Everyone needs a Single Source of Truth
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“We need a single source of truth”…says every leader in every organisation, likely more than once, certainly in reference to more than one artefact. In a recent conversation I was able to distil that the leadership of a certain organization, were taking this a step further – extolling the benefits of multiple single sources of truth! 🤣
I’m not trying to be cruel in calling that out. It highlights the immense difficulty in developing a system/process/repository that can be all things for all people; and yet it is so desperately needed…or is it?
Sure, it would make life simpler. If you had one place to go to determine who does what, how they do it, what they did, where it was delivered, how well it was received, what happened next, you and everyone else involved would probably save a ton of time and money (not to mention worry). There are plenty of solutions out there trying to do just that, but none quite work standalone, so the goal is always integration, integration, integration (hotly followed by translation. translation, translation). It could be that this is where GenAI solutions really step up and advance humankind – with integration enablement that anyone can use flawlessly; where references that don’t translate well across platforms are explained in familiar terms as your assistant senses your confusion. The only slight downside is having the ability to trust your friendly neighbourhood AI with all your commercial data - what could possibly go wrong?!
Here's my flip side (I’m always going to have one, or I wouldn’t have anything to write about). In a world where too many people are struggling to make and maintain connections with others, does a system that tells us everything we need to know without ever needing to ask another human being for directions, really provide the best value. I’d say the answer could still be ‘yes’, but only if the time saved on gathering and presenting data is poured into people and relationships, rather than isolated adventures in space.
Every time I discover that I don’t know where to find the thing I need, or even where to start looking, I remind myself that I get to start a conversation with someone new, or revisit with an old friend. I want that conversation to begin with “what have you been up to?”, “what’s the most important thing happening for you right now?”, or just “please tell me I’m not going crazy (or recommend a therapist), because…?”.
So, a single source of truth, might just make the world a lonelier place, unless we are all much more determined to listen and be curious with others. To flip it back around – if we finally get to a single source of truth for all data everywhere, just think how much time it will give us back to spend with each other!
Here are some things I’m reading this week that help me make sense of that:
“How you do anything is how you do everything” – An old and very true saying
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” – EE Cummings
“We habitually misread people and therefore miscommunicate with them. We blame and belittle one another and ourselves because we have not been trained to notice the effect we have on one another or to fluidly shift the ways we communicate to accommodate others. We take for granted that intelligence occurs within our own minds. We don’t realize that it also occurs between us. What keeps us from communicating effectively is that most of us don’t know how to think with people who think differently than we do.” ― Dawna Markova, Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently
Finally, I hope that you remember to make time for yourself, try to take care of others, and search for joy in whatever you’re doing. Don’t worry if you don’t find it every day; just keep looking, just do the work – it’ll come.
Cheers,
Kyle
An AI take on a universal single source of truth - I’m getting the big brother vibe for sure!