This four-part article explores the nature of truth through the prism of quality, mass media, culture, and art. In part one, we posed the question of why truth matters, and considered how the quality professional’s toolkit can help mine mountains of data to uncover hidden nuggets of meaningful information. In part two, we delved into how media helps and hurts in the quest for truth. Here, in part three, we talk about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and explain why 1950 changed truth and fiction forever.

Sometimes, the truth is not only unknown, but quite possibly unknowable. What does that mean in trying to predict or manage ongoing systemic change?

Fortunately, the U.S. Army has developed an acronym that can help us make sense of a world of apparently conflicting data points. It’s known as VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. When thinking about the nature of reality and truth, the fog of real-time decision making (whether on the battlefield, in the boardroom, or at a fast-approaching highway overpass) calls for a flexible structure that can quickly make order out of chaos. That’s what VUCA is designed to do.

Large systems with lots of real-time velocity tend to be confusing and unstable. Few people’s minds work well under such conditions, so VUCA slows down the process of decision making by relying on anticipation and awareness. That requires a deep and dispassionate analysis of the situation both before entering a state of change, and most importantly, during it. Asking laser-focused questions and pushing for similarly clear answers (given what is, inevitably, a limited set of facts) is key to performing this process well.

We all deal with VUCA all the time; unfortunately, we often run afoul of clarity by guessing or hoping our way toward decisions and/or trusting in the assessments of others who may be inexperienced or deceptive. That’s the way many of us consume and process information: We see a small section of a large picture, don’t probe long enough or hard enough to expand our field of view, and consequently make an impulsive decision about what’s going on and what it all means. That’s a recipe for disaster whether the system is a business enterprise, a battle, a political campaign, or life itself.

VUCA describes a fuzzy world in which all possible outcomes are happening at all possible times. In such an environment, objective truth is of paramount importance even if, strictly speaking, such a thing is almost impossible to determine. Yes, this pursuit will be challenging and never ending, and the results will never be perfect. Yet pursue it we must, for it offers our best hope to lift the fog, if only for a moment, and gain some holistic perspective on reality that can be put to practical use.

The search for truth sometimes evolves in strange and synchronistic ways. Back in 1950, the brilliant quality engineer Joseph M. Juran re-interpreted the Pareto Principle, formerly consigned mostly to the field of economics, by using the concise phrasing of the “vital few” vs. the “useful many.” Many people know this as the “80-20” rule—that 80% of effects, good or bad, come from 20% of causes. Brought down the field of quality, it means that a large number of problems stem from a relatively small number of issues. Finding those vital few causes can be painfully difficult when you have an enormous amount of data to sift through. The truth is out there (or in there, as the case may be) but finding it is never easy. In fact, you might not even recognize it when the truth appears.

In retrospect, 1950 was quite a banner year for truth and ambiguity. While Juran was attempting to codify cause and effect, the noted poker player and junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, anted up and immediately began bluffing in his quest to uncover Communists (real or imagined) in the U.S. government. Meanwhile, half a world away, a little-known Japanese filmmaker named Akira Kurosawa was putting the finishing touches on Rashomon, a motion picture that would bring into sharp focus the very human and very frustrating search for absolute truth.

In brief, this film depicts the murder of a samurai that takes place in medieval Japan. The event is related by the man’s wife, an outlaw, a woodcutter, and the victim himself. All tell a version of the story which contains elements of the truth, and healthy doses of self-interested misdirection as well. Who is deemed trustworthy shifts as the story unfolds, and we gradually come to realize that this deceptively simple story depicts a post-modern, abstract, and relativistic world that has more in common with the paintings of Picasso or the compositions of Stravinsky than the average movie of the era.

In its final moments, Rashomon offers a kind of kaleidoscopic truth, but only in passing. What it’s actual concerned with is faith. We, the audience, find ourselves near the end of the film deeply disturbed by a world in which we can’t ever really know what is and what isn’t. But it turns out that the woodcutter, who is (probably) a thief, also has a sense of morality that redeems both him and us. It turns out that justice and righteousness are the truths that really matter.

Appreciating the absolute necessity of these basic qualities is probably more important that spinning the meaning behind some 448-page report or paring and comparing the arguments for or against mainstream scientific theories or far-fringe belief systems. Wanting or needing something to be true does not make it so, just as denying one’s essential dignity cannot lessen that quality’s vital importance. Some things just are, or are not, regardless of the limited perspective of witnesses.

In the fourth and final part of this series, we tie together the strands of truth by considering who and how we can trust, and why.

BIO:

Mike Richman is the principal of Richman Business Media Consulting, a marketing and public relations company working with clients in the worlds of manufacturing, consumer products, politics, and education. Richman also hosts the web television program NorCal News Now, which focuses on social, economic, and political issues in California. He is a contributor to (and former publisher of) Quality Digest.