The Questions We Didn't Ask

Update: Confirmed New date and a longer session. Wednesday, September 16th, 90 minutes.

Sign-ups ran well past what we had planned, so Indi and I are using the extra time to refine the agenda.

Already registered? You don't need to do anything.

Not registered yet? You've been given more time and a bigger session than originally planned. 

In many user interviews, there's a moment when the researcher stops listening and starts confirming. The questions get narrower. The interviewee follows the lead. Everyone leaves satisfied, even though something important slipped through the cracks. The result? 

The possibility of one or more of these nightmare scenarios happening on your watch: 

• The product fails, even though you did the research 

• Stakeholders do not believe your proof 

• You built exactly what the intended users told you they wanted, and it still didn't help them 

Indi Young has spent two decades teaching people to notice the moments of consequence. 

She co-founded Adaptive Path, the agency that shaped much of modern UX practice. Across her three books- Mental Models, Practical Empathy, and now Time to Listen she consistently argues that the most useful thing you can learn about a person is not what they did, but how they were thinking while they did it. 

There is a twist here.

To illustrate, most people interpret using a search engine as “using a tool”. But that doesn’t capture the larger intent or purpose the person was aiming for. For example, “Decide whether or not to go to college.” “Figure out how to live with my chronic condition.” “Spend more time in person with friends and strangers.”

Behavior is easy to measure and tells you very little. Reasoning is harder to reach and tells you almost everything. 

Time to Listen is her most practical book. It claims that a listening session and an interview are two distinct things, and that you can learn to spot the difference. 

The session

In this session, Indi will share her insights on how designers can benefit from honing their deep listening muscle. 

Then, an interactive demo will give you the opportunity to participate in a live listening session between Indi and me (Olivia). During the session, Indi will ask me a question, and I'll answer honestly, as the participant.

Then we pause, and you get a minute to type into the chat the follow-up question you would ask me next. Then Indi asks hers.

We'll do this several times. What you'll be watching, over and over, is the gap between the question a room full of smart practitioners reaches for and the question a listener with twenty years of practice reaches for. 

You'll also see what happens to me on the receiving end. Where I open up. Where I close up. What a rephrase opens that a follow-up would have closed.

What you get

Note that this is not a stand-in for a course or actual training. Indi normally runs this format in her paid practice groups, so this session gives you exclusive access to a taster of that experience. A small slice of the introduction.

However, because it's interactive, not passive, it is enough to give you:

• A concrete example of what deep listening is, or what it isn't. 

• Info you can use in your very next conversation, at work or otherwise, to slow down where you'd normally speed up, 

• Skills to notice that the person across from you is communicating in a way you'd usually rush past.

If you leave with the reflex to ask yourself, "Is this a situation where listening more deeply would help?", that's not a consolation prize. Asking the question means you're already moving in the right direction, whether or not you act on it that day.

What it buys you

Long-term, this session might be the first step on your journey to becoming a skilled deep listener. A truly human superpower that an AI cannot replicate.

• You stop rebuilding things. The highest cost of not listening isn't a bad interview; it's a quarter of engineering time spent on the wrong thing.

• You start having better work relationships. Recognizing what level you’re communicating at leads to trust and deeper connections. Deeper connections facilitate influence that can travel up your organization.

• Your perspective matters in big decisions. You get invited into decisions when people trust your reasoning. You build that trust by being the person in the org who understands why things are happening, not just what happened 

• You get new ideas, not just validation. Not confirmation bias. Ingenuity from your own brilliant, creative mind, sourced from your ability to not anticipate answers.

• You can cut scope with confidence, because you know what to prioritize.

• You consistently understand your users deeply. Effective lean research with fewer participants and more signals. Eight real listening sessions beat forty surveys, which matters if your research budget is basically zero and your deadline is tomorrow.

• You make solid predictions based on segmentation. Thinking styles hold across markets in a way age brackets don't.

Who this is for

Anyone who talks to users, stakeholders, or colleagues as part of their work. Researchers, product designers, content designers, service designers, and the people who brief them. No prior familiarity with Indi's books required.

We'll leave time for your questions at the end.

About Indi Young

Indi is a solution strategy researcher who created a method that lets teams clarify, measure, and grow their solutions and audience based on thinking styles. She works with teams on knowledge-building projects. She also teaches six applied research courses, writes books & essays, gives talks and makes podcast appearances, and pens helpful posts on LinkedIn.