You may know the TV series about the fictional misanthrope House, MD—the notoriously grumpy doctor who manages to offend almost everyone around him, yet ultimately solves the most difficult medical puzzle in every episode.
One of House’s guiding principles is: “All patients lie.”
At first glance, that sounds cynical. But I find this principle fascinating because it is also extremely useful in sales, technical marketing, and in almost any form of customer interaction—not just for the benefit of the salesperson, but for the benefit of the customer.
Surprised?
Then read on. The idea is neither shocking nor arrogant. It is simply constructivism expressed in a different way.
Lies and relative truth
We usually think of a lie as a deliberate false statement. If that were the case, Dr. House’s quote—“All patients lie”—would indeed suggest a very cynical view of human nature.
But false statements do not only happen intentionally. People also say things that are incorrect simply because they do not have all the information, or because they believe events happened in a certain way.
In his bestseller How Real Is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication, Paul Watzlawick explains the core idea of constructivism: each person ultimately constructs their own version of reality.
This means that a patient’s reality is not necessarily the same as the reality a doctor observes and investigates.
Think about how many people believe they eat healthily. Now think about how many of them regularly consume things that are objectively unhealthy.
There is even a medical term for when this effect becomes extreme. As described in the House Wiki, Korsakoff’s syndrome refers to a condition in which gaps in memory about recent events are filled with older memories.
In other words, the brain attempts to explain a situation using whatever memories are available.
Even a healthy brain does this if we are not extremely careful. The well-known confusion between correlation and causality—on which homeopathy and entire magazine empires are based—shows how easily our brains construct plausible explanations when the facts are incomplete.
The fictional character Gregory House calls all inconsistencies between perceived truth and factual truth lies.
Constructivism as a basic assumption
So one way to express the idea of constructivism is simply to say:
“All patients lie.”
And this principle does not apply only to patients. It also applies to customers.
“All customers lie.”
Pause for a moment and think about that sentence. Does it make you uncomfortable? Do you instinctively want to disagree? Perhaps you even feel the urge to stop reading.
That reaction is understandable. We are taught that the customer is always right and that the customer should get what they ask for.
But just as it would be absurd in medicine to always do whatever the patient requests, it is also misguided in sales to simply agree with everything a customer says.
Because all customers “lie”—not intentionally, but because everyone perceives reality through their own assumptions and incomplete information.
This personal perception can still contain valuable clues. But it does not necessarily represent objective reality. That is exactly what constructivism describes.
Better advice through constructivism
If the customer’s perception has gaps, how reliable are their own ideas about their challenges and their causes? A patient’s self-diagnosis can be helpful—but only up to a point. When dealing with complex illnesses, a doctor must investigate further.
The same is true in sales.
For simple problems, people usually know quite well what the issue is, how it arose, and how to fix it. But when the root causes run deeper, things become more complicated.
Imagine a programmer who claims that a new library is causing errors in their C code. That statement reflects their perceived truth. It describes a symptom, but not necessarily the underlying cause.
Finding that cause is not the programmer’s primary task. It might instead be the responsibility of an application engineer who is trying to improve the overall development process.
The programmer may not see that the specification itself contains contradictions.
They may not realize that the specification was never properly simulated or tested.
They may not notice that another software module is accidentally writing into their memory space.
From their perspective, the library appears to be the problem.
Stop asking questions? Not at all.
Does this mean we should stop asking customers about their problems?
Not at all.
What the customer tells us is still extremely valuable. It reveals how they currently understand the problem and what explanations they have already developed—whether those explanations are accurate or not.
But those answers should only be the starting point.
To really understand the situation, we may need to talk to several people within the customer’s organization. We may need examples, sample data, documents, or code.
In short: Stay curious and keep asking questions.
Better service
Once we stop shifting the responsibility for the correct diagnosis onto customers or patients and start analyzing the situation ourselves, the result is better service.
Suppose a customer insists that they need product configuration X. If a deeper analysis shows that the real issue is a lack of training in module Y, then simply agreeing with the customer would actually be poor advice.
The assumption that “all customers lie” is not an easy one to accept—neither for you nor for your customers.
But it leads to better understanding, better solutions, and ultimately better results.
Give it a try.
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