It’s not simple
Complex systems are beautiful. And powerful. They support all the players within the system.
Right now, our rules-based systems do not evolve nor flex to support everyone. Machine learning has no ethics. Big data only predicts big crowd behavior.
UX is created for individuals. Help your team shift their mindset to build complex systems in support of humans and the non-humans & environment.
Taking the Perspective of People, to Build a Future for Your Org
As a field, product creators have been trying to get organizations to focus on being human-centered. This effort has always struggled against business aims of more growth, more market, more “users,” or more profit each year. The two mindsets don’t mesh. Re-centering on people’s purposes is a way to actually serve these business goals. The opportunity map shows current gaps to fill in over the coming years. You can see gaps in how your solution supports people, by “tower” in the mental model diagram, by thinking style, and by lens (interior cognition caused by discrimination, physiology). You can benchmark these gaps by level of support (weak, good) or harm (mild, serious, severe, systemic), and going forward you can track improvements to your solutions in these benchmarks. Filling in gaps provides paths toward growth. In a nutshell, the mindset shift is to move toward thinking as a person addressing a purpose.
There is a lot here. It’s powerful. It begins with listening deeply and developing cognitive empathy
Help your organization embrace ambiguity and treat humans as complex beings with agency.
The Mental Model Skyline
The opportunity map is laid out a bit like a city skyline. The city skyline is made up of towers with windows in them. Each window represents a summary of inner thinking or an emotional reaction, or a guiding principle (interior cognition) of people as they address their purpose.
The patterns that form these towers emerge from qualitative data of listening sessions that were all framed by that same purpose.
The tower patterns often form into city blocks, and sometimes those city blocks form into neighborhoods. It depends upon the breadth and richness of what we are hearing in the listening sessions.
When patterns of thinking styles appear in the same data, then we can layer these thinking styles on top of the windows in the towers, allowing product strategists greater resolution into what parts of their solutions are intended for and successfully support different thinking style approaches to the purpose. This is also where you layer on lenses where interior cognition has been caused by ignorance or lack of intention in your solution, which results in discrimination and other harmful experiences.
When patterns of thinking styles appear in the same data, then we can layer these thinking styles on top of the windows in the towers, allowing product strategists greater resolution into what parts of their solutions are intended for and successfully support different thinking style approaches to the purpose. This is also where you layer on lenses where interior cognition has been caused by ignorance or lack of intention in your solution, which results in discrimination and other harmful experiences.
This abductive research shows the complex systems running through people’s minds as they address that purpose. Why abductive? Because it’s about understanding people addressing their purpose, not about understanding interactions with our solutions, not about generating new solution ideas. You will get there, but first you need this knowledge to be able to support a greater diversity of humans.
If you are curious, here is the story about the genesis of mental model diagrams, thinking styles, and opportunity maps.
The city skyline is also called the “mental model skyline” about that purpose.
Below the city skyline are the capabilities present in the solutions your organization has created. Aligning these capabilities beneath the towers forces your organization to see from a human perspective. The gaps, weaknesses, and unintentional harms that result are easy to identify.The difficult part is prioritizing which of the different opportunities to provide better support are of importance to the organization right now. That is where product strategists and stakeholders can collaborate on initial direction and get started on the journey toward intentional human support.
Of course, you and your stakeholders need to trust each other, first.
Supporting Humans: More Important than Creating Solutions
Yeah, that sounds weird, doesn’t it? It’s not. Digital service and product design is caught up in methods that focus mostly on measuring the success of the solution, not the success of the human. We are not paying attention to the more serious harms we unintentionally cause, like self-doubt and feeling unwelcome. Rather than waiting for lawsuits, we should be looking at potential severe harms, like loss of health, freedom, life, money, or time. What about intentionally mapping out systemic harms that our solutions perpetrate?
Generating respect, dignity, and a sense of making progress in community with others–those are what lives are made of. And those are what get crushed in the zeal to push technology forward.
Indi is a technologist, but not a solution-ist. The tool she reaches for most often is deep listening. She’s one of the people molding our methods to a more human shape. She is spreading the idea of paying attention to people. Indi helps you support humans, rather than simply create tools.
Indi gives practitioners and leaders powerful mindsets and awareness. Depending on their own context, developers, product owners, designers, researchers, and leaders can adjust these mindsets and awareness to best work within their organization.
Harness the mindset of supporting humans.
Research for Ethical Product Strategy
We can’t go on solving things only based on our own thin understanding. Even if we have diverse teams, our ideas are based on our own experiences. Who speaks for everyone else out there who may think and react differently? It’s time to bring ethics to bear. And to do that, deeper knowledge is needed. Problem space research provides that knowledge, and is deeply similar to futures research, opportunity research, foundational research, and exploratory research.
It’s time to:
Compare JTBD & Data Science That Listens
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) has become popular, and in good hands it has the potential to produce deep understanding similar to our method, Data Science That Listens. The trouble is that it’s most often applied to understand a process or a buying decision, instead of understanding what people are trying to address. And it does a lightweight job of understanding emotional reactions and personal rules. It also doesn’t differentiate groups of people by their thinking style–only by their role in the process.
Our method focuses on a much broader variety of things that people think about carefully.
So, JTBD, in hurried contexts, tends to circle back to the same old “functional specification” that we started with in software design.
This video starts with Indi’s opinion about the market-sizing survey used toward the end of a JTBD. This graph then becomes part of an example where a practitioner, Elizabeth Thapliyal, started with listening sessions, made a mental model skyline and thinking styles, and then used that knowledge to create a deeper JTBD market-sizing survey.