Product design strategy often seeks to change a person’s buying decisions, or to manipulate a person’s behavior. Such a product-focused mindset has driven our organizations into a corner. Even when product design teams want to benefit a person, they discover how they've harmed them instead by not recognizing their thinking and approaches.
Luckily, organizations don’t actually function by a set of rigid laws; business, education, government, and science are all based around people.
Deep listening lets your team understand what it couldn’t recognize before. The patterns and knowledge that result from deep listening are used to support someone in accomplishing their purpose in a way that matches their way of thinking better.
In this book, world-class researcher Indi Young teaches you how to conduct listening sessions to help your organization move away from a product-focused strategy toward a purpose-focused strategy.
Page by page, Indi explains clearly:
How deep listening is different from interviewing — and from regular conversation
How to re-center a person’s purpose, instead of an organization’s solutions
Techniques for helping the person unfold their interior cognition
How to create a safe space for a listening session
Building assumption-wary knowledge from perspectives that are not your own, nor your team’s
Read this book to begin expanding your organization’s support for more and different perspectives—leading to better strategies, more inclusive products, and a broader human experience you could find no other way.
Listening deeply changes everything.
“... researchers learn, in graduate school, how to interview people. But learning how to listen is rarely addressed. Truly listening involves engaging in a radical and profound presence by the researcher and a position of bravery and humility by the company. "Time to Listen" is the best way to ensure product success…”
— Marie Mika, PhD, Design Researcher
If you want to understand people, if you want to serve them, sell to them, work with them… then you have to get good at listening to them. The good news is that you can, and that what you’ll find when you do will exceed your expectations.”
— Alexandra Jacoby, Artist and Online Community R&D