker
So um what I'm going to use an example of understanding your employees.
Storytelling and Research in Tech
00:05:28
Speaker
And now what I want to do is talk a little bit about thinking styles around that. So, yeah, personas. Oftentimes we will be starting a new project or trying to explore a new direction. And the first step is to make up some personas so that we can you know think like those people.
00:05:49
Speaker
And there are issues with making up personas, um because you know we're just sort of imbuing them with demographics and we're making the assumption that everybody with this particular demographic is going to think this way. I remember some demographics for a and a um for a company that helps individuals do investing on their own, we will say. um And and there were you know there was the woman who didn't know a damn thing about investing. And then there was the man who was the whiz and like totally in you know in the investing thing all the time. And they would totally ignore the woman because the women didn't know what they were doing and that sort of thing. But that is all kind of like messed up
00:06:38
Speaker
mixed up, tangled in a way that can be untangled. Here's how to do it. Personas, the the act of making up personas is actually the act of making up characters.
00:06:51
Speaker
When we want to communicate internally with other teams, within our team, we often will tell stories as a human way of communicating. And when you tell a story, you have to have a character. And so you make up a character and the impulse to make up a character is true. That's true to our species. 10,000 years worth of, you know, telling stories with characters. So that's fine. The problem is that we're making up characters out of thin air.
00:07:25
Speaker
And when you make them up out of thin air, instead of making them up based on research, we go off the rails and we imbue them with all this cognitive bias and the demographic bias. okay So so like assuming that like they yeah like women are bad with money and then know what they're doing when really it's like yeah the gender probably doesn't have anything to do with it. The gender is the piece that's being injected as the bias.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah,
Bias Recognition in Thinking Styles
00:07:54
Speaker
exactly. And that, ah granted, was um several years ago. So hopefully that's not being done anymore. But what I still see is people making up their characters. And I like to, instead of using the word persona, just replace it with character. All of a sudden it makes so much more sense what you're doing. So when you make up a character and you're imbuing it with demographics, which you have to,
00:08:20
Speaker
you also need to do it based on an archetype or a guide that comes from research. That archetype I call thinking styles. I used to call it behavioral audience segments. It is a behavioral audience segment, but who wants to use that word in applied world, right? I sound like an academic. um So I started using thinking style and lo and behold, there was a professor at Yale who actually used thinking style to represent exactly what I mean back in the 90s. And what he was focused on was trying to show us how much we judge people who have a different thinking style than our own.
00:09:04
Speaker
So let's take another study I did, which was for a company that creates washing machines. And the study, the study's always focused on what a person's trying to get done. That's sort of the the variable that we hold constant. So across the entire study, what we do is we talk to people about what are you trying to get done.
00:09:27
Speaker
and not how you use the laundry machine. okay Oftentimes we will in real life focus our research around the use of a solution. And I'm not interested in that. That's a boring story. What I'm interested in is what is a person trying to get done in the larger picture? So the story the study um was ah how do you take care of your clothes?
00:09:53
Speaker
right? What goes through your mind as you took care of your clothes over the past three months. And we got stories that ranged quite a bit. And we also got stories from men, women, young, old, retired, busy, three jobs, kids, no kids.
Challenges of Unresearched Personas
00:10:12
Speaker
We got all sorts of stories from people where interestingly,
00:10:19
Speaker
It was really clear that there was a group of people whose thinking style was prevent the germs. No germs, okay? um Some of it was around kids, some of it was around a nurse who was um working and then coming home and well taking their clothes off in the garage and washing them before even walking in the door. This was before COVID. One of them was just around like kitchen towels, not getting messed up or mixed up with clothing. It was like germs, let's not let the germs spread.
00:10:52
Speaker
There was another thinking style. It's like, it'll be OK, right? I'm always busy. It's hard to find time to do laundry. I've got my system, whether it's piles of things on the floor or piles of things in baskets, whatever, you know, it'll be OK. I'm just going to dump it in the laundry when I've got a ah chance. I'm not going to fiddle around with all the little buttons on there because it always turns out fine.
00:11:17
Speaker
um And I'm good. And then there was the neat and pressed. This was the person who wants to appear a certain way. Their thinking style is going to look at those piles of laundry.
00:11:29
Speaker
on the floor or in the baskets and the person who doesn't fiddle around with the buttons and go like, oh my God, you're doing it wrong. This is so wrong. And that's a judgment. You're describing the relationship between me and my mother. I'm the second one where I'm like, I asked my mom, like when i was she was teaching me how to do laundry, I was like, nope, it needs to be this way.
00:11:47
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And the whole point that um the professor was trying to make is that look at that judgment happening. Like, let's try the example of trying to find a job. The way I look for a job and the way you look for a job might be different. Our thinking styles might be different. We still get jobs, but we're going to judge each other.
00:12:07
Speaker
And what the professor wanted to do was make us aware of that judgment because the judgment is going into the code that we write. It's going into the solutions that we write. And so my whole point is let's get those thinking styles out there. Let's divorce them from any demographics. It's purely interior cognition, your inner thinking, your emotional reactions, your guiding principles.
00:12:31
Speaker
And let's make our team aware of those thinking styles so that we can make up stories around them. We can make up characters around them. We can make, like in the case of laundry, we can make two characters who have the same thinking style neat and pressed, right? One is a woman, one is a
Storytelling's Role in Tech Development
00:12:51
Speaker
man. They have the same approach, the same thinking style, okay? You can make So we're playing with demographics here. um The executives in that particular study were absolutely certain that it was the housewife doing the laundry all the time. So we made a bunch of male characters who had the different thinking styles that they were unconsciously ascribing to housewives doing laundry, right? So you can play with it. You can get two different thinking styles with the same
00:13:25
Speaker
ah demographic. So in the laundry case, like two different thinking styles with male, um or two different thinking styles with ah children. You know, speaking to the the developers out there, when I was but a young devlet, I love that term was forced to a story writing training. And I think me and the rest of my team were actually kind of flabbergasted at this because we were not the ones writing the stories. Like for better or worse, we weren't even in the room. Like we didn't watch stories get written. Like, you know, we talked to the people who wrote them, like, but
00:14:04
Speaker
you know, hey, what is us knowing how to write stories help with? Right. And it was like a three day training and it was like, you know, all day, a lot of interaction, participation. I mean, it was pretty heavyweight thing, like relative to what I thought the relevance of it in my life was. But I ended up actually getting a whole lot out of it. um And I realized that, like,
00:14:27
Speaker
um We didn't really have like that firm of an idea of what a story even was, let alone how to write one. So you know if you're going to be participating in this in this dialogue with this communication tool, like having a literacy of ah what the thought process is that that go into it, like how do we how have we learned to think about what our users want which or need, you know, which could be different even than what they say they want. If you actually do listen to them, um that was really that's really valuable. So I encourage people to really dig deep into the notion of what is story writing, what is understanding, what the intent of a story was, what what how is this helping do its job, which is to create, you know, to to instigate a meaningful dialogue about how we're going to get this ah done. That is beautiful that you did that as a devlet, Ray. So I'm around a lot of software engineers, and a lot of them love stories, um engage in stories. There's another way to do that is to like sort of watch the stories that you enjoy and recognize so the plots. like How is the plot?
00:15:40
Speaker
in this episodic TV show that you, how is it the same? How is it different? You know, all those two different writers on these, how did they approach it differently? um And I think that's going on in a lot of people's minds um already yeah as you do your entertainment. um So that's kind of fun to be aware of. The other end of it is that it can be as subconscious for us as humans to tell stories um that you don't have to put any effort into
Conversations and Social Dynamics
00:16:11
Speaker
it at all. I mean, putting effort into it, I think is a great idea, but think about gossip. Think about the last time you talked about you know like your manager to someone else.
00:16:21
Speaker
Your manager, and something that they did, the manager is the character, you both understand that character, but maybe if you're telling someone else, you need to sort of describe that character. So you're telling someone who's outside of work about your manager, you describe the character a little bit, and then you say the terrible thing that they did, or the wonderful thing that they did, right?
00:16:41
Speaker
um And you sort of, you pace your gossip a little bit so that there's this great little point where the other person goes like, oh my God, or like slaps her forehead or whatever, right? And there's your story arc. You do it already. I was recently, I've been listening to the book um Super Communicators by Charles Duhigg. and um It's really good. I like it. I'm learning a whole lot. And like having lived in the communication world for so long, I love that when I learn new things. But he was talking about, he was synthesizing some research around how we have three different types of conversations. We have, I need to express emotion and like, figure out what's going on inside me so that I can regulate. There is, I need to solve a problem, so let's coordinate our work. And then there is navigating our social environments, which is exactly like how do I relate to other people? What is my identity? yeah And like what are the different social groups? And I believe it was that about 80% of the conversations
00:17:47
Speaker
are around that exact thing, where it's about how do we navigate these social, and who are we, and how can we, and I think that's really where the storytelling comes in. Anyone saying that the biggest thing? Is that is that where gossip falls? I think, yeah, it falls a little bit, yeah. you know And I think gossip can sometimes be, like i I think I find it fascinating that with a lot of these different things, there can be a little bit of a good side most of the time if it becomes like,
00:18:16
Speaker
you know, petty spite, that becomes bad if you're, you know, but sometimes it's like, I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And same with empathy, it definitely has its shadow size too. So, you know, but um I found it fascinating because he said one of the biggest challenges in communication is a mismatch in alignment. So if you are just like, I need to process my emotions,
00:18:37
Speaker
and then someone doesn't recognize that that's the type of conversation that is being asked for. And they're like, great, let me jump in with a solution, right? when That that is when a lot of the tension happens. But I was really surprised at how high the like social organization side of things, like that's a really important part of how we communicate.
00:19:00
Speaker
You know how they always say, Oh, as humans, we're a social, you know, a social species. And I'm all like, I don't know. I'm like, ah I'm an introvert. I don't really like going out, you know, like, actually, no, I am, so I am as social as they mean. And they don't mean social as like,
00:19:17
Speaker
I love to go socialize. It's like we communicate and that 80% of the communications about like, ah you know, how am I relating to you? Am I like trying to make you laugh? um Am I, you know, all these kinds of things.
Listening Sessions for True Insights
00:19:32
Speaker
One of the things that I do when I'm um doing listening to sessions when I'm trying to teach people to collect this inner thinking, emotional reactions and guiding principles that are around just the person addressing their thing, not around the person using a tool because that's really boring to me.
00:19:52
Speaker
Because I'm trying to get strategy, I'm trying to go places, do innovation, fill in cracks in the market, try to you know stabilize the the paths that we're following instead of changing from year to year. But one of the things that I teach in that listening deeply is to recognize what is being said and what's the mode in which it's being said. So a lot of the time when you, when if you've ever participated in an interview, it's like a formal thing. There's this back and forth and you're maybe expecting the other person to have questions for you. This goes for job interviews too. And you go through the the questions that they ask you and you answer them and you wait for the next question and it's kind of formal that way.
00:20:38
Speaker
Whereas in a listening session, we're trying to completely get away from that. So we have, we want people to go back in memory. We want people to talk about inner thinking, emotional reactions and guiding principles or personal rules that they've already had go through their minds. It's really difficult to talk about that stuff oh like in the moment.
00:21:01
Speaker
So when you hear about research that's called like a ride along or a field study, people are trying to, you know, their interviews are asking, so what's going through your mind right now? And it's up for a lot of us, it's like hard to translate that into words.
00:21:16
Speaker
um unless it's like I'm in reaction to a solution that I'm trying to make work. So in that respect, it will work as a ride along, but all these other respects, trying to get to the inner thinking and the emotional reactions is much easier if we get back into something I call memory mode.
00:21:36
Speaker
So let's make sure we're talking, we're we're casting someone back in time. like It might be yesterday, it might be this morning, it might be you know three years ago, it's whatever they remember. And the things they remember are the important things. Those are the things that got laid down in their mind um physically, right, in the neurons. So what is interesting is recognizing when you're in like memory mode versus session mode,
00:22:04
Speaker
So session mode is like that formal interview. I'm waiting for the next question. Or it might be like a person's telling what went through their mind. And they're like, oh, wait a minute. Do you want me to talk about blah, blah, blah? Or is it OK to talk about blah, blah, blah? Or even the opposite? Like, I i just can't go there right now. it's kind of And that's session mode. I'm like talking to the interviewer, sort of setting the boundaries of what I want to talk about in that particular case. but knowing, just the awareness, knowing what's going on and how we're communicating to one another and how a listening session is much more like a conversation. That is really key. One of the things that I do also is when we're recruiting people ah to participate, we tell them, hey, this is going to be different and we want to do an intro session. The intro session is all about
00:22:59
Speaker
telling them, hey, it's just going to be a ah far ranging conversation. We have no list of questions for you. We have one germinal question, and that is what went through your mind as you were X, whatever that purpose or intention. um You could even call it a goal ah was right.
00:23:17
Speaker
But the reason that we do that is also to help us understand if that person has done a lot of thinking about it. And if they haven't done a lot of thinking about it, because sometimes you know people will join studies because they just want the money. Steve Portugal wrote a book, ah Danger and Doorbells or something i like that. Lots of instances of people making up in information that they think the interviewer wants to hear.
00:23:43
Speaker
being able to have the intro session lets me sort of do the Spidey sense thing where I'm like, I, yeah, like this candidate sounds great on paper, but they just either haven't done a lot of thinking about it or they can't get into memory mode about it.
Cognitive Interviewing Techniques
00:23:59
Speaker
So this really resonates with me because I've been over the last year or so picking up the the skill of cognitive interviewing. I'm kind of at near the beginning of my learning journey ah on this, but something that I learned to do there is start with one, I think you called it a germinating question, a a very open-ended, almost emotionally charged like, and just try to elicit a description. I will have a session that's just around essentially one question, like which might be like, okay, what are the things you're more comfortable with? Now, what the real question, what are the things that you work with that you're less comfortable with that are maybe more tricky or scary? And what makes them tricky or scary? And then we just talk about that for a half hour or more, right? And I just get amazing stuff out of this.
00:24:51
Speaker
But I think, you know, you know that that is research. But that is not what a lot of people think of as research. They think if you're getting data, that must mean you're gear counting things, you're going in, you already have all your your questions and you're counting and you're making a bar graph.
00:25:06
Speaker
But this is very qualitative, open-ended approach. like that is That is research too. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, the like for instance, the difference between quantitative and qualitative data and how you know when to go for what. Yeah. I also want to talk a little bit about safe space because that example you use where you start with something comfortable.
00:25:28
Speaker
You get them talking about things that are going well, and then you ask, hey well what's something that you tried to do that was like a little tricky or scary? um What you were trying to do was build trust.
00:25:40
Speaker
And so that's a really important thing. I teach that also, and it's in my book, Time to Listen. Building trust is not it's not easy, ah but it's not hard either. You can gain it, and then you will lose it, and you have to gain it again, and then you will lose it again, and then you will gain it again. So it's more like it goes up and down, kind of like a dolphin going in and out of the water or something.
00:26:05
Speaker
um it's Yeah, it's like, you know, you come up for the AR, you're also doing that with memory mode versus session mode. It's all good. There's no like, to like rigid rules about it. But the whole idea, the one rigid rule is that you don't want to force that person to tell you something that you need.
Qualitative Research in Tech
00:26:27
Speaker
You don't want to approach it as if you were ah like a colonizer going to a new land, this other person's mind, um to get the gold out of that land to bring back to your team, right? That is a colonizer kind of a mindset. Instead, I think that it comes from this idea that we're going to get an insight. We're going to get something out of this one
00:26:52
Speaker
interview that's going to make a difference for our team and make us do something different. And that is patently not true. So here's where it ties into qualitative data science.
00:27:05
Speaker
So ah hold that thought on the the colonizer and bring the gold back. Qualitative versus quantitative. I used this chart, I saw it once a long time ago, um where there is a spectrum you know with an arrow at either end that's labeled qualitative and one end is labeled subjective and the other end is labeled empirical. There's another arrow just like that. So there's one for quantitative and there's one for qualitative.
00:27:35
Speaker
They both have a subjective end and an empirical end. Empirical means that it is valid. Okay, well, how do we tell if it's valid, right? It's repeatable. Different researchers can get the same results. You can use the same data set with a different researcher and get the same results. um Completely different sets of people or participants and get the same results, right? That's empirical.
00:28:06
Speaker
With qualitative, because it is not something that is really lived in the academic realm, and it hasn't been taught in an applied way very widely. So this idea that you ray you're taking cognitive interviewing is really great. um The analysis part of it also needs to be taught. um I teach a two-part course on the analysis, right? Because that's where you're going to get to empirical.
00:28:37
Speaker
If you're just looking at a an individual and wanting to bring some sort of insight out of it, that's gonna be subjective. It's gonna be anecdotal. You've heard that word before. It's like, oh yeah, you know I can tell this story about this one person and we're gonna change our whole you know path forward or we're gonna change this little feature because of this anecdotal evidence. One person, it's one story.
00:29:04
Speaker
So the empirical end is valid because we get patterns across stories. That means patterns across a lot of different individuals giving us their inner thinking, emotional reactions and personal rules as they were addressing this purpose and we're seeing patterns happen. That's how we get our thinking styles as well. So these patterns, so the definition of empirical in qual is and qualitative data is that patterns showed up. And it isn't until you compare those patterns to your solution and in that comparison, you find gaps that you get insights. I love that. It also makes me think like one of the other things that you know I learned from you is the different ways that we reason about data. And develop so there's deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and then you introduced me to a new one that I didn't know, which is abductive reasoning.
00:30:01
Speaker
um yeah Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I think as developers, we think a lot about deductive reasoning because it's like it's true or false, it executes or it's not. And I'm curious, I have a hypothesis. right That is a practice that a thinking style emerges, but you do have to think about things a little bit differently because you can't deduce people into true or false. Yeah.
00:30:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And deductive is where you're going to have a hypothesis. You're trying to test, right? Deductive comes from science, where we've got actual physical things that we're trying to figure out. What are the rules of this atom, right? um Or behavior rules of this you know little molecule? Or can we figure out how to cure this particular condition in somebody's bloodstream kind of thing, right? Physical things.
00:30:56
Speaker
So deductive works there. And I think that business applied, especially like a loves the scientific kind of like rule-based sort of like it's obvious and clear. And we're trying to figure this out, but we're not working with physical things. We're working with humans. We're working with, as we said earlier, social beings, social beings.
00:31:23
Speaker
ah think and react according to their context and according to their experience. um In the book, Time to Listen, I use the image of an Asian dragon where they've got the big
Reasoning Types in Understanding Behavior
00:31:35
Speaker
mane and the whiskers and everything up front in their mouth and then the the body goes long, really sinuous. um That face is the person in the present with whatever context they're around. You can behave slightly differently in different contexts.
00:31:52
Speaker
but their body that they carry with them everywhere is all of their experience, which also influences how they're going to do their inner thinking, their emotional reactions, and and apply their personal rules.
00:32:05
Speaker
So the idea that... um Okay, wait, I have to pop the stack here. Where were we? The deductive, inductive, and abductive. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yes, good. So so this this deductive thing and making hypotheses, that works with physical things. like That could work with like um the behavior of a an app, okay? But it doesn't work with people.
00:32:30
Speaker
So you cannot understand people by saying, I have a hypothesis that they're gonna behave this way because it's gonna change. you're never going to get the same answer. It's not going to be anything that you can say, oh yeah, I nailed it. So the other thing about deductive is that it is based on something we already kind of know. We've got a theory. That's the word for it. And so inductive and abductive are both about creating theories.
00:33:03
Speaker
We have to have theories before you can go have hypotheses that you want to test deductively. um And often in the applied world, we just pull the theories out of thin air. And then we're trying to pull those theories and make up theories about people's behavior, which is like wrong, wrong, wrong.
00:33:22
Speaker
I have this talk um from 2019. You can go into the archive. It was at um Manchester ah at the NUX, so that's the Northern England User Experience Conference, ah where I kind of go through all of this visually as well if you're more of a visual person. So you can see what the differences are. So inductive and abductive are also different from one another.
00:33:51
Speaker
An adductive is more like, let's just like really drop the boundaries and explore. I need to do that because we're social beings. So that one thing that we hold constant, what was that one thing we hold constant?
00:34:08
Speaker
It is, what is a person trying to address? um I call it a purpose. It could also be called a job for jobs to be done. It could also be called a goal. It could be called an intention. It could be something that the person is always going to be working on and never be finished with, such as trying to take care of a health condition.
00:34:33
Speaker
Okay, we're doing these kind of interviews. It also could be something that you're trying to put off. i don't want I don't want to deal with this right now, such as in a health condition in the studies we did, there was so many patterns around people who just got diagnosed with something. they There's this whole section where they're trying to struggle through like, what is wrong with me? And then they get diagnosis and they're like, no, no, no, that can't be happening to me. And there's that space in there that is completely unsupported.
00:35:06
Speaker
in the medical community, which we can support. And so this brings me round to thinking styles back to that so whole cognitive bias thing. It's like, we're only supporting people that we think are out there, that we made up that we're out there. We invented them out of thin air and um we're ignoring, i I hazard at least 60, 70, 80% of our audience.
00:35:33
Speaker
That's a huge amount of so people that we're not supporting, that we're forcing to go through this process that we made up based on what we thought was happening um or based on our own experience, our team's experience or our mom's experience, you know, that kind of thing. And it's very different. We're not doing any empirical research. And if we do our qualitative empirical research to form theories, these thinking styles are theories.
00:36:00
Speaker
The mental model skyline that I create are theories about how people address that thing that they're trying to accomplish or address or put off.
Empirical Insights and Solution Development
00:36:12
Speaker
Yeah. The way that I've kind of synthesized these different um ways of reasoning is that, to me, deductive reasoning is about finding a proof or a truth, like something that's like, yep, it is. That is the thing. right And then inductive is about finding patterns.
00:36:30
Speaker
and exploring that discovery. So from a lot of different discrete data points, what are the patterns that emerge? And I think abductive, what I would i feel, it's about discovering the next question.
00:36:43
Speaker
where it's it's really more about like the scientific discovery. So one of the, when I was yeah exploring how, what is this thing? They talked about how um doctors use abductive reasoning where it's like to make a diagnosis. Well, okay, well, I think it's this and it's like, oh, actually it might not be. Okay, well, based on what I've learned from that first question, now I'm going to create another question and like it helps you learn, but it,
00:37:08
Speaker
you often can't get to it is this thing because everything's constantly changing. That's kind of how i' I've thought of this. Yeah, and that that's great because that definition is what the mental model skyline provides. We talked a little bit earlier about like yeah the orgs are making these decisions and guiding their there are teams Based on like no knowledge, we need this knowledge. It's valuable knowledge. it The Mental Model Skyline exists as that knowledge that we use
00:37:43
Speaker
during our, you know, what are, what are our theories? Should we go this direction? There's a help harm scale that I also use ah where we do evaluative work for each tower, for each thinking style in the mental model skyline. And that allows us to, like I said, we're not getting insights from the interviews themselves. We're getting insights from how the patterns, the skyline and the thinking styles,
00:38:14
Speaker
compare it to our solutions. And if in comparison, we're say in one part of this, one tower of this skyline, um one part of what people are going through to address what they're trying to address, um we're supporting one thinking style and clearly not supporting another thinking style. Is that an opportunity that we want to address? Is that a little gap that we want to fill?
00:38:43
Speaker
And so this skyline, that this kind of research about people's inner thinking, emotional reactions and guiding and principles or personal roles, um it doesn't shift. You might be used to evaluative research where it's going to shift because the product has shift.
00:39:02
Speaker
If the product has shifted, then we throw out that old research, we have to do some more, right? This kind of research about people's inner thinking doesn't shift that fast. And so the people that create these use them for at least a decade, if not more.
00:39:21
Speaker
So the idea is to use this as a model for where are we going? What have we done well? What have we not done well? I want to see the whole picture. Often, orgs will have many of these skylines because there are many purposes um or jobs that people are trying to address, right?
00:39:45
Speaker
Earlier, you mentioned this idea of getting outside of the colonizer mentality where someone's got the gold locked away in their head, and I'm going to go get it. But the thing is, you're selling us on there being all this great gold in there, though.
00:40:04
Speaker
It sounds like I do want that insight. I do want to go extract it like, ah or at least we want the the good things that come from that. So how do I do that in ah in a less colonial way? That's a beautiful question. So the gold is not locked in the heads.
00:40:20
Speaker
The gold comes from the patterns and how those patterns compare to your solutions. So the gold is not in someone's head and you're not going to be able to bring it back to the team. You're going to bring back everybody's inner thinking, emotional reactions and personal rules, you're going to see what patterns come out of that in terms of ah a skyline of like the different parts of the way they dress things. And in terms of the thinking styles, which we layer onto that skyline, it gets put in all the windows on all the buildings in the skyline.
00:40:55
Speaker
um And the idea is that still we don't have any gold. It's like, oh yeah, that's how people address things right now. Let's put underneath these buildings what we do to support that building, our foundation for that building. How are we supporting someone doing this thing?
00:41:15
Speaker
OK, and there are going to be gaps. And sometimes those gaps are like, u we just don't want to get in that business. um But a lot of the time the gaps are like, oh, I'm supporting this building, but only that thinking style or none of the thinking styles here. And we're doing a crappy job, but we didn't quite realize it because we didn't know what the thinking styles were. um That's the gold.
00:41:41
Speaker
So it sounds to me it's less about getting the insight and more about, it's almost like a service mentality. Like, how can I learn from you and all of these other people so that I can create a solution that actually solves the problem?
00:41:56
Speaker
Yes, exactly. That has value to you as a person. So oftentimes ah we'll put thing a solution out and then we have to like convince people to use it. And what we would rather have is we put solution out that people are like, oh my God, somebody finally understands me and I'm like reaching for it and telling all the people who think like me um in this condition about it. That's what we would love to have ideally.
00:42:24
Speaker
and You can only accomplish that if you understand how people are thinking. So yeah, ah yeah that's the value means. um So one of the things that we often as engineers, um because I'm an engineer, think is that like what I'm building has never existed before.
00:42:45
Speaker
However, people are still already doing it and they are using existing tools for it. When you say tool, you're like, oh, they're using existing digital tools? No, they might be using mechanical tools or manual tools. They might be using the tool of their memory.
00:43:02
Speaker
They might be using the tool of social, like I'm gonna go ask my neighbor how they did this. I'm gonna like, you know, if I'm trying to decide whether or not to attend a performance, ah which is a study I'm doing, um ah you know, did did my friend like that performance?
00:43:20
Speaker
And um ah do I think like my friend, am I going to like it, right? That's part of the tools that we reach for. And if there's an another tool that ah that we we kind of have to be convinced to use, we're not going to use it that much.
00:43:34
Speaker
because we've already got our tools. yeah They already work really well for us. This new tool has to be of greater value. Yeah, that gets back to a question I have. So we open the ah conversation with, it's a tough time right now.
Market Gaps and Innovation
00:43:50
Speaker
How do you sell this idea of this is such a great investment and a creator of value? um and Then especially for practitioners, so individual contributors who are building the features, who are you know definitely probably aren't leading the studies and then at best are getting data, you know quality data in, yeah know how do you kind of ah take that idea both you know broadly and then deeply within an organization?
00:44:22
Speaker
So um how I had been doing it up until a year ago is slightly different than how I'm trying to do it now, because I discovered that, yes, we need something different. Another way to talk about it, um the way I had been doing it is just to appeal to individual contributors who recognize that they're not like they've had an experience themselves where they weren't supported. And if only this tool worked this way, then it would be more valuable to me. But instead I'm going to do it the old way because this tool is not valuable. Right. So there's also a lot of individual contributors who love variety, who love equity, who love ethics.
00:45:07
Speaker
um And so I was appealing to all of that and that worked great. I've got a global following because of that, but that does not work in an organization that is perhaps more focused on time and profit.
00:45:23
Speaker
And so in that respect, I started studying like, okay, what is it that people are missing or interested in or trying to do? And there were six things that I came up with, because I did my own study, right? I went around and talked to people, and listened to them, try and understand what went through your mind and what were those personal rules you were using. And um the first one is basically, um we we We kind of like just put our finger in the air ah with respect to which direction we're going to head. And you know whatever conversation we were having, um
00:46:05
Speaker
you know, that influence somebody that influence somebody makes the direction we're gonna go for this year and just seems kind of flaky. um Either that or the people at the top who are making these decisions are also giving us a different direction every six months and it's getting annoying. So that's the very first thing this is useful for is to stabilize that direction finding.
00:46:33
Speaker
Okay. The second one and the third one are so strong. the One of them is finding the gaps in your market um or it within the way that you support your employees internally or within the way that you support citizens within this little department that you're working in.
00:46:55
Speaker
the The ideas that I said, i at least 60, 70, 80% of the thinking styles and the approaches, the steps that people are sort of taking in their minds are not supported.
00:47:09
Speaker
there is a lot to gain there. And for a company that is going fast and time is money and they want to make ah more of a profit um or like this sad endless growth mindset, um the the idea that there is much more in your market, you don't have to go find a new market. There's a ton of people in your market that you could glom onto. The third one though, that just as strong as that is innovation.
00:47:39
Speaker
So a lot of people innovate, innovate or die, blah, blah, blah. um And they treat innovation as if it's a thing that they, as sort of the colonial mindset, are going to come up with. So a lot of people, individual contributors, um sort of started like, hey, there's this this idea of like generating ideas with people, generative research, generating ideas with the community. um Let's not like come swooping in with our um beads and our pencils. and you know whatever take, whatever we want, and and and manipulate the way that things come out, because we want an outcome that's going to work for people. Something's going to be of value to people.
00:48:19
Speaker
and a value to a variety of thinking styles. There's no one solution. There's no one then ring that rules them all. The idea is variety. That next book I'm gonna write is gonna be called Towards Variety. So that's that's like been the whole arc of my career since I was i a devil at myself um is being able to include more variety in our solutions, not have just one solution.
00:48:49
Speaker
um So anyway, popping the sack a couple ah back. So this idea of innovating with this idea of having the city skyline and the and the thinking styles, innovation suddenly becomes much more clear. Here's where we've got a gap where these brand new ideas that we can generate in this narrow frame can maybe be applied.
00:49:19
Speaker
right These ideas are not necessarily coming from us. They're coming from the way the data interacts or the the say we're looking at the data and all it's telling us is there's a gap. That means we do generative research.
00:49:35
Speaker
This is a gap we want to step into. um There's this idea of hill climbing as well with respect to innovating, where you're trying you're going up a hill, your team's going up a hill, and and and you're like measuring, but like are we higher than those other hills? right how are we How far are we getting? um And what I want to do is say, hey, wait a minute. When you're hill climbing, your goal is to get the top.
00:50:03
Speaker
But maybe maybe getting to a stream where there's water is also a good goal. and So maybe getting to a bush where there's a lot of berries is also a good goal because we're humans and we have to eat and drink. um But in any case, the analogy I like to use for innovation is that if you're going down, say a fire road, ah you're hiking, there's a bunch of your competitors ahead of you or behind you, right?
00:50:34
Speaker
Maybe you're running, maybe you're not running, but as a business, you've got competitors. So there's competition going on and you want to get to the front of the crowd going down this fire road because it's the path that you're on, where if you actually had this idea of providing value to people and an understanding of the value, you could just branch off.
00:50:57
Speaker
you could just go in a totally different direction. If it were a race and there was a finish line, which this isn't, um you could like go bushwhacking to get to the finish line faster than following along where all the other competition is trampling. um And so the ideas that we've got in this data, all those little tiny trailheads where you could go off bushwhacking.
00:51:22
Speaker
um There's more work that needs to be done
Evaluating Solutions' Impact
00:51:25
Speaker
there. Yes, generating ah solutions with people is a great idea. That's the work that needs to happen there. um but we've got those little trailheads showing. So that's that's the third one. The fourth one is being able to measure help or harm. So I've got this help and harm and graph because oftentimes in our evaluative work, we only talk about, oh, this was frustrating for someone to use. We need to change it.
00:51:53
Speaker
um or this was confusing, that's an even better argument. This was confusing, people aren't doing it right, that kind of stuff, right? But there's a lot of other, that's like a mild harm. A person who is confused by it and then figures it out can recover.
00:52:10
Speaker
They're also experiencing a little bit of something else. They're experiencing a little bit more serious harm where they've lost that time. um They maybe um had been interrupted. Maybe they're feeling self-doubt. Maybe I'm not the right person to be doing this, or maybe the you know i' I'm not allowed to sign up for this thing. um Maybe they're experiencing some sort of emotional triggers along the way, such as being shown an ad for Mother's Day when your mother has passed away.
00:52:40
Speaker
That's a great example of an emotional trigger. So that distracts you and then you get off the path of what you were trying to do and, you know, you're not as effective um as you had hoped to be. That's serious harm.
00:52:58
Speaker
You're also being asked to do unpaid labor. Oh my gosh, how many times have we been on the phone with our internet service provider? That's unpaid labor. they They changed our rate or whatever and it's up to us to go back in and try to change the rate back to what we wanted or reduce the speeds or whatever, right? That's unpaid labor. Lisa Danse has written a great book about it recently. um The next level of harm is called lasting harm, where you might have lost some money. You might have lost a relationship with someone. You might have lost access to something forever. You might have lost your reputation. You might have lost a limb or your life. We're making software that runs in cars now. Lives are at stake.
00:53:50
Speaker
And then there's also a fourth level, which is systemic. And that's really important, especially when we're dealing with um systems that are going to be far reaching like AI and long lasting.
Empathy's Critical Role in Tech Evolution
00:54:03
Speaker
We're putting our own cognitive bias into the system, right? We're only serving a non-existent thinking style or our own thinking style. And that gets baked into the system. People who think differently will never be served.
00:54:20
Speaker
And as it gets deeper and deeper into the systems, it gets harder and harder for us to root it out. There's, I think, so much to unpack there in terms of how we everything think about who isn't being served by the existing system. It's just not set up to serve them. By doing more of what it already does, it will never reach that state. And then in terms of how we think about the integration of AI is certainly
00:54:50
Speaker
ah playing into that a lot and and ah perhaps I'd love to have you on again sometime and and talk more about some of these areas. But for now, we have one final question. We ask all our guests, what do you think is the most important thing that needs to happen at the intersection of empathy and technology?
00:55:11
Speaker
variety, mindset shift toward variety. The idea so that the AI, that's one of the other things that I realized is um we need to humanize the AI. When I asked my illustrator to do something about humanize your AI, she made an a robot with hands, you know, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want the AI to understand that there are thinking styles out there.
00:55:39
Speaker
we want the We want our solution, even if we're not doing AI, we want our solutions to understand there are thinking styles out there, and we want a variety. Now, the pushback to that is, hey, I don't want to have to make 10,000 different versions of this widget. I'm like, yeah, true, especially if it's a physical widget. No way. But first of all, when we're doing this for thinking styles, there are not 10,000 thinking styles.
00:56:08
Speaker
I did a study once for an airline where we, you know, passengers, this is such variety there. And we came up with ah six thinking styles. Okay, that is that is not 10,000 solutions. That's just six that you cut could cater to. And you can then just use the same backend, but six different frontends. Do some sort of design work where a chat bot helps ah recognize, oh, I think you're this thinking style. I'm gonna lead you to this design solution for that thinking style. So variety, thinking in terms of the idea of
00:56:46
Speaker
a multiplicity and doing, because the pushback is like, it's so expensive to do 10,000 versions. Well, it would be even expensive to do six versions. I'm like, no, you're only doing six front ends. I have this great example um on my website and I've done it in a couple of talks about streaming plans. Right now, streaming plans are based on features, what you get.
00:57:11
Speaker
right They're not based on thinking styles. and so When the executive said, hey, I'm going to put ads in here, and we'll give it to you at the lowest price, you are harming people whose thinking style is, I need to control my finances, or their thinking style is, I need to control my consumption.
00:57:35
Speaker
right If you're giving them the ads, they're going to be triggered when they see those ads. You need to put it in the ads into a thinking style where ads are a part of the game that they like to play, getting the most for the least.
00:57:52
Speaker
So that's what I mean by variety and making different front ends, like different streaming plans, a streaming plan where you're allowed to choose how many days per week ah you want to watch. That's easy. That's not hard to make. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah. And one of the things I love about your work too is that you really emphasize focusing on the problem space first so that the solutions become obvious.
00:58:16
Speaker
right And then that way, when you know that you go to implement that solution, you have a lot of confidence that it's going to work. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So, India, this has been a great conversation. Where can people get in touch with you or find out more about your work?
00:58:32
Speaker
Yes, there's datascienceatlistens.com or indiyong.com, both right now go to the same place. And that's I-N-D-I, right? Yes, I-N-D-I-Y-O-U-N-G. I'm also on LinkedIn under that same thing or ah Twitter. I still cross post to Twitter and Instagram and Blue Sky as well. So I do a lot of fun stuff there.
00:58:59
Speaker
Also, what's really important is the newsletter. I will start putting some of the fun posts in a little bit more detail into the newsletter. Awesome. Oh my gosh, Indi, I am so glad that you're part of my life. I'm so glad that you were able to come on the show and share about all the goodness that you're learning. um and i know I hope that people ah Maybe listen to this show a couple of times because you're just a wealth of knowledge. So awesome. I know that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. When india and I get together, it's like long, long, long conversations. It's great. So thank you all for listening. And thank you for coming. Just a reminder, empathy in tech is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry by doing four things. Closing the empathy skills gap by treating empathy as a technical skill. teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, and actionable training, building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes, and finally promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice. So if you found this conversation interesting, head over to empathyintech.com to keep the conversation going and join our community of compassionate technologists.
01:00:14
Speaker
Thanks again for listening and we will see you in the next episode.