What's Happening? - Truth as Emergent

5. One person doesn’t own the truth, the group does.

This is one element of speaking about "truth" that gets people a little queasy...they start thinking, "what's truth?", "your truth is different from my truth," "everybody's got their own truth," and, the next thing you know, nothing's true anymore.

Well, that's not true.

Yes, no one individual has the whole story, the whole truth. That's true. The whole story is a composite, the convergence of many points of view. That's true.

But, you don’t have to talk to everybody to find out the truth. That feels true, too.

Why? Because, the truth is an emergent pattern, one that you can discover more quickly than you think. What's an emergent pattern? It's an experiece of order, a coming together that is revealed through experience. When the truth emerges, it reveals itself in this way.

Think about talking to people about their experience with a person or a company. When you engage in the right kinds of conversations, you soon become familiar with that pattern.

In those conversations, people begin to describe their interactions, their feelings and their judgments. You ask questions and probe for descriptive clarity and richness. Eventually, the truth of their experience emerges.

You then speak with other people, and begin to see the pattern shifting, colored in different tones, with different aspects emerging and receding. If you've chosen the people you're speaking with carefully (that is, if they represent an adequate slice of those who have experiences with the person or company you're exploring that all agree are typical) you'll have a profile that depicts the truth of dealing with that individual or company within ten conversations.

Will that profile be complete? No. Will it be true? Yes. It will be true in that it will depict the key elements, the essence, of dealing with that person or company in their typical settings...true enough to begin having conversations about what that truth means to that company or that person.

The key then becomes engaging the meaning of that truth. We'll look at that tomorrow.