It seems that, after all, the story of Henry Ford and the Faster Horse may have been an urban myth. He was of course reported to have said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

In an interesting piece for Harvard Business Review, Patrick Vlaskovits not only questions the evidence that Ford ever uttered the phrase, but more importantly challenges the thinking behind it. The point of the quote is that your customers don't necessarily know what they want or need, or why. It's therefore the role of the innovative genius – like Ford himself – to come up with the disruptive ideas which customers themselves will rarely if ever stumble upon. Vlaskovits identifies a more nuanced lesson by looking forward beyond the glory days of the Model T ("any colour as long as it's black") to the time when Ford's business started to be disrupted by the more flexible approach adopted by General Motors. He agrees that innovators need to do more than simply ask customers what they want but goes on to suggest that they will ultimately fail if, having come up with a "magic recipe" they ignore their customers with their diverse and changing needs.

We agree that the answer is neither to ignore the customer nor simply take at face value whatever they say they want. Sustainable disruption needs to be human-centric and qualitative first. Human-centric because what ultimately matters about a technology is not the technology itself (nor those who invent it), but what it can do for the people who use it. Qualitative First, because successful differentiation comes from serving the customer rather than starting with the numbers. Of course, numbers matter, but as John Kay points out in Obliquity: Why our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly, the best way to a successful business is to focus on what you are trying to do rather than how much you can make from it. Human-centric disruption isn't a cuddly alternative to business success, it's a more holistic, flexible and sustainable way of achieving it.

Customers, or – more broadly – users, don't always know what they need. But that doesn't mean you can't talk to them about their needs, provided you take the trouble to interpret what they are saying and avoid allowing a particular solution to lead the conversation. For example, do people really want a horse or a car, or are they really looking for a way of being able to do a number of things which require them to be in a number of different places? For people as individuals trying to get to work, the solution might seem to be a faster car or wider road, but for the same people as members of a community (eg residents of a town), more open spaces might be a higher priority than more roads.

Henry Ford's genius – while it lasted – was to understand something of what people needed even when they didn't know themselves. Our approach is not to rely only on the genius of the innovator, but to "unleash the creative genius" latent in organisations and their ecosystems. There are essentially two steps:

Whether the goal is a new corporate strategy, a smart city regeneration or a marketing or HR refresh, a human-centric approach ensures that the projects you take forward remain close to the people they're intended for. If Henry Ford were starting out today, what might he have done differently?