00:01
So maybe the toxic culture is not going to change where you are, but maybe you can change it. The problem is that you can't leave. Maybe financially you can't leave. So how do we change this sort of thing? Well, we can form groups. We can talk to HR. Half the time, the stories I hear are that HR is just as toxic as the rest of the culture there. We can give talks. We can go and say, hey, we're having, you know, this lunch meeting and everybody's welcome to come. These are going to be the things that we talk about. That's how union started. I don't know if they had lunch meetings or it was afterward. It might have been afterward. It might have been in the dark, a special knock to get in the door. 

 00:44
But that's the thing, is that we can start this, too. 

 00:50
Hello and welcome to the Ally show. My name is Ali Eslamifar and I'm your host for the show. We are here with our episode number 17, where I have the honor of hosting Indi Young, who is actually one of the most inspiring people in my career. A few weeks ago, I reached out to her about having a conversation, and she was so kind to say, yes. I'm so excited to bring you this episode and this conversation with Indi Young. I got to know Indi Young after my graduation from my master program, and she was the first person who actually brought in this concept of practical empathy into words, things that you could actually bring empathy to your companies, to your product, and how you're doing research, how you're communicating that with your team. 

 01:31
It was a life changer for me, and I couldn't resist of bringing her to this show. This conversation may feel a little bit different from the other conversations we've had on the show, but I'm sure these are something that can actually help us building healthier teams so that we can also build healthier products. The range of the conversation we have here is pretty interesting, so I highly encourage you to listen to the end of the show with Indi Young. 

 01:57
A. 

 01:58
Little bit more about Indi Young Indi is a pioneering problem discovery researcher and solutions strategist with over 30 years of experience, Indi has developed methods centered on inclusive and purpose driven research, helping teams design solutions that align with various thinking styles. As a founding partner of Adaptive Path and the creator of opportunity maps, she has deeply influenced user research and product design. Indi also has three famous books in the world of product design and research, including practical empathy, mental models, and time to listen as one of the most impactful voices in product development. Indi continues to share her expertise through teaching, coaching and public speaking, which brought us to this conversation. And I'm so excited to host Indi Young in this episode of the Ally show. 

 02:44
As always, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this show is by subscribing to our YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcast channel. You may also review us up to five star reviews. This would allow us to reach the audience who may benefit from such content. Now, without further ado, let's start this conversation with Indi Young. 

 03:12
Alright, we are here with Indi Young. How are you doing today? 

 03:17
I'm doing great. How about you? 

 03:19
I'm doing awesome. The reason to start is I'm chatting with you today. I have the honor of chatting with you today. I told you already, but for listeners, you're one of my heroes in my career, and you made a career for me in tech by your book, practical empathy. And I'm not exaggerating about this at all. Like, you really gave me through that book, you gave me practical tools that I could bring to work after my graduation and be actually a decent designer. So thank you for that. I know you're also hero for so many of my friends, so they said that I should tell you hi. So hi from all of them. 

 04:01
Hi to everyone. 

 04:04
And one of the great things I learned from you, and I still have to improve it in my day to day life, is this power of listening, being a good listener. And throughout your book, you talk a lot about that, and you have another recent book about it. But maybe the best way for us to start and getting to know you is like, what are the things that we can do to be a good listener in life? 

 04:29
Yeah, yeah, sure. Before I answer that, I just want to point out to everybody that apparently in your work, in school, you actually wanted to do the same thing that the book practical empathy was about. So it's not coming from me. You also grew it in your own soul. 

 04:48
I mean, yes, we all are bridging it together. Thank you. 

 04:51
I think so. Yeah. And I think that's true of a lot of people. That's why this whole community, and there are a lot of people worldwide, we have this in our soul. We want to make things better for people in a viable way that's better for them. So that's the whole reason I do deep listening. It's all based on understanding different people's perspectives, a variety of thinking styles, embracing this whole, you know, the complexity that's out there and being human. So when you listen, the phrase that I use to start teaching people how to do this is pay rapt attention. So, paying rapt attention means trying to calm down your own inner thinking, your own inner cognition, and just follow all these little pieces that the other person is talking about. 

 05:49
There's a great illustration by Brad Kalbo in the book practical empathy, where you're kind of, as a listener, following the and joining in the other person's speech bubble or thought bubble. I did a spin off on it in this book where they're kind of sharing this thought bubble. Right? So pay rapt attention. It means that you have to train your mind to be able to recognize two things in the background. So you're using 10% of your background cognition. Like, you know, this process, this running without you needing to pay attention to it so much. And those two things we can talk about later. But those two things are, hey, at what level is this person speaking to me? Are they describing things? Are they kind of expressing opinions? Or are they actually talking about interior cognition? 

 06:49
And then the second thing is, how comfortable are they with what we're doing? Are they popping into session mode and kind of asking me about how this session is going? Have I not developed trust well enough? I know that we develop trust and lose it and develop it and lose it. So there's a lot that you need to train your brain to be able to pay attention to while you're paying rapt attention. 

 07:16
Very interesting. 

 07:17
Yeah. It's all about being aware of what the other person is saying, and it. 

 07:21
Feels like the way you are saying it as I was visualizing it's like there is a muscle in our brain for building this rapt attention that it takes a lot of practice, from what I'm understanding. What are kind of like, the steps into this practice to get better and better with this wrapped attention? 

 07:38
Well, one. One of the steps is to learn what the process is. So there's a way to do it. It is very similar to non directed, interviewing, but it's also slightly different. There's also a different way of framing a listening session. You're not just gonna, you know, if you don't have a thing for the person to tell you about, the person's gonna be standing there going, I feel like I'm all of a sudden in charge of this whole thing, and I don't know where to go. So you have to set things up. I have a book. I just showed it to you. Time to listen. That goes through this. If you prefer a more rich, interactive kind of thing than reading a book. 

 08:27
I've also got a course on it, and I also run live practice groups on it occasionally, at least once a year. And you can practice in your own life. One of the things that I tell people is that as you start learning how to do it and you start practicing, pay attention to how your energy level is, because you can't pay rapt attention if you don't have the energy to do it. It is like, I have this little illustration. It's like putting on a really heavy hat. Like, I've got to pay rapt attention. So I'm putting this heavy hat on. I'm trying to, like, empty my mind, pay really deep attention, and then have that background process, like, what layer are they at? Are they feeling comfortable? And you can't do that for more than, like, five minutes at first. Two minutes at first. 

 09:24
I have over, you know, the past 30 years, I've managed to do it for like 2 hours. Two and a half hours is not something that you do all the time. You have to take that heavy hat off and be yourself. What I'm doing with you right now is not deep listening. Hey, I'm doing all the talking, but you're also not doing deep listening with me necessarily. You're doing something very similar, but slightly different, because you're trying to make something happen for your audience. You're trying to give your audience something valuable, which is not what you would do when you're actually deep listening. 

 10:05
Yeah, this is actually very interesting because I even, like, had a couple of other interviews before this one. I was just thinking, like, how I'm keep trying to come up with questions rather than insights, you know, because I can benefit, like, more than anyone, probably from all these calls, because I'm getting it firsthand and I'm so excited at it. Like, I know this person I can get the most and collect those insights right away, pretty much. But at the same time, I'm replacing it with all my thoughts about what questions can I ask? Where does it go? That's interesting. Like, it's more of like, that baby in me, so excited rather than the mature person in me. So it's actually very funny. And that's why thing, I mean, this is. I'm going all the places. 

 10:54
That's why I think podcasting is such an artistic way of understanding yourself. You see where your brain actually goes as you're talking to people. The baby inside you comes out. So I love what you pointed out because I've been noticing it in myself and in these conversations I see, these are completely different with other conversations I have. 

 11:15
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And. And those insights that you mentioned, those are the things you're trying to give your audience. When I'm doing deep listening, I'm not after insights. It's utterly. I just want to understand a person's thinking as they were trying to address a particular purpose. And I let go of the fact that I'm, you know, an employee for somebody doing this for some sort of research project. I might be doing this with a stakeholder in my own team because the stakeholders like, you know, being difficult or trying to make me go one direction, and I don't think it's a good idea. And the way to understand people in your team is to do deep listening as well. 

 12:03
And when you do deep listening, I'm not trying to persuade the stakeholder, not thinking about the way they want to go versus the way I want to go. Just trying to understand, where did this thought come from? You tell me this opinion, but where did it come from? Was it. Oh, that was your last job and the job before. Oh, I see how you had that emotional reaction in that last job. And this is how it sort of built into this guiding principle that you're applying here now. I can understand where you're coming from. Also, after this listening session, I have a better understanding of the way that person sees the world, and then I can work with it right during the listening. 

 12:45
And so when you're doing your podcast, you're like, oh, you know, I want the insights to sort of show up in the podcast, and I'm trying to help you, but when you're doing a listening session, especially for something at work, the insights are not going to come in the session. They come much later. 

 13:03
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And this is actually helpful for me because, in a way, it also, like, calms me down that sometimes I'm like, am I. Am I thinking too much about directing things? You know? 

 13:17
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're fine. What. What you're doing for the podcast is fine to get. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a different. 

 13:23
It also tells me that I'm a better podcaster than a researcher that I was, so. And that's why I'm not doing that anymore. 

 13:30
Yeah, exactly right. It's always good to learn something new about yourself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the book and in the course, I talk about all these different ways that we listen, and they have different techniques. Like, if you're trying to interview someone for a job, you're listening, but you're listening in a whole different way. If you were a journalist and you're trying to get some quotes for an article from some experts, you're listening in a different way. You can do a little bit of deep listening, but you're trying to. You need a thing, and you have an idea what that thing is, and you need that person to say that thing. And so you've got a need, as opposed to just walking in and saying, I have no needs. 

 14:23
I just purely want to experience your way of thinking, and we're going to do it by you taking me back in a time machine to some places where you were doing thinking. There's a reason we do that because it's very difficult when you're talking about your interior cognition to talk about your current interior cognition, it's much easier to talk about your past interior cognition because you've had time, you've got distance. Also, a lot of people can't fathom what's going on inside their mind immediately, and it takes a little while to be able to let it. You know, it falls into place, and you can actually describe what it was to somebody else. So when we do deep listening, it's always. 

 15:16
We always do special kind of recruiting to make sure someone's had a lot of interior cognition going on about this particular purpose in the past that they can talk about. 

 15:27
And is that why? When. Because in user research and in product development for our tech friends, is that why we always say, tell me about the last time you had this experience. Is that why we are framing it that way? 

 15:42
Yes, I think so. For me, absolutely, yes. Because I know that's how our brains as humans kind of work. I mean, all our brains are different. There's some patterns, some, you know, there's spectrums and things of how well we do with one thing or another. And it's not to be a judgment. Like, this is a good way and that's a bad way. It's just a way, and we need to make space for that. When someone else says, oh, tell me about that, and I don't know why they're doing it, especially. So one of the things that I get right now in the conversation is, well, like, what worth? What value is this to my organization to sit down? I mean, it sounds like really great to do over coffee with someone to just like, woo. We get to understand them. 

 16:43
But, like, how am I going to use this, right? And this is actually. I mean, it is so powerful, especially now in the age of AI, it is so powerful for your organization to truly understand the patterns of thinking and then compare what you're doing for people in terms of solutions. This works for users, this works for people that you're trying to support in government agencies at any level. This works for employees that you're trying to support within your own organization. You're trying a lot of the time as a business, you don't use the word support, but as a government or as a company, you will say, yes, I'm trying to support my employees. It works for business too. That word is so important because in the age of AI, yet again, we have another tech solution with no problem. 

 17:51
And so everybody's all like, this is a great tech solution. What are we going to solve with it? And what I'm doing is I'm trying to come at it as like here, someone's thinking in the realm in which your organization tends to support people. And let's see where the gaps are. And maybe some of these gaps are places where we can do something new. Let's see what the various thinking styles are and see which thinking styles we're actually harming. We're causing them, you know, self doubt or we're causing them an emotional trigger. Let's see where these things are. Let's map them out on a mental model skyline and have some sort of structure that then we can use in our strategic decisions which then move into the product and the product roadmaps. 

 18:46
Yeah, interesting. And I think this is actually a good segue to why I think I'm now even more excited for this conversation. And I'm going to actually read that quote which kind of like inspired me, contacting you and having to have this conversation where you quoted creating solutions is mental labor. There's not much protection in the workplace against mental harm. Let's work with our communities to get wider protections in place. And this kind of hit the spot for me on where I believe it. Healthy products are built by healthy people. If Ali, as a researcher or as a designer, as a product manager, if he is not mentally healthy or physically healthy, both ways. 

 19:38
If he is not healthy, how can we guarantee he can think in a healthy way to make healthy decisions that creates healthy products, that drives healthy KPI's and all the whole thing, and then delivering value to users who can hopefully stay healthy in their lives. This cycle can just go all the way away. And I kind of got so inspired by what you posted and that's how we connected. And I think this is why this conversation might be a little bit different compared to other conversations we have on the podcast. But this is a young podcast, and we can do whatever we can do. Yeah. And I'm so invested in this topic because it's also like something I felt it, like during all my time in tech. 

 20:26
And as a matter of fact, that's why I'm not in it anymore, because I didn't feel healthy. And I want the audience to kind of, like, get your perspective on this. I said all the blahs here, but I want them to know how you think about this topic because it seems you also have a lot to talk about, even in your book and all the teachings that you do. 

 20:45
Yeah, yeah. So many of our tech companies are doing things that we all know in our souls are not valuable to people. They are valuable to the investors, to the wealthy people, to get the wealthy people even wealthier. Right. I mean, I could say that we also all know in our souls that there are millions of us out here who are building a different kind of way to be in a capitalist system so that we are more human, to use your term, so that we are more healthy and so that we're providing more healthy solutions. Now, I know a lot of people who have, you know, done a stint at, say, meta and seen how toxic it is and left. But for a lot of people, it is hard to leave. 

 21:45
You have, your parents might be dependent on your kids might be dependent on you. You might have, you know, some sort of connection to a different country and family there. There is a lot riding on you. And so you're like, okay, I'm just gonna, you know, grit my teeth and keep this money flowing in because it's very helpful to my family, even though it's making me, you know, into a sort of a hollow human. I feel, you know, empty or I feel very heavy. I'll have people tell me things like, you know, I've heard this twice this week. I had a manager who would shout at us, or I had a manager who would say, you've got to do it anyway because we need to hit the deadline. And the deadline was just randomly set. 

 22:46
It has no value to a human other than maybe, perhaps that boss is getting, I don't know, part of their pay because they've hit so many deadlines. I don't know. I've never heard of a boss being paid by hitting deadlines. So there's a lot of people who have bought into that sort of toxic cycle where I think they want release as well. They would not mind working in a more beautiful sort of capitalistic system. Now, a lot of my nieces who have gone into the work place now are working for day weeks, so they have more, you know, mental time to themselves. They are working in more community sort of environments or in co working. 

 23:38
Like, they're just, you know, they're not working in an office per se, but they're co working together online, so they know somebody else is there, or they come to each other's apartment, co work together, even though they work for somebody completely different. And I think this drives some of the toxic cultures mad because they're like, oh, you know, they could like, you know, tell each other our secrets, and we need to get you to sign the NDA or whatever, but at its heart, that's going to happen anyway. If somebody really wants to do it's going to happen anyway. It's not because you're co working at some friend's apartment and having a healthier sort of workspace, knowing someone else is around and taking breaks when you need to take a break. I think this goes for the idea of listening as well. 

 24:37
When I teach people how to listen, I tell them, this is not the kind of thing that you do with a bunch of different participants in one day. You only do one listening session a day. You need time afterward to sort of let what you learned percolate. You might write down some summaries, but you have a recording as well. And if you tried to do a second listening session that same day, that percolation doesn't happen. The empathy building doesn't happen as deeply. And you might run the risk of being deep inside the second listening session, thinking about the other one and getting them confused and asking a person about something that they weren't talking about. Because we're so deep in there, we're paying rapt attention. We're using all of our little, you know, I don't know. 

 25:36
Sometimes I use the analogy of carrot tops, like a field of carrots. There's like all these little carrots that we can pull on and see what's underneath them. We don't literally pull on people, but it's analogy. It's something I call a pull tab. It's like an indicator that there's more there. And you might end up with a carrot from the earlier listening session that day. And you don't want to do that to somebody because that disrupts their trust in you. So a lot of people are like, oh, my boss is not going to let me do just one a day. And I'm like, well, then you need to think about how to understand that, boss, and why there's that deadline. And talk to them about how this is building something different. We're not getting insights from an interview. 

 26:26
We're not treating people who are giving us their thoughts like they are, you know, sort of a subject. You're the researcher and they're the subject. We're not working in a colonial mindset like that. What we're doing is we're sort of, like, paying respect to them. We're sort of referencing and recognizing their humanity. And we're not using what they say directly. The insights don't come from the listening session. The insights come later when we do our qualitative data synthesis, and we do that using focus of mental attention. And what happens if you framed all of these listening sessions the same way, is that patterns will form. And when you're doing qualitative data, and here's where the judgment comes in, you can have, like, a spectrum of how good the data is. How reliable is it? It's very reliable. It's called empirical. 

 27:27
When patterns come out, it's not very reliable. When just, like, no same thinking comes out across different people, across different situations. And that's just anecdotal. And then you're doing the same thing as, like, oh, well, my aunt likes it, blah, blah. So let's do the whole solution based on that one story. Interesting. 

 27:52
And as you were talking about this, I remembered some of my, sessions back in days, that it was exhaustive. Like, I. At times, both for. For my thesis back in, my grad school and also, like, during my design time, like, I was, like, sometimes scheduling lots of calls and, like, lots of interview calls in a day or in a week. And suddenly it was becoming like, if I had a week with a lot of interviews the week after, I had to just, like, take off from the people. I was like, this vampire emote. You know? I couldn't even connect to myself, if that makes sense. 

 28:30
Yes, it does. 

 28:31
It's such an energy draining process, as you were also, like, alluding to it earlier. And now it just even makes more sense for me. Like, you need that day to just respect that sort of respect that conversation. It's like going and have a deep conversation with a friend, right? Like, you need to. You need to absorb it. You need to understand it. You need to spend some time to see what that conversation, what that pain was. That that friend was talking to you. And if you do two of that in a day, you're gonna be like, oh, my God, my friends are all whiny, you know? 

 29:02
Right. Yeah. You're gonna get both kind of, like. 

 29:05
Correct insights that are not necessarily the result. And you just think like that because you're just drained. You're just emotionally and physically drained. And you need to give it time. 

 29:15
Yeah, you need to give it time. And I think that's the thing that a lot of our toxic cultures and I just read a great. So Sam Ladner has a book out called Mixed Methods and a newsletter called Sam Lanner, and she just did this great post called bad apples. So if anybody wants to sign up for that, go find her post on bad apples, because she's talking there about how it's not one person in your organization's fault the culture allows people to behave, or can we say, misbehave if we're judging and treat things like, oh, no, you have to hit the deadline no matter what. Right. And make people do things that are very difficult. So this idea that we are mental workers is not yet an idea that has gained a lot of traction. 

 30:12
Mike Monteiro has been lobbying for decades to get unions in place. We had unions come into place because the same thing was happening in factories where bosses were like, make more of these widgets faster, and I don't care if you lose a finger. Right? That's the same thing that's happening to us. Do these things faster. And I don't care if you can't think or you're not human and you can't go see your friends afterward or for the whole week afterward. Right. If you're in vampire mode, I don't care if you lose a finger. Yeah, that's not right. And so eventually, we need to have unions or we need to have laws in place that disallow this. So I think that needs to happen. 

 31:04
It can also shift from this idea of like, hey, we're going to work at a more living pace or a life pace. I sometimes call it gestation pace. There's that phrase, you know, you can, one woman can make one baby in nine months, but nine women cannot make one baby in one month, right? That's a little catchphrase. It's like, there's just some things that you have to do in a human way, and so it takes more time. So maybe the toxic culture is not going to change where you are, but maybe you can change it. The problem is that you can't leave. Maybe financially you can't leave. So how do we change this sort of thing. Well, we can form groups. We can talk to HR. 

 31:53
Half the time, the stories I hear are that HR is just as toxic as the rest of the culture there. We can give talks. We can go and say, hey, we're having this lunch meeting and everybody's welcome to come. These are going to be the things that we talk about. That's how union started. I don't know if they had lunch meetings or it was afterward. It might have been afterward. It might have been in the dark. You had to have a special knock to get in the door. But that's the thing, is that we can start this, too. 

 32:27
I love this perspective that you're adding that we have power. We have some power, right? It's not that all of us as employees, if we just sit back and say, hey, yeah, it's a culture, and just keep blaming that like it's them versus us. No, I mean, I think there's a switch that like, hey, you actually have this switch to decide. You can turn this on and there is a small power. You can turn it on, and then over time it builds up. If you talk about it, if you have a launch and learn sort of meetings, that you can just bring people and talk about the practical empathy book with everyone who is working with you in a team. Tell them about what you learn. 

 33:11
Tell them about how research is done properly, how product development is done properly, how engineering development is done properly. Because I know my engineering friends are feeling the same pain, too, like how all of these done and how testing is done properly, how user testing is done properly. To keep talking about it, make it exciting, you have that power to do it at a zero cost. Honestly, if anything, you can get a free lunch supported by your company as well for that specific meeting, and everybody's gonna love it. So this fact that I have power to make this change, it's like the society in general, even in America, we all, like, complain about this government and that government. But hey, there are absolutely many, many places in everyday life that we can have those changes. 

 33:56
We can have those little impacts in a conversation with a neighbor, with a friend. 

 34:01
Yeah, yeah. Granted, what happened when unions started forming is that the people with money tried to pound them down. Somehow they survived. It still happens. Look at Starbucks, right? How many times have the employees tried to form a union and the people with the power and the money just pound them down because they don't want to pay more money for humans? And so now we've got AI and everybody's all, oh, let's make robots to flip burgers or pour coffees or whatever, you know, and I'm like, okay, yeah, see how your customers fall off after that, right? We don't want. So the thing about AI is that it feels like right now our job is in danger and we could get fired, and the AI can take over what we do, right, no matter what job we're in. And it's true, and it's not true. 

 35:08
So what we can do is reframe this whole thing. A lot of the media stories that we hear about AI is that, oh, you know, it's going to make life better, faster, easier. But there's no examples of what that means. And usually if you find one with the example, it's the example of what better, easy, or faster means for one kind of thinking style, not the variety, the true variety of humans out there. And it's going to harm several other thinking styles. Thinking styles belong inside a little bubble of purpose. Somebody's intent, what they're trying to get done, their goal. Sometimes a purpose can be lifelong. And so I don't like using the word goal because, you know, your hobby is not your goal. Your relationship with your kids is not your goal, it's your purpose. 

 36:07
So recognizing that AI can do a little bit of the work that's repetitive and at scale, but not necessarily requiring a human, which frees us up then as employees, to do more listening sessions, to do better at recruiting people, to find people who actually did thinking about this so we don't have a wasted hour where the other person feels annoyed at us as well, to be able to even better figure out, well, now that we see this map, we see this skyline, we can start looking for insights and seeing what the harms are and measuring the harms through evaluative testing, you know, framing by the towers in the skyline. Once we see that, we can invest a lot more of our attention in there. And that's where it has not been invested. 

 37:10
As people who are creating things in the tech world, we end up creating things, but we don't get to measure the value of those things to people. We can, but it hasn't been our role. And we can step into, we can make a new role for us as the creators to understand what the value is, instead of letting the people at the top define value by the amount of revenue an organization makes, or if you're HR and you're looking at your employees, the number of employee turnover rate or churn or something like that, so you can start to measure it instead of by those high level things that are inhuman that have to do with a corporation or a group. You can start measuring it by what people are trying to get done. What's that purpose, and how well are they doing it? 

 38:07
And are they being harmed as they're doing it? Because their thinking style is a variety from, you know, this one average thing that you made up. 

 38:18
Yeah. And how are we making their life action better? Because I know that's. That's a phrase that you care about so much, like, how do you make their lives better at the end of the day with this product? 

 38:29
Exactly, exactly. 

 38:32
And I love this notion of freeing up some of this time using AI. So, like, now with AI, you have, for example, note taking of this conversation right now is easily done by AI. 

 38:49
Right? 

 38:50
Synthesizing, like, an initial synthesize can be done by AI. And then you and I, we can review and say, you know what? Yeah, I. So I'm just. And that already, like, saves us five, 5 hours, but now there's 5 hours we can invest it in places that we have never been able as an organization. 

 39:07
Yes. 

 39:07
How can we go and, like, see this product, this Instagram product, like, that we created that now is being used in all the villages across the world. How is it changing someone's life, a youth life, and then is it doing it for better? What kind of harm is it doing to the society in that small pocket communities? What can we do to actually avoid that? What can we do to make it better and help them have a better life and communicate better, connect better? 

 39:36
Yeah. Yeah. 

 39:37
Now we have this time, and AI cannot do this. Robots cannot go and interview that. 

 39:42
No. Yes. There are companies out there who say they've got an AI who can interview somebody, but that is not listening deeply, and that is also treating someone like a subject. 

 39:55
Yes. And I'm not going to even be interviewed by that product. Like, I personally, like, I don't know, what's your opinion on the chat sort of formatting? I'm like, come on. Like, I miss talking to people. I don't want to just, like, be in a chat with a robot that they don't understand my problem. 

 40:14
But maybe the person in the village, at the prospect of being paid to chat with a robot, they'll do it. Right. And then the company with the robot getting this chat is going to put value into that conversation. Or see, like, okay, that conversation is valid and it is not. This is very similar to my gripe about a lot of the surveys that are out there now. There are great ways to do surveys. Caroline Jarrett has a good book on it from Rosenfeld Mediaev. But most of the surveys, they're written from one point of view, not a variety of thinking styles. They pre select answers, which your own answer is never in there. So you either have to click what's closest or click other. Right. And half the time, you can see the cognitive bias. 

 41:07
When I look at surveys, I stop looking at surveys. But when I was looking at surveys, I'm like, this is clear what they want out of this. 

 41:17
Yeah, it's, it reminds me and some friends, I mean, this is real story. Like, I've been at orgs where, like, sea levels. Like, they were designing the surveys to go on a modal so that they can get bias on a specific product that they wanted to invest on. Like, it was clear. And then they were saying, like, no, 25% of people, they said they want this product. And I'm like, because you put that product there, you said this is what you want them to click on. 

 41:48
Yeah, yeah. 

 41:49
And you didn't even put an other option there. So that there's only three choice to choose from. 

 41:55
Exactly. So this is the idea that, like, if we have a robot or a chatbot chatting with people in the village or chatting with people, employees in a corporation, we're going to get just as good data, which is to say, it's shitty data. It doesn't represent people. It just represents what the person who is looking at it wants to see. 

 42:17
Yeah. So we're talking. We talked about some examples so far. Like, I shared some of my example. You. You went through a lot of, like, points in your conversation. One other question I had for you was like, and it's. It might be completely off topic, but I want to know, like, this listening style that you came up with. And, of course, there's a lot of research I'm sure you have done, but, like, is there any essence, any specific things that you kind of, like, brought into your style as kind of, like, someone with a philosophy here? 

 42:51
Technically, I've had. I had a coach for writing who said, okay, so let's think of your creativity as, like, a gas or a car. And it has a gas tank. Well, my car doesn't have a gas tank. So say a battery. How do you fill that battery? What do you do to fill that battery? And are you on empty? And so thinking of kind of the way, recognizing that part of the way I fill my battery is by helping people recognize things, recognize their own power, recognize their own creativity. Like, I think a lot of people already know this, but there are some people still that when you get into a job, you're like, well, I don't want to rock the boat. I think my ideas, but they don't want to hear my ideas. 

 43:45
And so when I get to talk to those people about this is like my nieces and stuff, like, yeah, those ideas are valid. Those ideas come from somewhere. Where did they come from? Talk to me about that. And when they start feeling confident about their ideas coming from a good place, you know, a place that's solid, it's not just random thoughts. It makes me feel good that's filling my tank. 

 44:17
That's very interesting. Kind of like, on that note, I know you're working with other teams and companies and things like that, different scale when you're talking about them with this concept of listening and this kind of like a longer term thinking, this idea that we are building values and that value is not conversion rate, that value is making people lives better and all the great things. 

 44:46
Yeah. 

 44:47
What are some of the reactions you get on both ends if that's something you can share with us? 

 44:53
A lot of the reactions, believe it or not, people crying like, yes, this is what I believe. I want to make this happen in my career. I mean, not everybody cries, but that's sort of the thing. It's like, it feels like there's something in your soul that's like, I can breathe. It's the I am released. It is okay to think this. And in fact, not only is it okay, it is imperative to think this if we are going to have. I mean, it's imperative to think this in so many different ways right now, if we're going to have a planet and societies on this planet that are interconnected and helping each other and growing and treating the planet well. Right? It's imperative. And so if you have that permission, you can breathe. You've got the freedom you released from that little trap. 

 45:52
You're like, okay, even though I'm still in this toxic situation, I can be released. I can make some changes. I can make little changes. I have a whole section on this website. I haven't quite released it yet, but by the time this comes out, it'll probably be out where it's using little bits of listening deeply, using little bits of this qualitative data synthesis, using little bits of thinking styles inside your existing process, inside that stupid, fast spinning toxic thing to start bringing more value and start showing that value to slow things down. 

 46:31
And as far as, like, the other side, are there. 

 46:35
Yeah, I don't get much on the other side. What I'll do is I will hear people telling me about the pushback, which is like, no, we've got to hit the deadline, basically. Right? That's always this thing. I don't hear it directly. 

 46:51
Okay. 

 46:52
Yeah. 

 46:53
You're mostly, like, facing those who are in the need of getting that feeling. 

 47:00
Of, I'll get a lot of doubts. People will ask me, well, what about this? What about that? What about this? I'm like, yes, those are all valid things. And here's my thinking about it. Your thinking might be different. Take. Take it. Make it your own, right? 

 47:18
Yeah. 

 47:18
If it's your own, you can work with it. You can take steps on it. We're going to have a different society. We're going to have a new kind of capitalism that's not as toxic. We're going to have situations where we're creating things of value to people because we're interested in the value, and we're measuring by the value that people get out of things that we're creating. 

 47:44
So for those who are, like, cynical about this, they're like, yes, Indi, we hear you. It's great what we are seeing. Building value is great. That's why we started the company. But the reality of the business is not this. Imagine I'm an executive for those. I can imagine. They're going to be like, yeah, this is long term, short term. This is the problem we have. We need to hit the deadline. We need to hit this. What would you tell them to get them excited more about this concept that, no, the future is actually super green if you do this. 

 48:19
Yeah, exactly. I mean, part of it is like, who are we building for? We're not building for non humans. Right. We're not building for the AI, which, you know, there's no AI out there. 

 48:32
But anyway, that would be funny if we do someday. 

 48:34
I know. We're building for the animals on our planet. We're building for the ecosystems and the systems of trade on our planet. Trade is very important for humans. We're building for repositories of knowledge so that future generations don't have to learn by doing. Right. We're building for all these things that are so much more than just a deadline. And I think that can partially get people excited. Like, get back in touch with, like, your blip here on planet Earth is just a blip. There's a lot bigger future. What are we, you know, how are we connected to that bigger future? 

 49:23
How do you want to be even remembered in that bigger future? 

 49:27
Yeah. 

 49:29
Yeah, that's actually. That's interesting because, and this is assuming, and I'm not on the side that says, like, capitalism is evil or it's like the system and how we are evaluating makes it toxic and evil looking because we are not evaluating by value and like how we're making life better. But how can we actually do this? Bringing them to that moment that, hey, there is something you can do to change this world for better. We know this is what you want to do. We are helping with this mindset, with this power that starts by listening. Just listening. Simple. Zero cost. Yeah, zero cost listening. We can make a better future. We can make this name you and your vision stay forever, stay longer and help the evolution of this work. This was very interesting, that view. 

 50:22
Are there anything else in this topic that we discuss? 

 50:28
We could dive, dive. I think the dives are like, how do we. There are little nuances. I personally don't care to be remembered or how I'm remembered. I care more about having a beautiful future for more people and more acceptance and more embracing. And it seems like as we're starting to develop that more embracing, more understanding, that there are a lot of ways to be in the world, that there's fear and pushback. And I think that's like the dive that we could go into, but that would take us a half an hour or so and I can't. And I can't solve it. All I have is listening and qualitative data synthesis and patterns in this mental model, skyline and thinking styles to measure, to be able to measure the value to actual people who have a purpose. 

 51:23
And how well are we helping them accomplish the purpose in their way? Because we're not building something that they've never done before. We're building things that help them do something they have a purpose about already. 

 51:36
The good thing about this way of thinking, the way I saw it impacting me at times, is like this model that the way I'm thinking about like the end user and end customer, it's also like impacting my relationship with my coworkers. Like, if I'm learning this way of thinking, if I keep practicing this is also helping us work better together. This is also helping me have a better life outside of here. So there is something about this concept that we are spending 8 hours, 9 hours, 10 hours, depending on how we are working per day in an environment that if we are together practicing this, I think there's something more, even beautiful comes out of it that yes, the end user is happy. Hopefully at the end of it. But also, we are working better together. 

 52:26
We love each other more, we can communicate better, we can listen better. And also, when I'm done, when I go home, I can continue listening better to my partners and my friend and everything. And like, just like it just the ripple effect of it sounds just interesting. Does that resonate with you? 

 52:41
I think so. I mean, there is a difference in this kind of listening because you can't do it all the time. Yeah, but I do think it will. Once teams can see how to measure the value to the end people and see what the harms are based on various thinking styles. And thinking styles, again, they're not horoscopes. They're not like, you are a personality and this is how you are in all things. No, this is just your thinking style with respect to figuring out how to buy a new mobile phone. Okay. You can have a totally different thinking style with respect to deciding what to get for lunch. Okay. You might change your thinking style with respect to deciding what to get to lunch when you're on travel. Okay. So it's awareness. It's embracing. It's awareness. It's awarenesses of this. 

 53:34
Variety at first is really like, well, that's too much variety. We can't solve for that. No, it's not too much variety. And yes, we can solve for it one thing at a time. 

 53:45
There is no one solution fits all, correct? 

 53:48
Yeah. For all problems of that one, that's going to be exactly like the ring in Tolkien. Very toxic. 

 53:57
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So as we are winding down and kind of like trying to, because I know, I want to respect your time as well. For teams, you mentioned, you actually mentioned very interesting thing like that. Kind of like routine of do one interview per day. Are there anything else that you would recommend to folks who are working in research, in product development, as engineers in tech environment that would help improving their mental health during their day to day? Things that they can say no to, things that they can push back or things that they can do. 

 54:36
Like, there's a very key. There's a very key thing. It's chapter like seven in this book, which is about safety. And that key thing is to recognize that when you're in a listening session, if there's anything that feels wrong about it to you, if you feel triggered, notice it, and that's important, stop the session. So generally, with a listening session, we don't stop it at a certain hour. We tell the person, hey, you're in charge here. We do an intersession with the person to make sure that they feel comfortable this way of doing something that's not an interview. We don't have a list of questions. We're just going to have them sort of lead us through what their thinking was as they were addressing this purpose. Right. As many times as they address that purpose. And if something happens, though, you can stop it. 

 55:36
If that person starts showing you that they're feeling unsafe, you can stop it. So stopping the session, because we're not getting insights from the session directly. The insights come from the patterns of. You'll still have some data that you can put into the patterns. Stopping the session early is not bad. Your boss might go, no, you gotta finish that, like, nope, don't. Not at all. You're feeling triggered. The other person's. Yeah, the other. You're not gonna get anywhere, you're not gonna get any more depth. You're not respecting yourself, you're not respecting the other person by forcing it to keep going. So that's a very important way of saying, no, you might. I go through a couple of ways to do it in the book and in the course. 

 56:27
I definitely put links, by the way, to all the books you introduce from yourself and other authors that you mentioned. I'll just make it easy for folks to find it in the show. 

 56:38
Notes courses are on my website, indie young.com. So that's where you can find those. I didn't put them in any of the other coursework sort of things because we're the. We're a small community right now, and I don't think it would appeal to, you know, thing. It's not going to be up there with like, learning how to play the guitar, learning how to listen eventually might be up there with learning how to play the guitar. That would be right now it's on my website. Yeah, wouldn't it? 

 57:10
Well, I think. I think anyone would benefit from learning how to listen better. I need to learn a lot more myself. Not just for podcasting, but also like, for my professional and personal life as well. So that's my opinion. I hope that happens someday. I hope we can put it next to the guitar courses at some point. 

 57:33
Yeah, right, exactly. I think I'll have the logo on front. Like, this is a heavy hat. 

 57:40
By the way, you mentioned something about your logo now that you said, but do you want to share a little bit about that? 

 57:46
Oh, the logo is a sprout growing thing. So it's just a reference to ourselves growing our growing acceptance and embracing of variety and our growing of our teams and our growing of our support for people and are also referencing actual growing things in our actual planet. 

 58:11
Amazing. 

 58:12
Yeah. So, yeah, no, I like, I think a lot of people use a sprout. It's. There are a ton of people who have this, and when I get to hear from them and when they get to hear, it's like we have this connection of the soul. Right. 

 58:27
Awesome. So is there anything else before we end this conversation that you would like to share with us? Any, any final thoughts? 

 58:36
You can do it. You can do it. 

 58:42
That's the best motto for today. 

 58:44
A lot of the things that I talk about in the book too, have to do with neurodiversity and taking different approaches depending on your own neurodiversity or the person's neurodiversity. We don't have to do it audible. We can do it by a chat or text messages. You can listen in a lot of ways. So it's really important just to have that awareness. You can do it. 

 59:10
It was an honor for me to host you today and I really appreciate you and your time. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did because I love this conversation. Thank you so much, Indi. 

 59:21
Thank you. 

 59:29
That was our conversation with Indi Young. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you found this content helpful, please help us reach a broader audience by sharing this episode with your friends and network. As always, I would love to remind you that the best way to support this show is by subscribing to our Spotify and Apple podcasts. You can review us up to a five-star review. We are also putting the videos and clips from all these conversations into our YouTube channel. Please feel free to go there, subscribe to that channel and share that with your friends as well. Those are hopefully visual content that can help you learn better from all these amazing guests. Thanks again and see you on the next episode of the Ally Show.