Why your fancy binoculars are broken

So you're launching a business, or maybe you're flirting with the idea of adding a shiny new service to your portfolio. Naturally, your first move is market research — asking people what they want. Sensible, right? Except here's the awkward truth: people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they definitely don't do what they say. Humans are clueless about their own motivations. We simply don't have X-ray vision into our own brains.

Then there's your second set of binoculars: standard economic theory. This one doesn't bother asking people anything, nor does it even observe what they actually do. Instead it sits in an armchair and assumes a laughably narrow, hyper-rational view of human motivation—dreamed up by hotshots in sterile labs who've reduced human beings to tidy one-dimensional cartoons. Behavioral economics has gleefully pointed out that this view is about as complete as a jigsaw puzzle missing half its pieces. Yet business and policy types keep cheerfully peering through these cracked binoculars, apparently unbothered.

Why? Because it's safe. Everyone you work with — and everyone who might hire, promote, or fire you — is squinting through the exact same lenses. Sometimes the old binoculars work perfectly well, of course: quite often people can accurately describe what they want, and plenty of human behavior lines up nicely with economic theory. The trouble comes when these broken binoculars confidently declare that making travel better means making it faster, making food better means making it cheaper, and encouraging planet-friendly behavior means turning everyone into passionate eco-warriors. All these ideas are sometimes true—and sometimes gloriously, hilariously wrong.

The Mystery of the Never-Ending Appointment Window

Picture this: you need to schedule home visits for technicians. Appointments are either morning or afternoon—getting more precise than that is a nightmare because who knows how long each visit will take? Customers, predictably, grumble: "I had to take the whole day off work!" What they say they want is a crisp, magical one-hour appointment window.

But here's the trap. If you take their demands literally and try to deliver surgical precision, you'll hemorrhage money — and you'll still disappoint people whenever real life gets in the way. Plus, the truly observant among you will have spotted the sneaky flaw: a one-hour window doesn't necessarily solve the "whole day off work" problem anyway. If your slot is 1pm to 2pm and you don't work five minutes from home, you're still taking the day off, sunshine. Well, at least half a day.

Our recommendation? Listen to what customers say, but interpret it sideways rather than head-on.

People clearly find something about the waiting game deeply annoying — but maybe the real villain isn't the length of the window. Maybe it's the soul-grinding uncertainty. Anyone who's spent five hours trapped at home waiting for a technician knows it's a special form of mental torture, a sort of low-grade house arrest. You can't have a bath. You can't even go to the toilet in peace, because you're terrified the second you do, the doorbell will ring. So you spend half the day on tenterhooks, marinating in anxiety that nobody will show up at all.

Now imagine how different it would feel if the provider simply texted you half an hour before arriving. Suddenly you're free! You can get on with your day almost as if it's a proper day off, your only obligation being to glance at your phone occasionally. Is it as dreamy as a one-hour window? Not quite. But it might deliver 90% of the emotional relief at 1% of the cost. That, dear reader, is proper magic — conjuring value from thin air. The old binoculars would never have spotted this, because they'd have taken the complaints at face value and solemnly nodded along.

People can be pretty good at naming their emotional state, but the actual causes of that state — in this case, gnawing uncertainty — are often a complete mystery to them. If the text-message experiment works (and early signs are rather encouraging), we've pulled off a delightful magic trick. Experimentation is the only truly reliable way to test this stuff, so you measure the effect of those cheerful warning texts against a control group left to stew in silence.

The Tale of Two Departure Boards

Another delicious trick is the thought experiment. Ask yourself: which message on an airport departure board would distress you more?

BA 786 – Frankfurt – DELAYED

Or

BA 786 – Frankfurt – DELAYED 70 minutes

The second one stings a bit, sure. But at least you're back in the driver's seat. You can fire off a few apologetic calls, retreat to a lounge, crack open your laptop, and get on with re-planning your day. The first message, though? Pure psychological waterboarding. You know there's bad news, but you've been given absolutely nothing to work with. Is it a ten-minute hiccup or a ninety-minute disaster? You might also fear that "delayed" is just the polite appetizer before the main course: "cancelled." That sudden loss of power and control can whip up far fiercer emotions than mere lateness ever could.

Here's the kicker: we're absolutely rubbish at distinguishing between these two emotions. You don't announce, "I am unhappy because inadequate information has left me powerless." You simply growl, "I'm furious because my plane's late." In cases like these, neither lens of the binoculars hands you a solution. Airline passengers won't love me for saying this, but it's true: if you're an airline and you have a choice between delaying a flight by an hour or spending $5,000 to leave on time, your decision should absolutely be influenced by how good your passenger information game is. A well-informed delay beats a silent mystery every single time.