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 learn how to discover the thinking styles that exist within the boundaries of goals that your organization helps people accomplish. This course follows an in-depth example that explores all the angles that your team might encounter when doing this work yourselves.

You do NOT need to be a researcher for this course, but you do need the mindset of team work and dwelling in details.

Required

before you take this course:

Self-paced Course Listening Deeply
-or- Book Time to Listen

see if you are ready

~~Enroll~~ (coming soon!)

Self-paced course

Closed captions

Last updated March 2026

Join Indi’s Slack community

6 month access

About the course

Indi Young, creator of Data Science that Listens, teaches tried-and-true methods for guiding organizational and product strategy based on a nuanced understanding of the people you support (or want to start supporting). Eliminate the guesswork and leave your assumptions at the door. This is the strategic gateway into truly human products, services, and policies.

The biggest paradigm-shift is that you work within a goal/purpose that people share, instead of trying to describe people universally across a market population. This shift gives you deeply actionable understanding that leads teams to opportunities no one else is seeing.

Check out examples and uses of Thinking Styles.

Course Sections:

Section 1 – Why Thinking Styles

1.1 Think Bigger

1.2 Define Thinking Styles

1.3 The Choice to Support

1.4 How Many Thinking Styles?

1.5 Why No Demographics?

1.6 Compare to Other Segmentation

1.7 Compare to Roles

1.8 What Do They Look Like?

1.9 Thinking Styles Change

Slide from the section 1.3 The Choice to Support, titled "If thinking styles differ enough." The rest of the slide reads, "you can vary things like: support of philosophy or personal rules, tone of voice, vocabulary, order of focus ... without judging ... various styles are each valid ways of using abilities in pursuit of the purpose

Section 2 – Represent Your People (Representative Collaboration)

2.1 Validity = Team

2.2 Represent Your People

2.3 Split Stories or Not?

2.4 Note the Essential Cognition

Slide titled "Why is a team important?" The answer is, "avoid assumptions and bias, ensure validity of results, this is how emergent synthesis ensures coverage of possibilities." There is an illustration of a person speaking to the right, saying, "It's not like I can get it alone. I need the group to read it another way, and then another way. Until you do the group back-and-forth you don't know what to pay attention to, or what is essential in your people's transcripts.

Section 3: Find Similar Essential Cognition

3.1 How This Works

3.2 Play Your Cards

3.3 The First Pancake

3.4 Coherence of Groups

3.5 After the First Pancake

3.6 Too Much Cognition? (solving coherence issues)

3.7 Play Cards Across Contexts (solving coherence issues)

3.8 Not Enough Cognition? (solving coherence issues)

3.9 What to Do With Singles? (solving coherence issues)

3.10 Preferences Instead of Cognition? (solving coherence issues_

3.11 How to Tell When Finished

illustration of nine people on zoom (seven of them active "players") discussing the latest card played, a blue card called 202 Driving in Ireland. Compared to the other four cards on the table, people say, "That one doesn't feel right. It doesn't have that level of anger at someone endangering me. Or does it?" Another says, "Yeah, I had a similar reaction." A third team member says, "Well, the person does feel endangered by their husband, and they're doing a lot of emotional management to convince their husband to stop driving too fast."

Section 4: Descriptions & Labels

4.1 Describe the Thinking Style

4.2 Label the Thinking Style

4.3 Compare to Existing Segments

4.4 Check Your Work

4.5 Try Again If Needed

Section 5: Value and Uses

5.1 Value to Decision-Makers (strategic)

5.2 How Are Thinking Styles Used?

5.3 No Classification System Needed (Yet)

Who is this for?

People who will find the thinking styles for the organization to support.

If you have worked with personas, get in here. Thinking styles are very different, more statistically valid, and enable more mindful idea generation. This is how you create truly new innovations.

If you will be using thinking styles, check out the overview Working With mmSkylines & Thinking Styles.

Extra benefit: This is how you show the organization what it means to stop judging or ignoring people.

Study this course if you are tasked with finding thinking styles within one purpose.

Researcher, Quant, Qual, Mixed Methods
Software Engineer, Product Engineer
Marketing

Study all but Section 3 to learn how to shift your mindset into supporting someone instead of trying to change them:

Product Lead, Design Lead, Content Lead
Design Strategist
Entrepreneur, Founder
Ideas Person

Course Features

<to be updated>
46 videos, in 5 sections
Total video time: 11.25 hours
Demos and examples
Practice, reflections & quizzes
Closed captions
Listen w/ or w/out the screen

Three illustrated heads in silhouette. Each shows a brain as a scribble. Inside each brain a different location is highlighted in purple, red, or green scribble, to show that different "thinking styles" are activated.

Price levels – Finding Thinking Styles

Regular

Price per person:

US $500

When your employer is covering your cost

Union, University, Government

25% off

US $375

When your union, university, or government is covering your cost

Out of Pocket

50% off

US $250

When you will NOT be reimbursed for the cost by anyone (e.g. unemployed, self-employed, contract worker, student, boss hopeless getting budget)

Extreme Currency Exchange

90% off

US $50

Only for people who live, earn, and pay in a country that has very limited purchasing power in the USA(e.g. Argentina, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Peru, Philippines, Serbia, South Africa, Ukraine)

Click here to compare courses for your role

Testimonials

The give-and-take gave me the impression that I was part of something that’s still evolving, which is exciting. Those of us applying problem space research to our work are part of the evolution. Each engaged student becomes part of how this fluid process is taught, and how it may be…
— Cindy Lowrey, 15-May-2019
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The training is a great way to expand how you conduct user research. Indi teaches you how to conduct your studies and analyze your data so that you’re getting to the heart of the users’ problems and better understanding their needs. I hadn’t realized how much rich data I’ve been…
— anonymous, 28-May-2019
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Do it! You learn so much in just a few weeks. And though it’s online, it’s very interactive and personal, not at all like a webinar. And there’s homework that Indi actually checks!
— Francesca, 15-May-2019

It’s a better way to look at the people you want to design for, based on real and not made up data.
— Bibiana, 10-Apr-2020

It was great to work with Indi. She is a pioneer in the field of qualitative studies. She also came from a developer background which is useful when you are involved in software projects.
— Dana Lynn, 16-May-2019

Just do it.
— Yannis Masouras, 2-Jun-2021

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: If I have questions about the course content, will Indi answer them for me?

A: Asking a question in the Slack community will give Indi, her team, and many other Slack members a chance to see the question and respond to it.

Q: Do the recordings qualify me for Indi’s Problem Space Certification Program?

A: Not quite. You will also want to join the Live Practice series for each course. In these Live Practice meetings, you get to work on exercises together with Indi and others. This is where we discuss nuances of context and share experiences that help others prepare to conduct their own research. Live Practice meetings give you a chance to double your knowledge and demonstrate your understanding.