My wife and I have been watching and re-watching the John Adams HBO series on DVD. Somewhere in the bowels of Netflix, a video jockey continues to wonder why the Drake household pays $25 a month for a set of DVDs that can be purchased for $30. The series has been incredibly inspirational to me for a variety of reasons, but principally among them is contained in the first disk of the series. John Adams is called upon to defend a collection of British soldiers who fire into a crowd. This became known as the “Boston Massacre.” Adams successfully defends the soldiers based on eye-witness accounts, evidence collected at the scene, and other indisputable facets of the situation. In his closing statement, Adams speaks frankly to what is likely a highly biased jury stating,
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
What struck me was the notion that facts and evidence are indisputable, immutable conditions that construct our interpretation of the world.
Facts are stubborn things. When faced with facts and evidence it becomes difficult for others to argue biased points of view. There may be disagreements about particular modes of evidence such as unrecorded conversations, but the existence of activity (or the meta-data) may be proof enough.
The Power of Honest Collaboration
At Deloitte, we leverage an internal wiki called D-Wiki. When our deployment team was developing the rules that would govern the environment, one of the pillars I lobbied heavily for was the principle of “honesty.” At the time, this was strange to many of my colleagues for me to feel so strongly about. Drawing my past client experience, I knew that people lie for lots of reasons and not all of them bad. Some people do not want to be brutal with their feedback, some people want to protect the equities of their project, and others are not informed of the full facts so they insert their own. Well, facts are stubborn things. The exposure of the truth in highly complex situations requires a deliberate focus on participant honesty and integrity. We crowd source our knowledge creation because it brings facts, data, and evidence to bear on a problem and improves our service delivery to our clients.
But People Still Lie . . .
One interesting thing about crowd-sourcing as a integrity/honesty building technique is that we still see participants “spin” information. The traditional crowd-sourcing theory is that people care about what they write or say and try to protect their digital reputations. This is largely true and has been proven in actual case studies. What is interesting to me is that there are still people that think they can be deceptive or tell half-truths in a transparent environment. The beauty of crowd-sourcing is its self-correcting nature. Lies or inaccuracies are exposed quickly and can be redressed with equal measures of speed.
Even in a digital age with mountains of data and mixed motives it seems that Adams’ got it right way back in 1772.
