Observing and Listening Are Underrated

01 Nov, 2026

Observing and Listening in Business

Applied qualitative research methods are terribly underrated and underrepresented. One obvious domain is business. Sam Walton is famous for having said that he visited more of his major competitor’s stores than any of their managers. I love the story where he went to see some small-chain competitor’s store together with some of his senior management and afterwards they all trash-talked about how badly set-up it was. Sam Walton’s point of view? ‘Yes, but did you see the candle display? The candle display was fantastic.’ ¹ As the CEO of Walmart, he would spend significant parts of his entire career roaming through supermarkets, chatting with staff and customers, observing and learning. Yes, Walmart was also a pioneer in using quantitative data to monitor their business. But that is precisely the point: To get a full picture, you need to rely on both inputs. And the qualitative one is terribly underrepresented.

I currently embark in trying to better understand Kaspi, the Kzakh ‘super-app’ that 15 of 20 million Kazakhs are actively using. How did the founder and CEO, Mikheil Lomtadze, build this incredible service that offers savings-accounts, a wide range of e-commerce, and even public administration (you can even request your marriage via the app)? As he tells the story in an interview, after having taken over leadership of a mediocre bank via the PE fund he was working for, he decided he wanted to operate like a tech-company and put the customer’s satisfaction at the center of this company². Asked about why they decided to build the one “super-app” instead of several applications, as advised to them back then, Lomtadze says: ‘Our job is to make our customer’s lives easier, not our own.’ Now, every corporation will say they focus on their customers. Kaspi, however, does do it: Virtually none of their management is tracked on any financial metrics. Instead, net promoter score – basically how likely it is that the customer would recommend the service to friends or family – is the basic metric they strive for. In addition, they contact a huge number of customers – in 2024 back it was 300.000 – and ask them for feedback. Not via email, but via phone, directly talking to their customers. This feedback gets processed and fed back to the product teams that try to incorporate as much of it as possible. This is no single exercise – they do it every month by default.

More recently, Kaspi entered the Turkish market by overtaking a smaller e-commerce company as well as a bank there, trying to replicate their super-app model. It would be relatively easy to take the existing features and roll them out quickly in Turkey, too. But that is not their approach. Instead, Lomtadze makes clear their first priority is to make the existing customers happy with the existing products. ‘And I mean really happy, not average happy!’ According to him, it only makes sense to roll out new features once the customers are extremely happy with what is already offered. Knowing all this, it might come as less of a surprise that Kaspi’s whole super-app was built organically, relying entirely on its own existing cash-flows.

Listening Well is Simple

As part of my BA-degree, I visited some sociology courses on qualitative social sciences, focused mostly on conducting interviews. The one huge take-away is incredibly simple and powerful: Ask an open question and then shut up and listen. Most often, the interviewee will give a standard answer, glance at you, notice that you are visibly listening but remain silent – and then go on talking, opening up noticeably. You have to bring honest curiosity and the ability to endure some awkward silences, but that’s basically it. And the people being interviewed usually love it. It’s natural for students to wonder about how to compensate the participants for their time. The text-book answer is: Never offer them money. It just devalues the whole thing. Instead, what you offer them is your full attention – a rare good. The first interviews I conducted made me really nervous: You are about to take an hour or more up of a stranger just for the sake of your own studies. How egoistic. But over the years (I led quite a few open interviews as part of my Ph.D.) I never finished an interview feeling as though I had taken away something from the participant. Instead, they usually clearly enjoyed the whole experience, recommending other relevant interview-partners etc.

As simple as this technique is, it is far from commonly practiced. Over the years, I noticed that in group conversations with friends: Everybody knows this situation where a friend wants to tell you something they know they shouldn’t. Be curious and go silent – and you will most often get to hear it. Now enter some other group members who, for instance, start peppering the holder of the secret aggressively (in a playful manner) with questions. What happens? These questions serve as some kind of attack, so the asked one will defend themselves. You want to bet on the desire of the other person to tell you – that is the whole secret of this approach. Attacking them achieves the opposite. This probably gets even increased by everybody’s wish to appear consistent – a trait that Cialdini points out in his wonderful Influence³. A common sales tactic is to get the potential buyer into a position where they can only remain appearing consistent with the views or opinions they just shared if they do in fact make the purchase. If somebody starts to defend themselves against questions, finally opening up and telling the story would make them appear inconsistent.

There is a fascinating study about interview techniques in the police and anti-terror sector. The researchers found that many of the interviewing techniques were painfully plumb recreations of TV-cliches, such as the good cap / bad cop combo. None of these were efficient. What proved to be by far the most efficient technique? You guessed it: Being extremely curious and honestly trying to understand this person’s story, trying to establish “rapport”.

‘The interviewer has to be authentically curious and completely objective. It is important to re- member that there is a reason that person ended up in that room. If the interviewer is not interested in what that is, the interview will not be effective.’⁴

My impression is that what hinders most people to approach wanting to know something the most is one or both of the following factors:

a) They actually don’t want to know as it might hurt their feelings or endanger views they hold dearly.

b) It seems ‘unscientific’ to them; hence they construct a complex set of rules that stand in between them and their subject.

Usually, b) leads to quantitative approaches. While I am quite critical of quantitative approaches, I immediately want to give in to the obvious point: They do have their important role to play. But I think in most cases, they are at least the second-best or even actively damaging option if exploration is your goal.

Back to business, where Palantir’s “forward employed engineer” works directly with and at the customer to continuously gather and incorporate their feedback. Nodoy would seriously question how innovative Palantir ist. It doesn’t come as a surprise that according to a Substack post⁵, one of the required readings for new-joiners at the firm was (or potentially still is) titled Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights⁶.

It is obvious that these qualitative research skills will become ever more important in an age of big data and Generative AI. Keeping an edge over AI as a number-cruncher is already hard – but it seems almost impossible five years out. Observing and listening are underrated superpowers.