On Tuesday I did two sessions at the CalSAE conference, one of which was titled "Truth-Telling in Challenging Times (and Challenging Situations). It was the first time I did this session, and I was happy with how it went. I also wrote an article about that topic that is coming out in the May/June issue of The Executive, CalSAE's magazine. I hope to provide a link to the article soon, but for now, here are the key points I made about the truth.

I think in organizations we have some myths about truth telling. We emphasize truth as NOT telling lies, we tend to view the truth as the result of focused, objective facts, and we assume that truth is primarily driven by the integrity of the individual. While lies, objective proof, and integrity are all important parts of the truth equation, they leave too much out. So I came up with these three points to help us open things up:

• Telling the truth is about furthering learning.
• The truth is a dance between objective fact and subjective experience.
• Culture drives truth-telling more than integrity.

More later.