Once you see that an answer is not serving its question properly anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle.
They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.
You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much work and energy invested on them. They feel so important, so full of themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial question!
The hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where to dig. An effective interview is more like a friendly interrogation. We don’t want to learn what customers think about the product, or what they like or dislike — we want to know what happened and how they chose... To get those answers we can’t just ask surface questions, we have to keep digging back behind the answers to find out what really happened.
Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.
Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?
The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media.
...There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.