Professional strategists are always asking the question, “what is true?” when evaluating the complicated nature of a business and how its leaders might chart a course for success and prosperity. As it turns out, understanding what is true is also one of the most pressing issues of our day. Knowing what is true impacts every aspect of our lives. This short series of posts is intended to provide one strategy guy’s approach to the subject in the hopes you can use the approach in your life and work, too.

(For those few of you that think there is no such thing as “truth” or “reality”, I can’t help you. You probably need therapy.)

Strategy One: A Model for Truth

“What Is Truth?” – An Imperfect But Hopefully Useful Model To Answer That Question

Figure 1.

To get on the same page, we’ll first attempt to answer Pilate’s¹ now infamous question “what is truth?”. Here’s a model I have shared with clients that can apply not only to the strategy profession, but to our daily lives as well.

There are three aspects to truth². These aspects all work together to form a whole as shown in Figure 1.

1. Facts – These form the very foundation of truth. Without facts, truth cannot be ascertained.
2. Story or Narrative – Story contextualizes facts. Facts must be able to be explained in a coherent, rational story that can be woven together to create a picture of…
3. Reality – Reality is the genuine, accurate, highest form of truth. It is ultimately what we seek, what we are trying to understand. It is represented as a cloud in Figure 1 because it is always a bit hazy and we are incapable of fully comprehending it. (It is shown here separate from and supported by the other two aspects of truth but it actually embodies them both to create a cohesive whole.)

Here are three useful examples of this model being applied in the world today.

1. The Justice System – A crime is committed. We gather evidence (facts) about the crime. Then it is woven into a comprehensible, coherent story the explains the likely reality so we can make a decision. If there are no facts, there can be no cohesive, rational story that reveals reality.
2. The Scientific Method – Science is based on observations (facts) that are woven into a theory (story) that explains as best we can, reality. If we have facts but can’t explain them in a story, we cannot understand reality.
3. A Situation Analysis Done For A Strategy – To determine the current situation we gather facts and data, interview people to get their take (narrative), and create a presentation (story) that tells of the current reality. Our understanding of reality depends on facts woven into a coherent, rational story.

An Example from Strategy: Situation Analysis & Truth

An early step in developing a strategy is to conduct a situation analysis. The primary purpose of any situation analysis is to uncover the actual reality of where a business stands currently with respect to what it wants to achieve. For example, if the business wants to grow, the situation analysis needs to uncover, among other things, how it’s been doing so far in growing. A clear understanding of the reality of the current business situation is necessary for the simple reason that you can’t plot a course for where you want to go if you don’t know where you are now.

How It’s Supposed To Go – Discovering The Truth

Since the goal is to discover the reality of the business situation, ideally you start by collecting the relevant and necessary facts & data. To continue the example, if your goal is to grow the business, then you start by collecting facts, data, and historical trends about revenues, profits, and other factors. You’ll also likely perform various analysis to get a deeper understanding of the facts.

Once you have gathered and analyzed the facts and data, you arrange them in a presentation (story) that accurately describes the current reality. Three steps: facts, story, reality.

How It Really Goes – Truth is Hidden

But that’s not how a situation analysis usually goes. Though you’re looking for facts & data that can be woven together into a cohesive story to explain reality, instead you get snippets of data, a smattering of purported facts, and a whole lot of individual narratives. A narrative is a statement of position on a topic. It may or may not be based in fact. It might not even be cohesive or seem rational. It’s basically an unsupported opinion that may or may not be true. So, you have to vet everything; facts, data, and narratives in order to get to the truth.

Applying The Truth Process Elsewhere – An Everyday Challenge

Sound familiar? Whether you’re a strategist or not, you’re likely familiar with sorting through a vast number of narratives every day wondering what’s really true. Is this nutritional advice really good for me? Should I be taking this medicine the doctor says I should take? Did that really happen the way the media portrayed it? Is any of what I’m hearing based on facts?

On any given day we are overwhelmed with information from hundreds of sources. How do we even sort for what’s relevant? And an even bigger problem these days, IT’S ALL NARRATIVE meaning you have to vet pretty much everything. Are the narratives supported by facts? Do the narratives fit together to create a cohesive story of a likely reality? Or are the narratives unsupported or implausible? To be believed, narratives must be based on foundational truth – facts – but where do I find the time to sort all that out?

When It Comes To Truth, The Problem Goes Even Deeper

Truth is often hidden, obscured, and difficult to find. This can come from unintentional bias, lack of foundational facts, or difficulty in putting the story together to create a clear, accurate depiction of reality. Many scientific discoveries, such as Newton’s laws of motion, were built on both ancient and contemporary knowledge and experimentation over hundreds of years³. Truth was not easy to find.

But truth is also intentionally hidden. People create narratives (statements of position on a subject) to promote an agenda or their preferred picture of “reality”. This happens to a lesser extent in business but it is especially true in media. Many experts believe all media sources create narratives to promote an agenda, sometimes (often?) not only unsupported by facts but contrary to facts.

Additionally, some have claimed that narrative alone is truth. This has led some people to assert that truth is therefore relative. “You have your truth, I have mine” or “That’s true for you but not for me”. This is ridiculous. Narratives may or not be true but they alone are not "truth". At best, they are an aspect of truth. Narratives are relative. Truth is not.

These days, the situation regarding truth is getting even darker. For example, in a process known as retconning (retcon is short for retroactive continuity) the data and facts of the past are intentionally changed to comport with a new, false narrative being asserted as true. Imagine the use of AI to scour the internet realigning “facts” to support a false narrative. Or search engines that promote certain sources of information and demote others for the sake of influencing the narrative “truth” that leads to the construction of a false reality.

Truth is being hidden. Finding truth is one of the biggest challenges we face. To find it, you need a strategy to use a working model for truth. Otherwise, truth will remain elusive and you’ll be building your life on shifting sand⁴ (aka, narratives…).

Summary…

This is what you need to know about Finding Truth – Strategy One.

1. There are three aspects of truth: the foundational facts, the connecting story, and the ultimate reality. They all must fit together. You now have a model.
2. The “truth model” is already in use in society. The justice system, the scientific method, and a strategist’s situation analysis are three examples. The model is not radical.
3. Truth is often hidden. These days it is increasingly intentionally hidden. This makes truth even more difficult to discern and promotes false realities. Using a model is essential.

What Now?

Given the immense volume of data, messages, stories and narratives that need vetting, what’s a person to do? The first strategy is to use a truth model, facts -> story -> reality, to determine what is true. But there are 2 other strategies you also need. Strategy two will be the subject of Part 2 in this series and the third strategy will be explained in Part 3. This is enough to think on for now.

I’m way beyond the length of article most people will read so if you made it this far, congratulations and thank you!

See you next time.

Larry

Footnotes:

1. During the second trial of Jesus before the Roman Governor Pilate (His first trial was an illegal trial before the Jewish religious council), Jesus claims He came into the world to “bear witness to the truth” to which Pilate responds, “What is truth?”. See John 18:37-38.
2. The model for truth was derived from a personal study of truth which also looked into three closely related Greek words in the New Testament of the Bible all often translated as “true” or “truth”. The notion of foundational facts comes from the Greek word aléthés which means “true as it accords with fact” and “what can’t be hidden”. See John 4:18 example. The second Greek word is aléthinos which means “real, genuine” and “what is essentially true – connecting visible (fact) to its underlying reality”. See John 4:37 example. And the third word is alétheia which means “truth of idea” and “true to reality” and [In Ancient Greek culture…] “synonymous for “reality””. See John 8:32 example. Keep in mind I know very little about the ancient Greek language and I’m not purporting to have treated these words correctly. I probably didn’t and that’s not the point I’m making anyway. What I am saying is that these three words provided the stimulus for the creation of my truth model shown above. Others more educated than me can argue whether the words are treated even close to correctly.
3. From the article Isaac Newton at worldhistory.org/Isaac_Newton.
4. See Matthew 7:24-27.