#GOOTFB

Steve Blank coined "get out of the building" for start-ups. We added one word to make it stick. The reason is simple: the answers to your most important questions are not in your office. Not in your slide decks, not in your market reports and not in the heads of the smartest people in your meeting room. They are out there — in the kitchens, workshops, warehouses, waiting rooms and car parks where your customers live and work.

Desk research and workshops have their place. They help you frame a playground, align different perspectives, structure what you already know and prepare the questions you want to ask. But they only ever give you a second-hand version of reality, filtered through someone else's assumptions. If you want to solve a problem, go where the problem is.

In practice, that means:

• Go to them, not the other way round: Don't invite customers into your meeting room. Visit them at home, in their office, on the shop floor. People behave differently in their own environment — and that behaviour is exactly what you are after. Let's say you are working on a new service for electricians: spend a morning in the van with one on their rounds instead of an hour with them in your conference room.

• Be a guest: You are in someone else's space. Be curious, be humble and listen more than you talk. A good guest notices the sticky note on the fridge, the workaround in the spreadsheet and the folder nobody is supposed to see. Ask about it.

• Suck up everything you can: Not only what people say, but what they do, what they use and what they avoid. Take photos (with permission), collect artefacts and write down the exact words people use. What seems irrelevant today is often tomorrow's surprising insight.

• Distrust your own understanding: If you think you have understood the world of your customers, the likelihood is high that you didn't. Every visit should challenge what you believed before it. The moment a team stops being surprised is usually the moment it has stopped listening.

Going out is not the same as chatting. Learn how to do it properly in Customer & User Interview and Customer & User Observation.

#GOOTFB applies across the End-to-End Innovation Process: in Phase I, when you meet lead users who already live the future; in Phase II, when you explore the current world of customers within a playground; and in Phase IV, when you go back out to test your hypotheses with real customers instead of colleagues.

#GOOTFB is the practical side of Customers First: there is no customer centricity without customers. And it is where the facts behind Facts Over Opinions come from. So close the laptop. Get out of the f*** building.