Mental models 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.

This workshop is highly interactive, with recommendations from Indi for individual situations, backgrounds, and personalities. The day is peppered with group exercises as well as solo and paired exercises. Questions are welcome at any point.

You’ll start with a discussion of scoping studies for a person’s purpose, rather than for tasks and goals associated with your solution, then practice coding real transcripts and writing first-person, present-tense summaries using real data collected over time in the Introduction workshops. The third part of the workshop focuses on finding patterns in the summaries based on intent, and building those into the hierarchies that can be depicted as mental model diagrams. Next, you’ll review these patterns and that of other mental model diagrams as a foundation for discussion about using the data internally. Indi takes into consideration participants’ roles, history, and power within the structure as variables that influence the uptake of the data by others. Finally, you’ll touch upon deriving behavioral audience segments from the same set of transcripts.