Where the gold lives
Simplicity created safety. Safety created honesty.
I was the executive sponsor the first time an outside facilitator proposed this approach, and my reaction was skepticism. A handful of questions, asked out loud in live conversation instead of collected through a written survey, felt too basic for something meant to produce real strategic insight.
In hindsight, those questions — asked live, in real conversation, not on a form — surfaced more than any survey I’d ever seen. A form invites a checkbox answer. A live conversation invites a pause, a follow-up, a moment where someone says something they hadn’t planned to say.
Simplicity created safety. Safety created honesty.
One question, in particular, is where the real gold tends to live:
“What are your pet peeves?”
What surfaced wasn’t about any single company — it was about service providers in general: inconsistent service experiences across teams, frustration with slow turnaround on time-sensitive requests, being told “no” before anyone had actually looked into the issue, hearing about a new product from a mutual client before hearing about it directly. None of it was aimed at us specifically. But it brought to light exactly what mattered most to our partners — and what it would take to keep them satisfied.
None of that shows up in a satisfaction survey. It shows when someone is asked directly, in a live conversation built for candor, with no scorecard attached.
That’s where the gold lives — not in the big strategic questions asked in every quarterly review, but in the small, specific frustrations nobody thought to ask about directly.
None of this is just personal experience. There’s real research behind why asking about frustration works better than asking about satisfaction.
Matthew Dixon’s research for The Effortless Experience, drawn from tens of thousands of customer interactions, found that delighting people barely moves the needle on loyalty. Customers whose expectations were merely met were nearly as loyal as those who were wowed. Friction, not delight, was what actually predicted whether someone stayed or walked away.
Service interactions were found to be four times more likely to drive a customer away than to keep them — far outweighing anything delight could offset.
The same logic holds for advisory boards. Asking “how satisfied are you?” rarely surfaces the friction quietly eroding a relationship. Asking about pet peeves does.
There’s a second idea worth borrowing here, from Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done framework: people don’t just want more of what they already have — they’re trying to get past something in their way. A pet peeve is often the clearest window into exactly that. Not what someone wants, but what’s blocking them from getting it.
Two different bodies of research arrive at the same place practice already knew: the friction people don’t mention is often more revealing than the satisfaction they do.
Worth asking, next time you’re gathering feedback: are you asking in a live conversation — or just collecting checkboxes?
This is the second story in a new series on what makes advisory boards and councils actually work — for the organizations that host them, and the members who serve on them.
Originally shared on LinkedIn