The best researchers I've worked with don't just listen to answers. They listen to silences, hesitations, subject changes. They notice what people avoid saying almost more than what they say.
Because people are excellent at producing socially acceptable answers. But they're terrible at hiding what makes them uncomfortable.
I once watched a researcher testing a new financial product. The question was simple: "Would this appeal to you?"
Most respondents said yes. Polite, agreeable, positive feedback.
But one woman paused. Just for a second. Then she said, "Yes, I suppose it would."
That "suppose" cost the company ₹25 crore in retooling. Because the researcher heard it. The pause. The qualification. The gap between "yes" and "yes, I suppose."
In the debrief, the woman admitted she hadn't understood the product at all. But she didn't want to seem stupid. So she said yes. Everyone else had done the same.
The product would have launched to disaster. Instead, it was simplified. It eventually succeeded. All because someone noticed what wasn't said.
Or consider IDEO's research for hospital bed redesigns. They didn't ask nurses what they needed. They watched them work. They noticed nurses kept medical charts at the foot of beds—not because that was best, but because there was nowhere else to put them. The nurses never mentioned it in interviews. They'd adapted. But that silence—that thing they'd normalized—revealed the real design problem.
Or consider complaints. When customers complain, they're telling you something specific went wrong. Useful, but limited. When customers stop complaining and just leave? That's the real data. That's the insight. They didn't think you were worth the effort of complaining to.
The same applies in creative reviews. When a client says "I like it," but their enthusiasm is flat, you've learned something. When they lean forward, when they start imagining applications without prompting, when they forget to look at their phone — that's the real feedback.
Insight doesn't live in what people tell you. It lives in the gap between what they say and what they mean.
The truth is rarely in the first answer. It's in the pause before the answer. That's where insight lives.