What Would Happen If You Said What You Really Think?

My Implied Accusation Is That We Don't Tell The Truth

Or said another way, I am saying we lie, and we lie about the fact we lie – often even to ourselves.

You’re lied to 10 to 200 times a day, and a stranger will lie to you three times in the first 10 minutes of a conversation. That’s unsettling news, but according to a TED Talk by Pamela Meyer, we only pretend to be against lying. Because obviously, we’re all, to some extent, covertly supporting lies by propagating them.

In a sense, we’ve built our whole world around lies, and that’s an idea that’s quite literally mapped out by this visualization of Meyer’s talk, created by Ben Gibson, co-founder and art director of Pop Chart Lab, in collaboration with the team at TED.

What's The Cost of Lying In An Organizational Setting?

I am going to ignore the obvious cost that come for lying that is a cover up for fraud and other criminal behavior. But what about the lying that we do daily by, for example: 

• By avoiding difficult conversations
• By talking around the elephant in the room
• By agreeing with a decision that we think is wrong only to covertly undermine it later
• By gossiping to others instead of directly to the person we have a complaint about
• By making excuses and justifying a mistake or failure instead of acknowledging it

It is not hard to work out that a group of people who have a shared practice of lying and (implicitly) agreeing to being lied to hugely sub-optimalize their capacity to produce desired results. 

What Would We Have To Give Up To Have Authentic Communication?

Can you imaging an organization in which open straight and honest communication was the order of the day. For example we'd have to give up:

• Hiding our real feelings so as to avoid upsetting someone/anyone
• Being inauthentic disguised as being nice, being polite
• The results we want in favor of the best we can get
• Trust as a value in use – we'd have to give up trust if we are lying and being lied to all the time.

We Lie, And We Lie That We Lie, Except – Not Always

If we knew that humans lie, and lie that they lie – but not always, wouldn't it be a normal and natural part of each conversation, each interaction with colleagues, friends and family, to probe to discover, is this the truth, or is this one of the occasions he's lying? 

Wouldn't we be more intentional so as not to settle for the untruthful answer and press for, what's the truth, really?

What about a practice to rehabilitate integrity – to make truth telling an organizing principle?