Strategygram: The Treachery of Facts

When it comes to creating strategy, we know that the trio of anticipation, assumption and aspiration won’t suffice; to plot our way forward we must rely on that great equivocator, that great deceiver—The Fact—who may turn out to be, to borrow the fourteenth-century words of Chaucer, “the smiler with a knife in his cloak.”

Many a strategic tussle has been lost because the facts weren’t suitably interrogated to cough up their full significance. (As that crafty trial lawyer, Rufus Choate, once noted about cross-examination: “If you don’t break your witness, he breaks you.”)

What is it about the nature of facts that make them resist the artistry of skill striving to extract their entire meaning?

Well, for one thing, there is the plasticity of fact. Any schoolkid knows that a ‘6’ can look like a ‘9’ when viewed from another angle, but what about scientifically tested facts? Surely they should be unambiguous?

It turns out that even verifiable physical facts, sequestered and scrutinised with the rigours of scientific enquiry, can be surprising shapeshifters. Consider light: is it a wave or is it a particle? The answer depends entirely on how you measure it. ‘Facts’ are often just points of view.

A fact is a spring-loaded story because we think in stories. Says Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman: “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” And so, the story that a fact conjures up in our mind—the story that snuggles alongside our preconceptions and pleasures our promptings—is the one we are most likely to fall for.

We aren’t being tricked by the fact; we are being tricked by the story about the fact.

“Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective,” remarks a character in Umberto Eco’s novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. The way we organise facts—the way we connect them—changes the story. 

Cautionary advice about the way we connect facts in our mind is what a Central Intelligence Agency training manual titled Psychology of Intelligence Analysis offers us:

“The principal concern is that if analysts focus mainly on trying to confirm one hypothesis they think is probably true, they can easily be led astray by the fact that there is so much evidence to support their point of view. They fail to recognize that most of this evidence is also consistent with other explanations or conclusions, and that these other alternatives have not been refuted.…They should also consider whether the absence of information is normal or is itself an indicator of unusual activity or inactivity.”

The C.I.A. training manual goes on to recommend posing three crucial questions: If this report had told me the opposite, would I have believed it? If the opposite outcome had occurred, would I have been surprised? If the opposite outcome had occurred, would it have been predictable, given the information that was available?

This, of course, is very much along the lines of what the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper advised: look for disconfirming evidence, because falsifiability is the essence of the scientific process.

Lilian Anekwe, writing in New Scientist, states it this way:

“Suppose a theory proposes that all swans are white. The obvious way to prove the theory is to check that every swan really is white—but there’s a problem. No matter how many white swans you find, you can never be sure there isn’t a black swan lurking somewhere. So you can never prove the theory is true. In contrast, finding one solitary black swan guarantees that the theory is false. This is the unique power of falsification: the ability to disprove a universal statement with just a single example—an ability, Popper pointed out, that flows directly from the theorems of deductive logic.”

Way back in the 1970s, there was a popular tv series called Columbo, in which the eponymous detective, Lieutenant Columbo, played by actor Peter Falk, solves a series of apparently flawless crimes committed by affluent people with faultless alibis.

Unlike many detective series where we don’t know who the criminal is, in this inverted-format tv series, we usually see the culprit committing the crime—the whodunit part—and our fascination, therefore, is in the howcatchem part: how this lowly, blue-collar, homicide detective, with his rumpled beige coat, self-effacing manners, and homely references to his always-off-screen wife, is able to solve the crime, often foreshadowed with that disarming phrase: “Just one more thing.”

For Lieutenant Columbo, the clinching clue is the anomaly, such as: the feather pillow outside the hospital room in Troubled Waters (“They don’t use feathers in pillows in hospitals. They cause allergies. All the pillows in the hospital were made of foam rubber”); or the fountain without running water in Requiem for a Falling Star (“Why doesn’t the fountain run? That bothered me. Yeah, that’s what started to bother me. Why didn’t the water run? Most people like the sound of running water”); or the discrepancy between the victim’s home library which had only country and western music cassettes and the radio in the victim’s car that was set to a classical music station in Blueprint for Murder (“It was just that music thing that bothered me. Carnegie Hall and Nashville. They don’t mix.”)

The context of a fact influences meaning, the comparison with other facts influences perspective, the connection with other facts influences narrative, and the change in circumstances influences the fact’s lifespan.

Which is why, when looking at facts, we recall Benjamin Franklin’s axiom, “If Jack’s in love, he’s no judge of Jill’s beauty” and add our corollary “You can’t judge Jill’s beauty without also considering Jane’s” while contemplating “What is ‘beauty’ and how do you assess it anyway?” and always heeding “Does it really matter here how beautiful someone is?”

After all, if we don’t test our facts, how can we be sure our strategy isn’t counterfactual?

This Strategygram titled ‘The Treachery of Facts’ is part of the Strategygrams series I’ve created where each Strategygram encapsulates one strategic thought in one billboard-style image.

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides pinnable image prompts for brand strategy workouts..

A set of 100 Strategygrams will be publicly released in the coming weeks. If you’d like to know when the set becomes available, direct-message me with your e-mail address.

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