Rise and Shine

Fact-based working approach

Ours is a society that still has a hangover of working by guesswork and treating suggestions and assumptions as facts. A lot of information that we come across is neither empirical nor fact-based. And yet, we often make decisions based on such information. If we are to rise and shine, we need to change our approach to how we treat information.

One major source of this problem is that when we don’t know, we quickly jump at asking friends or those who are very close to us. Way back, this approach was probably necessitated by the poor or lack of communication tools. But today, we live in a global village. You can reach almost anyone in no time. So, why not get it from the source?

In our society, people easily create and propagate rumours. Sometimes this is out of malice, other times simply because some people carelessly misunderstand things, extrapolate them wrong and add other information to what they hear and then tell others as if proven truth. But as we grow as professionals, we need to cleanse ourselves of these malpractices. We are now in a global village where certain practices transcend across cultures and countries. We need to adopt the global working culture that is based on facts that can be proved. Even when we rise in management, we need to always be guided by facts, with intuition only supporting what we learn and gather from facts, but with little or no input from rumours, emotions and guesswork.

But how do we deal with serious rumours—should we entirely ignore them? If we get interested or agitated about some rumour, we should work to validate, prove or disprove the rumour before we can adopt any view or take any decisive position or action. In all, we must work with and work through facts and not rumours or guesswork.

Many of us do not pay attention to the details of facts. A lot of times, we simply act on informal information that we come across. We are not prepared to go that extra mile to get the genuine facts from the original sources. This is why we make wrong decisions, make wrong choices and end up with suboptimal achievement. Therefore, now we know how to fix this particular problem. Any important information needs to be validated. We can confirm with the original source. In the case where even the original source may not be relied upon, it is important to conduct a sanity check. Do a rough estimation or benchmark to check if the information you have makes sense.

Even in your employed job, validating facts will take you very far. I know that in the management consulting industry, validating facts is part of their creed. Top management consulting firms such as McKinsey want you to be a person who confirms and validates a question or requirement before you even embark on solving the issue. They must be aware of the unique importance of validating information before it can be used. Typically, in this industry, when they get requirements from a client, they package them and play back to the client so that the customer can confirm that what the management consultant has recorded is correct.

Let us embrace the practice of validating and confirming all the important information. This is the sure way to rising and shinning. All the best as you seek to rise and shine through validating and us of facts!

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