Indi Young

Qualitative researcher and author Indi Young has spent decades developing a methodology that goes beyond opinions and behaviors to uncover what she calls interior cognition—the inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules that actually drive human decision-making. In this interview, Young explains how her Mental Model diagrams help organizations recognize the full range of human thinking styles and design for all of them, not just the majority. She shares concrete examples from studies on clothing care and home cooking that reveal how surface-level research leads organizations to build the wrong things—and how listening at greater depth changes not just the research, but the decisions that follow. […]