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“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
George Bernard Shaw
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“Perception is a dynamic conflict between the attempts of an outer world to impose an actuality on us and our efforts to transform this actuality into a self-centered perspective.
Perception is a confrontation between an inward-directed vector of external reality compelling awareness and an outward-directed vector of physiological, cultural, and psychological transformation.
Where these vectors clash, where they balance each other, is what we perceive.”
Source: Understanding Conflict and War – Volume 1: The Dynamic Psychological Field
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Look. Far too often we speak of truths in absolutes and, even worse, suggest an individual fact represents truth. Both of these things are actually the nemesis of truth.
Truths are dependent upon knowledge and, well, knowledge is not only contextual to situations but is also evolving as new learning occurs. Truth is often contextual, often situation-specific, and often can take on a slightly different hue when viewed by different people. In other words, truth is emergent.
Let me define how I view facts, knowledge and truth (and their relationship).
- Facts. Facts are everywhere. an individual fact is nice to know but, in isolation, does not represent a full truth.
An absence of a fact is typically the root of any conspiracy theory (or false argument). “There is no proof, it is not” never trumps “there is proof that it is.”
- Knowledge. Facts, combined, create knowledge. Opinions, & conspiracy theories, combine *coincidental* facts, not correlated facts. knowledge are *correlated* facts combined. coincidental is lazy. correlation takes work & thought.
- Truth. Truth is a coherence of knowledge (combinations of facts) into a cohesive unit of facts. This means that truth adapts to changing knowledge (not individual facts).
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“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
André Gide
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“Truth” is rarely are solid black & white. Truth is often contextual, nuanced and often slippery to get a hold of. Now. Let’s not confuse facts with truth. Lots of facts exist. And in a mutually exclusive environment someone can hold up a fact as a single-minded fragile truth. The difficulty is that everything is connected with everything and a single fact does not ever live in a world solo. It rubs elbows within a community of other facts. And as they rub against each other they create, well, truths. Truth is a combination of facts.
That said. The simplest use of facts is, well, to use one fact to make a conclusion. 99.9% of the time one fact is not reflective of a conclusion. Yet. We people are pretty persistent in doing this. the problem with this is, in isolation, that fact can be many things to many people leading to many possible conclusions depending on “where you stand.” If I were particularly harsh I would suggest of you hold only one fact with your conclusion it is an opinion, not a truth.
The next most common use of facts is linear logic. This fact plus this fact equals this truth. Or maybe call it a “if this, and this, then that” logic. This combinatorial usage is pretty relentlessly persistent in the world mostly because it appeals to our ‘common sense’ instinctual logic. To be fair, if you stack this, ‘buildable logic’ it is slightly better. That said. 99.9% of the time you are screwed if you believe this represents ‘accepted truth.’ Why? Revisit the simplest use of facts, but double the potential pain. Each of the individual facts could be viewed a gazillion different ways by an infinite number of people and the “this + this” is no longer additive. The codependency makes this an extremely fragile logic.
The follow-up to linear logic is fact storytelling. This is where you connect a number of facts that logically conclude in a truth. This is an incredibly effective way of communicating a ‘truth’ in a way that not only appears logical, but sounds good. Once again, revisit point one. This sounds good, but is also extremely fragile in that a story begins to fall apart if one thing is disputed. But this is where this one gets a bit crazy. The conspiracy fact storytelling. This is the “go-to” technique on cable TV opinion shows. This is where they pluck any number of random facts, which in isolation may be technically true, and then combine them in a very tenuous connective storyline in order to make the grand conclusion that “if all these things are true, this has to be the conclusion.” This one is wacky, but unfortunately highly effective in creating a perception of a ‘truth.’ I will note this is extremely difficult to destruct effectively because the facts are so often random eliminating one simply leaves a number of others in this mosh pit of non-associated facts for the conspiracy to fall back on. I will also note this is not healthy for society.
Lastly is ‘bounded truth.’ This is what you learn in debate classes or any logic classes. You triangulate, or box, multiple facts so the conclusion resides WITHIN the space of the connected facts. Its “if these four things truly exist, within this space resides the truth.”
Which leads me to the title of this piece: truth can simultaneously be contextual and timeless. Bounded truths reside in a world of facts and other truths. Any, and all, of these things can change, but if the ‘boundary facts’ do not, the context has not ultimately changed the principles of that truth. It becomes timeless … until the boundary facts change (as facts have a tendency to do at some point).
This all means truth is often elusive. In that I mean, if you care about truth, you are always in the pursuit of truth as facts replace facts (as facts tend to do).
Now. I want to be careful. Yes. There is truth in the world. Even if some facts change all they do is change the shape of most truths, not make them ‘untruths.’ I do believe we sometimes forget that. Simply because a fact changes does not make the whole become irrelevant. It can, but most times it does not.
I believe rather than discussing truth, or a truth, as static we should refer to it in, well, progress terms. The pursuit of truth is one of progress. Things may arc toward truth (assuming there is active involvement in the pursuit of), but that arc is not smooth nor does it actually move in one direction. Truth, itself, is uneven in that in its combination of facts those facts can reside in the past, present and future as well as within the truth itself and ‘with-out’ (correlative connectedness). Truth is, well, very often emergent therefore, you can deal with many wrong turns, stops (which look like dead ends but aren’t really), doom loops and a variety of backtracking trips. All in all, though, things continue moving toward a Truth that changes. And Truth changes in some unexpected and unpredictable ways. Being blind, or remaining purposefully ignorant to that, shifting of truths can cost you, well, Truth itself.
But the real point to this is that someone without YOUR knowledge is more likely to teach you something completely new than someone who shares your knowledge.
Anyway.
I would suggest that Truth is a puzzling maze for anyone to navigate — good person or bad person.
- Facts come and go. We have as many of them floating around as stars in the sky.
- Knowledge demands some creativity in combination of facts (think seeing constellations in a night sky), some hard work (to gather the most appropriate facts) and some wisdom (to discard less relevant facts).
- Truth demands active learning and a tightly held, loose grip on individual truths themselves.
- Truth is often fragile. This means it demands some rigor to protect it from opinions.
It was Alvin Toffler who said “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” In other words, literacy is an ability to absorb learning, and understanding, and adapt. So maybe you don’t do it at ‘speed’ , but you are an evolving understander. And then this is where speed comes into play. I do not believe the world is actually moving any faster than it has ever, even in business, but I will say that the faster you understand something; the faster you can do something. So the only reason the world may appear to be moving faster is that with the ubiquity of most information, the ones who ‘speed understand’ just move faster. Circling back to my opening question, the reality is that their intelligence is contingent to the environment.
I have purposefully harped on ‘intelligence isn’t the output, it’s the correct input’ because any output is only as good as what is put into it. This is a universal truth when it comes to humans and minds. Once again going back into the wayback machine, 1962 in fact, Doug Engelbart wrote a piece called “
But new products are really important to existing businesses in that profits from new products tend to account for a substantial amount of the bottom line of businesses (note: there is a point to be made here about efficiencies and squeezing out profit from existing products in the market but that is for another day). We have all seen the simplistic surveys online showing “reasons why new products fail” as if CPG companies haven’t studied new products in depth. It’s a bit crazy. So, having pulled out an old folder with a bunch of notes scribbled in it about new products from my experience with P&G and other companies, let me say some things about innovations and new products. To be clear. I will share some dated information that I am too lazy to update mostly because I am 90% confident, in principle, the conclusions are the same today as they were then.
Technology is actually learning a lesson that the Consumer Packaged Goods industry learned a long time ago. More products can mean more sales, but you have to be smarter about your new product that you offer to the public. In 1964 there were about 1,300 new product introductions in supermarket/drug stores. In the early 1980s the packaged goods industries were introducing around 3000 to 5000 new products a year. By the 1990’s, we saw this number jump to about 18,000 to 20,000 and now we were over 25,000 a year. To be clear. Maybe only about 10% of new product introductions are truly new; for the most part they are extensions or additions to existing products/product lines (see opening image). The incredible thing about this phenomenal growth during that period (1960 to 2000ish) is that failure rates, while high, did not increase. It seems like consumers were finding space in their lives for five to 10 times more products per year than they were in maybe 1980. This suggests that the market likes to experience experiments as well as have been convinced specialty or ‘niche use’ has efficacy value. It’s like the culture has grasped the nature of change and finds value through experimenting with new products. But every business needs to remember with as much as 40%+ of new product ideas hitting the trash can, it’s just tough to swallow the failure rates and invest real money. In fact, I remember a number that there was an estimated 46% of all the resources allocated to product development and commercialization by US firms are spent on products that are cancelled or fail to yield an adequate financial return. There was an old study with some rough splits of innovation costs across stages in the new product process but basically it suggested for every $1million spent on product innovation, roughly only $150,000 is spent on exploration and screening research or even idea generation, i.e., the initial attempts to qualify the idea. This is kind of nuts. This also suggests ideas searching for a market rather than a market defining an idea. This whole section is something technology folk should ponder long and hard.
In the early stages of any new product project, we make many assumptions in order to justify the project.
The reality is the state of work has improved pretty significantly over the past century or so despite rampant Taylorism (partially because Taylorism DID improve overall business conditions for the worker). Today’s work, generally speaking, is less tiring and of shorter duration. The challenge is the other side of the Taylorism coin sapped work of substance, workmanship and meaning. Business, for the worker, became a relatively aimless pursuit of promotions or milestones where a worker often found themselves feeling relatively useless within a callous business environment tied to a clock. The way business was conducted only created worker resentment (in terms of meaning and later in money as inequalities increased) as one’s labor fell further and further away from any kind of personal craftsmanship. The reality was business began demanding different qualities in people than people would normally have brought to their work. This dissonance mandated the absence of the intrinsic humanness and the presence of only the extrinsic tools and labels. Work became subordinate to “necessity” and the ends (not the means). Along with this have arisen new technologies. These technologies have effective new uses, but they also come with new risks and challenges to business. In fact, many of these non-manufacturing/machine technologies raise questions about if and how not only AI technologies should evolve, but how all technology should evolve with regard to its effect on people. One could argue the only way to be able to design a better future of work, we will need to not only understand the threats but need to understand the AI systems themselves and how they work ON and With people (we should do the same with machines too). This will almost be a mandate as AI tools begins to help us make more and more types of decisions. As exciting as this technology is with great potential for good it also has the potential to disrupt the work as we know it today, hence, the workers as we know them today. If we are to steer the technologies between the benefits it can bring and the challenges it can create, business needs to seriously think about and build a set of mindsets, behaviors, attitudes, and standards that can guide the development of these technologies. You may note I did not suggest government regulation for policies because while they will be important in the future the most important aspect of the future of business and technology will be the involvement of humans themselves.
It is lazy to suggest worshiping growth is where business went wrong. Growth, in many aspects, is good. The ‘wrongness’ is actually found more in, well, a constant desire for consistently more. What I mean by that is once you have attained a 15% margin, that becomes the standard. Lower means “you are doing something wrong” and higher means “you have done something well (and we should do more of it because this is the new standard).” If you grew 3% last quarter, less than 3% is bad. If your stock price hits X++, anything lower is bad. And maybe even worse is that within a growth mindset, maintaining where you are is bad. Everything is a stair step upwards or, well, you are getting worse in this business world. That is nuts. It is nuts because in order to maintain this kind of growth mindset you need to make sacrifices elsewhere (as I noted back in 2013 in 
The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?
Some ‘don’t ever want to’ for fear of the unknown. On a personal note, despite all the things that I have done that may appear risky I can develop as long a list, if not longer, of things I didn’t do — for whatever reason (some good, some bad). It reminds me of something:
ourselves these are way stations on our way to getting somewhere. They are not. they are simply parking benches along some path someone else has built where they suggest you sit and rest and think about how you’ve attained something (but, if you look closely, you’re not really sure it was something you wanted to attain in the first place or if it is even representative of progress you truly value).
your roaming restlessness. And you may actually fall in love with just being restless. But you may find yourself overwhelmingly happy wherever you end up (even though you may not have been specifically aiming there). Now. Some business people reading this may think “this guy is nuts.” And they may be right. But I would argue most business leaders, the good ones, may not be able to specifically articulate where they want to go, but they have a general sense of the scenario they envision their business in that would equate success (
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Establishing a business Vision seems to be a lost art these days. It has been replaced by the misguided Purpose and, well, it really hasn’t been a very productive decade or so for business thinking. I can’t really blame Purpose because it simply filled in a hole that some absurd Vision discussions had created. Let me be clear. A good business vision is very similar to the concept of a 
Conceptually, context is everything, pragmatically, the situation is everything and all exist within a Vision. A context has infinite aspects while a situation has some finite aspects. i am consistent in how I point out that 99.9999999% of situational decisions are finite in nature – WITHIN a relatively infinite world of possibilities (unforeseen consequences beyond a horizon). So, pragmatically, a situation demands ‘decision sight’ in order to diagnose the most effective strategy (and, yes, I am suggesting each decision is a strategy in and of itself) and the Vision offers a ‘sight line.’
to thinking about a vision as an endeavor too often it is thought of as a grandiose transformative project to remake not only the business, but the dynamics of the market the business exists within. It is often positioned as a panacea that will wipe away the complexity of business. This is just begging for disappointment. In view of the current economic business dynamics, as well as experiences that all of business has had over at least the last decade or two, grand transformative changes are few and far between. But this doesn’t mean that we can allow vision development to go by the wayside if we ever expect to transcend the uncertainties and challenges of a constantly changing business environment. Look. I have suggested 
So there you have it, a checklist that quite simply could make you famous (honestly). Oops.
Anyway. I would suggest the perfect formula for just about anything good in life, and business, is when you can inextricably tie strategy to tactics and tactics to strategy within a healthy mindset. Basically, if you can embed your strategy into each and every task or action that means everything you do is contributing to the objective you aspire to and provide some tangible substance to your mindset.