I REALLY enjoyed the workshop and was so happy to have the opportunity to spend a day with you.  Wonderful to have some of my approach to research and listening validated but even better to hear how you go deeper to pull comprehensive insights out of research.  I now have more tools and techniques to make my practice better.  Thank you so much!

Ben Bailes, CapitalOne

paying better attention to the problem

In “western culture,” everyone is hell-bent on coming up with answers and solutions. From a tender age, kids are judged based on their knowledge and ability to apply that knowledge in homework, class activities, essays, and tests. This emphasis on solutions continues all the way up through grad school and on into team work, entrepreneurship, volunteering, mentoring, and leadership.

I’m all for solutions … we have a lot of things in our world that we can improve on. I want to see more emphasis placed on the problem. Instead of a couple of days, I want to see us spending lots more time understanding the depths, perspectives, horizons and histories of the way people achieve their purposes. Spending time opens up loads more opportunities. Branching solution paths reveal themselves. We can make solutions that truly support different people as opposed to an “average” one-size-fits-all attempt.

Plus, we’ve done a lot of damage, accidentally or in unblinking pursuit of goals. We can’t go on solving things only based on our own thin understanding of how others perceive the problem. Spending equal time in the problem space generates rich, endless understanding. Yes, having all those branching solution paths may feel daunting, but when you break it down into areas of focus over the decades, it’s a much better approach to really helping the world.

The problem space is not a part of the solution space. It should not be put into any solution cycle. It deserves more attention and a slow cycle all of its own. Organizations are starting to realize they’ve not invested enough in understanding the problem space. Mental model diagrams make up for this lack. Mental model diagrams represent the alignment between your organization’s efforts to support people (lower half of the diagram), and the reasoning and reactions of real people as they achieve a purpose (top half of the diagram). This alignment, or lack, can help your team prioritize, refine, and clarify services, audience segments, and branches. Mental models are then “decorated” with thinking-style segments and whatever other data focuses attention on areas of the diagram.

In this full-day workshop, I’ll introduce how to look at problems through the lens of peoples purpose. I’ll teach you how to decide where to gather deeper understanding, and how to listen for people’s inner thinking, reactions, and guiding principles. I’ll show you how to treat this qualitative data properly, avoiding bias, building patterns from the bottom up. And I’ll treat you to some time to play with some mental model diagrams and thinking-styles I’ve already created, so you get a chance to taste the powerful impact of deep understanding in the problem space. The workshop begins with discussion about when problem-facing exploration is needed, and when it is not. We talk about coming at this exploration from a place where you don’t care about solutions, but instead care only (for the time being) about what each person is trying to accomplish in the larger sense. The discussion then turns to the kinds of assumptions we make in business. We cover the topic of developing cognitive empathy, as opposed to applying it, and dive deep into the skills required to conduct good listening sessions. In the last part of the workshop, we touch upon the mechanics of formal analysis of the transcripts collected, comparing this formal approach to an equally useful quick approach that relies on memory instead of transcripts. We close the day by reviewing some actual data together, in the form of a mental model diagram, to find insights and discuss how to put the knowledge to use in decision-making, design, and future product strategy.