Solving complex problems is incredibly hard. Building products or services, digital or physical, is challenging. Even simple ideas are usually much more difficult to deliver than you think.

It's all too easy to build something you believe in but customers don't actually want. Or maybe they do want it but in a slightly different shape, and your product isn't quite there. There is every chance the first iteration of the product is complicated, and designing and building simple things is a hard skill few have but all can learn.

There's a specific reason people build the wrong thing even after they've been told they are doing so. It isn't that they weren't told. It's that they were told in the completely wrong way. We don't listen to everything we are told. In fact if we told something that is different to our own thinking the vast majority stop listening.

Psychologists call this the false consensus effect - the tendency to assume other people think and want what we think and want. Nielsen Norman Group wrote about it: designers generalise from a sample size of one - themselves - and treat their own view as evidence of a wider opinion.

A study by Tilburg University tested two different ways of correcting this bias.[1] One group was told when their assumption about someone else's perspective was wrong, with no explanation. The other group was shown what the other group had actually understood and why.

Only the group who were told why they were wrong reduced their longer-term bias. The group who were told they were wrong but not why barely changed.

Even being told why you are wrong doesn’t automatically lead to a change in behaviour, it’s not your fault and you can learn to listen.  Listening can become your superpower, and the next chapters will explain how.

[1] Damen, D., van Amelsvoort, M., van der Wijst, P., Pollmann, M., & Krahmer, E. (2021). Lifting the curse of knowing: How feedback improves perspective-taking. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(6), 1054-1069. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820987080