4. Thinking Styles
About this course
Start date: 5-May-21
Summary
Thinking styles are deeply researched, demographics-free mindsets. They are much more reliable and flexible than demographic & psychographic descriptions of sets of people.
Segmenting your audience by demographics invites bias and discrimination.
A well-researched persona is a good tool to guide your strategy and scenario-writing. But often personas are built in a day using quantitative data and invented “decorative” detail. When teams accept the convention of using names, faces, and ages in their personas, it allows cognitive bias to creep in. Demographic assumptions are harmful. This demographic approach to personas ends up as an unusable mashup of target market description and product design guidance. It frequently only addresses the buying behavior. If a set of personas does venture past buying into usage, they usually represent only one philosophical approach to users’ overall purpose. This one philosophical approach is duplicated with different “skins” to show “diversity.”
Thinking styles are a better way to support a broad diversity of people.
Thinking styles represent patterns of inner thinking, emotional reactions, and guiding principles derived from listening sessions. They’re archetypes. You use them in gap analysis to see where your solutions offer weak support for certain thinking styles. You use them for the characters who play roles in an org’s design scenarios: buying, on-boarding, usage, workarounds, retention. With a connection to the inner mindsets people have as they seek to achieve their own purposes, your team will become aware of broader cultures and philosophies. This variety allows your organization to multiply the number of goals and solutions you can seek to support.
You will learn how to:
- Practice the neutral mindset of understanding people as people
- Derive thinking styles from research
- Provide the core concepts at depth that differentiate thinking styles
- Represent complex sets of thinking styles in a way many teams across a large org can easily use
- Convert existing personas to thinking-styles
- Gather core concepts from existing research
- Stop writing repetitive (and useless) scenarios
- Give you org a clear path to address discrimination and support different physiology
Homework:
Expect homework to take about one hour a week. (Some people invest less time or more time, depending on their context.)
- Homework #1: Choose some transcripts to read, and write a participant sketch for each. Your sketch will take the format of either a paragraph of concepts at depth or a list of concepts at depth.
- Homework #2: Group participants with approaches in common. Annotate this group by merging some common inner thinking & guiding principles. Highlight people by strength of match to the annotation, then make changes if there are weak matches. See if you can make each person belong to a unique group
- Homework #3: Describe each of your thinking style groups using first person, present tense. Decide on a label for each group that the members would be proud to describe themselves as. (Optionally: map our original hypotheses to thinking styles; test out the descriptions with real people.)
Who is this for?
Product owners, entrepreneurs, enterprise leaders, designers, developers, content strategists, researchers … we all need a tool to help us systematically uncover the harm we are causing. Thinking styles is this tool.
Learn how to launch at your organization a more humane method of representing the people you hope to support.
Prerequisites
- read the essay Describing Personas
- understanding of listening
- understanding of listening sessions for data collection
- watch one of Indi’s latest recorded talks
- listen to one of the latest Other Recordings
Recommended reading
- The introduction to Practical Empathy
- Article – Launching Problem Space Research
- Chapters 10 & 12 in Mental Models
- Chapter 6 in Practical Empathy
How does it work?
Duration
4 classes of 2 hours each. The live version of a course takes about four weeks to complete.
Time Zones
Live courses are taught Wed 10:30am or Friday 5:30pm San Francisco time. here are two helpful tools: 1. Time zone converter 2. Explore your time zone
Homework Review
Students who enroll for the live version of the courses will have Indi review their homework.
Pricing
Several pricing tiers aim to support different budgets and currency rates.
Enrollment options
3 enrollment options give you the choice as to how to complete the course.
Previous start dates
18-Mar-20;24-Apr-19
More courses
Price & Enrollment Options
For each course you can enroll in one of these three ways
Live Online Classes
Join a class of 25 or less participants, from around the globe. Classes are taught online live by Indi.
- Live discussions & questions during classes
- Choice of two class periods per week (Group A or Group B)
- Partner for homework with others in your Group
- Homework review of your work by Indi & assistant
- Membership in Slack community
- Access to recordings of the course
- Recordings accessible for 3 months
- Letter of Completion available
- Counts toward problem space certification program
Individual
Team
If you have a team attending from one organization:
3 people ~15% | $660 each ($1980 total) |
4 people ~20% | $621 each ($2484 total) |
5 people ~25% | $582 each ($2910 total) |
6-10 people ~30% | $543 each |
11-15 people ~35% | $504 each |
16+ people ~40% | $466 each |
Follow-along Option
If you cannot attend class, but still want to follow along with the latest course as it is taught, this is a great option for you.
- Partner for homework with others who are also following-along
- Some cheat sheets for self-review of homework
- Membership in Slack community
- Access to recordings of the currently underway live course
- Recordings accessible for 6 weeks (motivation to finish!)
- No letter of completion available
- Does not count toward the problem space certification program
Individual
Archived Access
If the course you are interested in is not coming up soon enough, consider the archived recording.
- Last year’s course recordings
- Some cheat sheets for self-review of homework
- Membership in Slack community
- Recordings accessible for 6 months
- No letter of completion available
- Does not count toward the problem space certification program
Individual
Pricing Level Details
Regular – When your organization will cover the cost, e.g. your boss is paying
Government/Military/Non-profit – When a government, military, or non-profit organization is covering your education cost
Out-of-Pocket – When you will NOT be reimbursed for the cost by anyone; also use this if you are a member of a union and your boss is not paying
Extreme Currency Exchange – Not in the US? When your your purchasing power is at an extreme disadvantage with the US dollar, we have much bigger discounts. We want to include folks in Brazil, India, Ukraine, Russia, Malaysia, etc.
Refund Policy
Refunds are possible up until 2 days prior to your course start date.