Indi’s Problem Space Method

1. Frame the Study
   • begin with careful exploration of why you are seeking deeper understanding and what combination of thinking style + purpose you want to study (1-3 weeks)
   • find and qualify candidates (2-3 weeks)
2. Listening Sessions
   • Approximately an hour with each participant (2 weeks)
   • Optional field visits (when topic is physically habitual): add concepts that didn’t come up in listening session (+2 weeks)
3. Transcripts Into Concepts
   • Comb and summarize transcripts, deeply understanding 100% of the Speaker’s concepts (3 weeks)
4. Cultivate Patterns
   • Find affinities across participants by focus of mental attention
   • Keep bias out of the data by building from the bottom up (2 weeks)
5. Thinking Styles
   • Personas-sans-demographics; write participant descriptions, compare unique concepts to form participants into groups, write descriptions for each thinking style (1-2 weeks)
6. Map the Mental Model Diagram
   • Use one of the tools to generate the diagram from the data sheet created in step 4 (1 hour)
   • Spend time considering what other data to layer on top of the model, such as thinking styles (1 week)
7. Opportunity map
   • List a collection of org’s existing capabilities: products, support, services that your org produces (1-4 weeks)
   • Align some of the org’s capabilities beneath the one tower it supports strongly (solid line border); Also align some of the capabilities beneath towers it kind of also supports (1-2 weeks
   • Optional: also align capabilities from competition, or draw in dependencies between capabilities, or add future capabilities already planned
8. Gap Analysis
   • conduct a review of gaps & weaknesses beneath towers, deciding on priority or importance to the org (1 week)
   • Opportunity Discussion: map out and combine opportunity spaces; discuss prioritization (1 intense day)
   • Add other knowledge to these priority areas, such as existing quant data, past solution evaluation, competitive landscape, etc., to create opportunity studies (2 weeks)
9. Measure Progress
   • For a priority subsection of the opportunity map (usually 5-6 towers), measure current support in relation to the towers and the thinking styles and the lenses represented (1 week)
   • Define the help (weak or strong) or harm (mild, serious, severe, systemic) levels of each existing solution (that same week)
   • Track improvement of support (existing improved solutions and new solutions) each quarter or year; give product owners and strategists something concrete to look at (over the years)
10. Add more knowledge to the mental model diagram, to the thinking styles, to the aligned solutions, to the gaps (and re-prioritize as items are taken care of) and to the measurements as the years unfold