People lie to you. Honestly, they do it all the time, especially in business. If you ask a friend what they think of your new startup idea, they’ll probably smile and say it’s "interesting" or "has potential." They’re being nice. Being nice is the death of good products. When you ask someone to tell you what you want, you aren't actually looking for the truth; you’re usually looking for validation. And they know it.
The psychological gap between what people say they want and what they actually do is massive. It's why the 1975 "Pepsi Challenge" worked in a booth but didn't translate to long-term market dominance for Pepsi over Coke. In a single sip, people liked the sweeter drink. In a whole can, they didn't. They couldn't tell the researchers what they truly wanted because they didn't even know it themselves.
The Art of Getting Someone to Tell You What You Want
Most leaders think they’re great at listening. They aren't. They talk too much. If you want a client or an employee to tell you what you want to hear—the raw, ugly, profitable truth—you have to shut up. It’s called the "The Mom Test," a concept popularized by Rob Fitzpatrick. The idea is simple: you shouldn't ask anyone if your idea is good. Even your mom will lie to you because she loves you. Instead, you ask about their life, their specific problems, and how they currently spend money to solve them.
Stop asking "Would you use this?"
Start asking "When was the last time you dealt with this problem?"
Specifics are the only currency that matters in feedback. If someone tells you they "would definitely buy" your software, they’re probably lying. If they show you a spreadsheet where they’ve spent ten hours a week trying to manually do what your software automates, they’re telling you what they want without saying a word. Data beats talk every single time.
Why radical candor feels like a punch in the gut
Kim Scott, a former executive at Google and Apple, wrote extensively about "Radical Candor." It’s this specific intersection of caring personally and challenging directly. Most people live in the "ruinous empathy" quadrant. They care about you, so they don't tell you that your presentation was boring or that your breath smells. That’s not kindness. It's laziness disguised as politeness.
If I don't tell you the truth, I’m holding you back.
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I remember a project back in 2022 where a design lead kept nodding along to a client's terrible color palette. The client wanted neon green and purple. It was hideous. The lead didn't want to lose the contract, so he kept saying, "We can make that work." The result? A website that looked like a 1990s Geocities page and a client who was eventually furious because their conversion rate tanked. Had the designer been brave enough to tell you what you want to hear—the reality that the colors would drive users away—the project would have been a success.
The Behavioral Economics of Desires
We are irrational creatures. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, has proven this through dozens of studies. We say we want healthy food, but we buy the fries. We say we want to save for retirement, but we buy the latest iPhone. When a business tries to get a customer to tell you what you want, they often get the "idealized self" version of the customer.
- The Intent-Action Gap: This is the distance between a person’s stated goals and their actual behavior.
- Social Desirability Bias: People answer questions in a way that will be viewed favorably by others.
- Choice Overload: If you give someone too many options, they’ll tell you they want "simplicity," yet they’ll keep asking for more features until the product is unusable.
Look at Netflix. Years ago, they had a star rating system. People would give five stars to high-brow documentaries like 13th because they wanted to be the kind of person who watches documentaries. But then they’d spend four hours watching The Office for the tenth time. Netflix realized that if they listened to what people told them, their algorithm would be broken. So, they switched to a "thumbs up/down" and focused entirely on what people actually watched. They stopped letting you tell you what you want and started watching what you did.
How to extract the truth from a silent room
Have you ever been in a meeting where the boss asks, "Any questions?" and it’s just dead silence? That silence is a lie. Everyone has a question or a concern, but the environment isn't safe enough to voice it. To get people to tell you what you want, you have to change the framing.
Instead of asking for "feedback," ask for "advice."
Research published in the Harvard Business Review suggests that when people are asked for feedback, they focus on what’s wrong in a critical, backward-looking way. But when they are asked for advice, they look forward and become more collaborative. It shifts the power dynamic. It makes the other person a partner in the process rather than a judge.
The Five Whys Technique
Developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used heavily at Toyota, the "Five Whys" is a simple but brutal way to get to the bottom of a problem. You don't stop at the first answer.
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- "Why did the server go down?" (The database was overloaded.)
- "Why was the database overloaded?" (Because of a sudden spike in traffic.)
- "Why was there a spike in traffic?" (We launched a new marketing campaign.)
- "Why didn't we prepare the server for the campaign?" (The dev team didn't know about the campaign.)
- "Why didn't they know?" (Because the marketing and dev teams don't have a shared calendar.)
Now we’re getting somewhere. The problem wasn't the server. The problem was the calendar. If you just let the IT guy tell you what you want—which is that the server is fixed—you’ll have the same problem next month. You have to dig.
The Danger of the "Yes-Man" Culture
In high-stakes environments, the inability to tell you what you want—the actual reality of a situation—can be catastrophic. Think about the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. Engineers knew the O-rings might fail in cold weather. They tried to speak up. But the organizational pressure to launch was so high that their warnings were buried in middle management.
NASA leaders wanted to hear that everything was "go" for launch. They created a culture where people were afraid to tell them anything else.
If you are a leader and you aren't hearing bad news at least once a week, you have a major problem. It means your team is hiding things from you. They are telling you what they think you want to hear, not what is actually happening. This is how companies die. Nokia didn't lose the smartphone war because they lacked engineers; they lost because the middle management was too terrified of the senior leadership to tell them the truth about how far behind they were on the software side.
Real-world steps to find the truth
You can't just wish for honesty. You have to build a system that demands it. It's about creating "psychological safety," a term coined by Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School. It’s the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
First, admit when you’re wrong. Often. If the person at the top can say, "I messed up that call," it gives everyone else permission to be human.
Second, use "Pre-mortems." Before you launch a project, sit the team down and say, "Imagine it’s one year from now and this project has been a total disaster. What happened?" This gives people a safe space to voice their doubts without sounding like they’re "not a team player." They aren't being negative; they're following instructions to imagine a failure.
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Third, rewards honesty over results. If an employee comes to you and says, "I found a flaw in our logic that means we need to delay the launch by two weeks," you should thank them. If you yell at them, they’ll never tell you the truth again. They’ll just let the ship hit the iceberg and jump off with their resume in hand.
Listening to the "unspoken" want
Sometimes, people can't tell you what you want because they lack the vocabulary. Henry Ford (allegedly) said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses." Whether he actually said it or not, the sentiment is gold. Customers are great at identifying their problems but terrible at identifying the solutions.
Steve Jobs was famous for this. He didn't use focus groups. He believed that "people don't know what they want until you show it to them." But Jobs wasn't just guessing. He was an expert at observing human frustration. He watched how people struggled with clunky MP3 players and saw an "unmet want." He didn't ask them to design the iPod; he observed their struggle and designed it for them.
Actionable Insights for Finding the Truth
Getting to the heart of what people actually desire requires a shift in how you communicate. It isn't about being more aggressive; it's about being more curious and less defensive.
- Abandon Leading Questions: Never ask "Don't you think this is a good idea?" It’s a trap. Instead, ask "What’s the biggest reason this might fail?"
- Watch the Feet, Not the Mouth: In sales or user testing, pay attention to where people actually spend their time or money. A customer who complains about your price but stays for five years is telling you that your value is high. A customer who says your price is "fair" but leaves after a month is telling you something else entirely.
- The "Magic Wand" Question: Ask, "If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about how you work today, what would it be?" This bypasses their internal filters and gets straight to the pain point.
- Shadowing: Spend a day doing your customer's job. If you sell software to nurses, go sit in a hospital. You'll see things they would never think to tell you in a survey.
Truth is expensive. It costs ego, time, and sometimes it ruins your favorite ideas. But the alternative—living in a bubble where everyone tells you what you want to hear—is much more expensive in the long run. Whether you're building a billion-dollar company or just trying to have a better relationship with your spouse, the goal is the same: strip away the politeness and find the reality underneath. It’s usually messier than you expected, but it’s the only thing you can actually build on.
Start by looking for the person who disagrees with you the most. They’re usually the ones holding the piece of the puzzle you’re missing. Listen to them. Even if it hurts.