Customer Forces Dojo

What it is

The Customer Forces Dojo is where you train your ear before you run your own interviews. You can’t elicit a force you can’t yet hear — so instead of reading about the forces of progress, you practice catching them in a real, recorded interview, at no stakes, until you can hear them cold.

The forces you’re learning to hear, on the timeline of a customer’s struggling moment:

• Trigger — the switching moment that made the old way untenable.
• Push — dissatisfaction with the current state.
• Pull — the desired outcome of the new solution.
• Inertia — allegiance to the old way.
• Anxiety — fear or uncertainty about the new solution.

The subtle miss the dojo trains hardest is Push ↔ Pull — and taking a customer’s stated pull at face value.

Where it lives

The dojo runs on a real interview opened in simulation mode. You reach it three ways:

• Ask LEANSpark to teach you — “I want to learn customer forces,” “teach me customer interviews,” “help me get better at discovery.” You get a one-click chip into the dojo.
• The Skills page — the “Customer Forces” capability card on /skills shows your current rung and the right next action.
• Before a discovery experiment — when you start planning a customer-discovery interview, LEANSpark may offer a practice rep first. It’s an offer, never a gate.

How to use it

The dojo opens on an orientation splash, then runs one step at a time — review before you drill:

1. Review the interview. Listen to the recording (player and emotional-trajectory graph pinned at the top) and read the transcript. Just get a feel for the customer’s story.
2. Tune your ear. A discrimination warm-up — commit to a force, point at the word that tells you, then the answer is revealed.
3. Find it. Spot the force in a stretch of real transcript, or correctly reject a stretch that carries none.
4. Label. Highlight the soundbites and write the three-act story into a blank canvas, graded against the interview’s real forces.

Once you’ve shown you can hear the forces, the drills fade — you go straight from Review to labeling an interview unscaffolded.

How it grades you

The dojo tracks a real capability, separate from lesson completion, that advances forward-only:

• Training — you did your first discrimination rep.
• Recognized — you completed one full labeled rep, with coaching, and a judge confirmed you caught the trigger and the forces (including the subtle Push ↔ Pull).
• Demonstrated — across two different interviews and markets, you independently reconstructed the causal story and attributed the forces with sound reasoning.

Grading is justification-based, not tag-matching, and it’s anti-gaming by design: only your own work advances the rung — never a rep where LEANSpark supplied the answer, and never a passed lesson.

Common pitfalls

• Skipping ahead. The stepper is forward-locked — you can’t jump to labeling before you’ve reviewed and drilled. You can always step back.
• Letting LEANSpark do the read for you. Coached help is fine for learning, but only your own independent reps move the rung.
• Stopping at one interview. Hearing the forces once isn’t the same as hearing them cold on a fresh market — Demonstrated requires a second, different interview.
• Trusting stated pull at face value. The most common miss is mistaking what the customer says they wanted for the force that actually moved them.