I would like you to imagine the following. You are a private investigator. Your firm has been engaged to conduct an investigation into the current whereabouts of a woman. The client has provided limited details – the client only knows that the subject was named Ana Clara Beatriz and was last known to be living in Chickasha, Oklahoma, around 20 years ago. Chickasha, Oklahoma is a small town of just under 20,000 people roughly 30 miles the other side of Oklahoma city from Stillwater. Ana Beatriz is understood to be older than 50 years of age. The client wants to locate the subject female as she is entitled to an inheritance and today is the deadline to make contact with her. The client is happy for you to make contact with the subject if possible/necessary in the circumstances.

Your team has conducted detailed database and open source searches under the name Ana Clara Beatriz and there is only one listing that could be found. It is a land title document showing that a female with the name of the subject co-owns a property in Chickasha with other persons. Given the fact this is an uncommon name and the location is correct, you are certain this is the subject. Your team has tried all methods to contact the subject at the address but it appears she does not currently live there as there is a family renting the property currently. The family and the real estate agent have advised they do not know the current whereabouts of the subject but she used to live at the property and she is alive. The real estate agent mentioned that some or all of the co-owners of the property are understood to be in South America. Your team advised you that they could not find contact details for the other co-owners.

You do not have the time or the budget in the investigation left to conduct any other detailed searches. Who could you call in Chickasha who might know the subject and who might be able to put you in touch with her? The names on the title document are:

Ana Clara Beatriz
Maggie Aisling Connolly
Perlah Tiuseco
Maria del Rosario
Marija Horvat

Have a think about it and I’m going to tell you the answer later.

When I was younger, I used to get into disagreements with people in circumstances where I knew I was right but I had no way to prove it. Sometimes, I became angry with these people and perhaps with myself because I didn’t have a way to convince them that they were wrong even though I knew that was the case.

As chance would have it, at age 30 I happened to move to an area in Sydney, the city in which I live, where an old private investigation firm operated. I applied for some work experience and hit it off with the owner Warren. So, after a variety of roles in other industries, including a stint teaching English in Japan with Oklahoma State University’s very own Kenneth Kern, I became a private investigator. This role as an investigator afforded me the opportunity to actively test my grasp of the truth on a daily basis and to substantiate my findings. While I’m not necessarily better at convincing people that I’m right, I am comfortable that I know the limits of my knowledge and, within that area of knowledge, I know what is true and what is not. Uncovering the truth is like learning a new sport or language – it needs to be done regularly and fairly intensively for a while in order to build up one’s skill level to an acceptable level. Given that our societies are now very fraught over what constitutes misinformation, it seems to be a strange thing that most people are rarely ever given logical strategies or methodologies that help them practically identify a relatively abstract concept like the truth. In any event, over the fifteen years in which I have been involved in investigations, I have developed some principles that I believe can help anybody uncover the truth and I’d like to talk about those principles today. And incidentally, after I started at the private investigation firm with Warren, I discovered how lucky I’d been to land the role – he showed me the next job applicant who mentioned in his application that he was a psychic investigator. Warren’s response was very terse, “You have failed the first test by not knowing I wouldn’t be interested in hiring you.”

I decided to make truth the focus of my speech because I believe identifying the truth is one of the essential components of making good decisions. Consequently, making good decisions is an important part of becoming a good leader over the long term. Identifying the truth is certainly not the only leadership characteristic but, in addition to luck, hard work, resilience and other factors, making the right decisions once you are in possession of the facts will help determine the path you follow in life. And if you can’t always make good decisions, it’s perhaps even more important to avoid making bad decisions that could lead to terrible outcomes. A true leader is able to weigh considerations without being unduly affected by any single one of them and, similarly, is able to see his or her emotions in the context of the broader circumstances.

I believe that bad leaders are negligent towards the truth and that evil leaders deliberately obfuscate the truth. As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” I’m going to quote some people today – this is not necessarily a sign that I share a worldview with these people, it’s merely to convey that I agree with their sentiment in this particular respect. Good leaders can identify what is required to further the particular cause they are tasked to handle and determine whether the available resources are sufficient for that purpose. They can contextualise requirements. They can identify opportunities and limitations. They can be honest with themselves about whether goals are being achieved. Now, it has been possible and it remains possible to be a leader without regard to the truth however, that is becoming harder and harder in the age of information and I believe it will become harder still in the future.

Some of you may be natural decision makers or leaders and may already have sophisticated processes for making good decisions, perhaps without even knowing it. You have an advantage but even excellent decision makers sometimes make mistakes – Warren Buffet is considered one of the best investors in history but he has made bad financial decisions that have been costly.

While we’re quoting investors, Stanley Druckenmiller, another well respected figure, said that everyone gets it wrong sometimes, but it’s a matter of how much you lose when you’re wrong and how much you gain when you’re right, so you need to go big when you have conviction. I would add to that that you need to err on the side of caution when you do not have very strong conviction. Erring on the side of caution is one of the principles I mentioned earlier that I’m going to raise today. I spend a lot of my working hours dealing with people who have made bad decisions. Often, these are people who have relied significantly on emotional decision-making in personal or business affairs and this has created problems which they now need to solve.

Let me clarify my thoughts here. Emotion is a very important factor in leadership and business. For example creative people, marketers and salespeople all rely on emotions to guide them, whether it be to craft an interesting story for an advertisement, motivate colleagues or foster an emotional connection with potential clients. Our gut helps us determine what we’re passionate about, where we belong and who we enjoy spending time with. Political leaders work to activate the emotions of voters because they know that emotional connections often override logical considerations. Jeff Bezos, one of the most successful business operators in history, stated once that “All of my best decisions in business and in life, have been made with heart, intuition, guts, not analysis.” What I’m doing here today is speaking about those times when your intuition has failed you or not adequately solved the problem yet or when you have an important, strategic decision to make with serious consequences and you want to consider all the options. If emotion isn’t working, try to find the truth. And if finding the truth isn’t working, try to find the emotion. If you can find a way to objectively discern the truth when it matters, you’ll have an advantage over a lot of other people who trust their feelings alone. After all, we don’t all have the business intuition of Jeff Bezos and, to be honest, I wonder if he’s recalling things accurately as he elsewhere said that he started Amazon as a way to find a business plan that would make sense in the context of the 2300% growth the internet was experiencing in the 1990s. This sounds like logical reverse engineering to me but I’ll let you make your own mind up about that.

So I’ll outline now my three main principles for uncovering the truth.