The Clarity You Need In Uncertain Times Begins With Simple Truths

There’s a line written long ago by Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence coauthors, a phrase we know by heart, but now, more than ever, need to remember: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Those seven words and the list of truths they preceded (e.g. being created equal, having inalienable rights, etc.) weren’t penned as poetic hyperbole. They were the result of taking stock in a deeply uncertain time. They enabled a necessary return to what was core, lasting, and vital. Those self-evident truths were nothing short of a call to attention and a guide to action–not for a distant king, but more importantly to every colonist in a fledgling America. Jefferson’s idea of simple truths weren’t a map telling Americans how to go forward. They were a compass. Simple truths still are.

These times in which we live now are troubled too. As leaders, as organizations, as people, we have been upended in countless ways by the uncertainty in our midst. In such an environment, our tendency is to aim our efforts at fighting the fires immediately before us. In the founders’ day, those daily fires took form as unfair taxation, unreasonable search and seizure, and rising the volatile waves of an economic engine at the whim of a mercurial king. To be sure, dealing with the daily threats of uncertain times is necessary. And for a time, that’s where the colonists put their energies. But it’s easy to inadvertently establish a cycle of fighting the immediate and, even if unintentionally, put off thoughts about how to navigate the future, not just ‘someday,’ but right now. Though it promises short-term gain, it’s inevitably a no-win strategy. Breaking free of it is where simple truths come in.

Before you go looking for your own simple truths, it helps to have an idea of what to look for. In my book on the truth, patterns, and key success factors behind creative genius, The Language of Man, I offered the following simple guidelines for arriving at simple truths: 

1. Simple truths are shared. They are something everyone have access to and, at their core, knows to be true.
2. They are inextinguishable as well. They may get covered over at times by the day-to-day of how works gets done, but they stubbornly and thankfully remain and resurface.
3. What’s most true forms into patterns. Over time, even in uncertain times, simple truths remain, regardless of application or even who leads. Truths that don’t may be one person’s truth, but they are not the simple truths we seek for reorienting a team.
4. Simple truths are not rules. As true and consistent as they are however, simple truths are underpinnings, points of wisdom, and ongoing guideposts for our journey, current and future, not a recipe. 

To get a deeper sense of what a simple truth is, think about what leaders and their organizations typically turn to instead when things go haywire and the unexpected keep surfacing. They look to the past and look for the tried and true –the business plan that worked in another time, the familiar measures of performance, the execution details they know by heart. Yet comforting as these things can at first feel, every single one is based on facts and assumptions that uncertainty has a nasty habit of obliterating. There is, however, a powerful alternative.