My mother is a pathological liar. As you might imagine, this made growing up really confusing and weird sometimes. As an adult, I love her, but I don’t trust a single thing she says. This is absolutely exhausting to deal with. So I learned to rely on evidence that things actually happened the way she claimed. And I learned that when evidence is hard to come by, the next best approach is getting multiple outside perspectives to make it more likely I’ll notice any contradictions.
I hope I’m pretty well-adjusted by now, but I definitely didn’t escape unscathed. My sister and I both independently adopted a different maladaptive pattern in early adulthood. We refused to lie. We both knew firsthand how much it sucked to be lied to and were determined never to inflict that on anyone else. As you might also imagine, adding this constraint to our stereotypically dramatic teenage social lives made them that much harder.
Some advice I’ve seen repeated is that telling the truth is freeing and you should do it more. My current understanding is that this is good advice because most people tell the truth something like 98% of the time. If that’s the case, telling the truth 99% of the time probably will make your life significantly better. But I can personally report that going from telling the truth 100% of the time to telling the truth 99% of the time makes life so much easier that I can’t even begin to compare it.
All of this is to say that, at first through circumstance, then later through affinity and profession, I highly value truth-seeking. As with many deeply held personal values, it took me a while to learn that not everyone shares this value. It took me longer still to learn that sometimes there’s a lot of wisdom in not saying things that are nonetheless true and relevant to the current situation.
I’ve been an engineer and a consultant. One factor being effective in both fields has in common is that important decisions should be based on ground truth. And ground truth is not straightforward to get. On the engineering side, you can see shades of this in successful companies’ push toward data-driven decision making in the early 2010s. Each profession involved in a business has its own accumulated knowledge — this particular copy improves conversions, sales are about relationships, don’t write incriminating things in emails — all based on prior experience, and often in conflict. Part of the reason behind the conflicts is that what’s actually true changes over time. That is, while the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether Aristotle or Galileo are inferring them, the laws of society change over time. Slavery is bad. Kids should stay in school. Women should be able to vote and own property. Especially in the last 200 years, what people know and how people act has been a moving target, and accumulated wisdom can easily become invalidated without anyone noticing. The best way I know to counteract this tendency is to measure thoughtfully and carefully, then trust and doubt your measurements in equal measure.
On the consulting side, the problem is even worse, because people have an vested interest in misrepresenting the truth. If you’re a manager, you can walk the floor and see for yourself what customers and employees are doing and saying. But most managers lean on their reports’ testimony. If you’re a director, that’s a lot harder. It’s much easier to just ask your managers what’s true and mentally average it out. And if you’re an executive, it’s harder still. All that you have to work with is multiple levels of direct reports selectively reporting just the parts of the truth that make them look good. One of the most effective things you can do as a management consultant is convince your clients that they’re not getting the full truth and it’s making their decisions worse, then suggest ways for them to get closer to it.
Galileo is legendary for recanting his heretical belief in heliocentrism under penalty of inquisition, only revealing his true belief on his deathbed. Obviously the Earth doesn’t move; anyone can see that. His legendary last words were “e pur si muove”, typically translated as “and yet it moves”. As with George Washington and the cherry tree, which was supposedly only three hundred years ago, this was a legendary event. It’s probably not true. But it can nevertheless be a source of inspiration. Fiction is often better at this than fact. It certainly inspires me. When times seem tough and I can’t see a clear path forward, I remember: e pur si muove. And yet it moves. You can declare me a heretic and imprison me. And it may take a hundred years or more. But the truth will out.