Never Ask What People Want

An Introduction to Ford's Razor

I. The Poverty of Imagination

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

-Henry Ford

When you ask the average person what they want, you usually hear a plea for a shinier version of whatever sits in front of them. A quicker phone. A softer chair. A slightly better life that preserves the shape of the old one. You can almost see the gears turning as they reach for something familiar, as if the mind were a shop with no back room.

It is hard to blame them. Most lives are shaped by habit, and habit creates a narrow hallway where people walk side by side without seeing the doors on either side. Suggest something unfamiliar and the hallway feels tighter. Suggest something that could change how they live and the hallway seems to tilt.

Every culture has its comfort foods. Most people treat ideas the same way. They want the intellectual equivalent of warm bread. They rarely reach for the strange fruit sitting in the corner. The tragedy is that strange fruit contains the future, but the future tastes unusual at first.

The creative class knows this well. Anyone who has ever proposed a fresh idea has watched it hit the public like a snowflake on a hot skillet. It lasts about a second. Then everyone goes back to asking for tweaks.

Ford’s Razor begins here: never ask people what they want, because they will answer within the walls of the world they have lived in, not the world that could exist.

II. Faster Horses

Ford’s Razor: The public always prefers a superior version of what it already has than a better kind of thing.

When Ford said people wanted faster horses, he was not mocking them. He was describing a law of human nature. People can picture speed. They cannot picture a machine that transforms movement itself. This is why they ask for increments when the times demand a departure.

This habit reveals something deeper. Their desires follow the grammar of improvement instead of the grammar of replacement. Quality is familiar and safe. Kind requires a leap of imagination, and leaps are uncomfortable. Even a small leap asks people to risk embarrassment, and many fear embarrassment more than stagnation.

A society built around comfort teaches its children to avoid leaps. Yet every great shift in history came from someone who refused to follow the grammar of improvement. A leap created painting with perspective. A leap created the printing press. A leap created electricity. Each leap was treated, at first, like a visiting relative who might steal the silverware.

Category changes frighten people because category changes reorder their place in the world. A faster horse leaves the order intact. A car creates a new order entirely. And deep down, most people resist any new order that demands the courage they were never taught to cultivate.

Ford’s Razor warns us: if you seek direction from those who fear leaps, do not expect anything beyond another coat of paint on an ancient structure.

III. Why Breakthroughs Fail Their First Audience

The normy prefers its predictable hell over a heaven it couldn’t see coming.

Breakthroughs are usually greeted like an unexpected letter from a stranger. People hold it at arm’s length. They check for traps. They ask who sent it and why. Only then do they open it, and even then, they read it with suspicion rather than wonder.

This has little to do with the idea itself. The public carries an inner censor that filters out any possibility they cannot personally imagine. When people say something is impossible, they are often confessing their own limits rather than making a claim about the world.

Human imagination works like a lantern with a small flame. It lights the area around the individual but rarely lights the terrain beyond. A breakthrough arrives from that unlit terrain. To accept it requires faith that the world contains more than the lantern’s circle, and faith is in short supply.

So the breakthrough is rejected. It is accused of being strange, unnecessary, or somehow a threat. This is the same rejection that greeted early photography, early flight, early computing, and every other discovery that threatened the little lantern. The pattern never changes.

Ford’s Razor reminds us: the bottleneck is not the idea but the imagination of those asked to understand it.

IV. Why You Never Ask the Public for Category Shifts

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

-Steve Jobs

When you ask the populace to judge a category shift, you are asking them to evaluate a world that does not yet exist. The mind clings to what it knows. It compares the unfamiliar to the familiar and always chooses the familiar. That is why every focus group prefers quality improvements. They feel safe. They spark no fear of dislocation.

Yet the future is built from leaps. You cannot survey your way into a leap. You cannot poll your way into a fresh category. You must rely on those who can see beyond the lantern’s circle. You must trust the creators, the grand builders, the people who can hold an image in their minds that no one else can see yet.

The public’s imagination is too small to guide the future. It can refine the present, but it cannot author the next chapter. Asking them for approval on a category shift is like asking a child whether the stars should be rearranged. They will answer sincerely, but sincerity does not grant them the vision required.

Ford’s Razor is a simple rule with immense force: never ask people what they want when the future depends on a leap. They will ask for tweaks. They will ask for refinements. They will ask for the comfort of the familiar, every time.