Face the Truth
Leading change starts with seeing clearly. Face the Truth is the practice of finding out what is true before deciding what to do about it.
Why This Matters
The people in an organization make hundreds of decisions a day based on what they believe is true about it. When the leader’s picture differs from theirs, or from what is happening, those decisions compound in directions nobody intended.
Leaders who worked this practice in Think Tank sessions reported the same shift: they stopped reacting to symptoms and started working on causes. One county administrator put it this way: “I realized I’d been solving the wrong problems for two years.”
Seeing clearly is not a hunt for problems. It widens what a leader can perceive, so the changes the leader makes address what is real.
The Core Challenge
Every seat has a limited view, and the limit comes from position. The administrator sees patterns the department heads miss. The department heads, or in a small village the supervisors and the clerk, see realities the administrator cannot reach. Neither view is wrong. Both are incomplete.
Most leadership development starts with vision and goals. Defining what matters comes second. It depends on seeing what is happening, rather than what anyone assumes or hopes is happening.
What This Practice Looks Like
The Blind Spot Question
“What might I not be seeing because of where I sit?” A leader asks it of the people who see the organization from a different seat, and receives the answer without defending. The question rests on a structural fact: every position has limited sightlines. Asked in the open, it makes room for input that would otherwise stay unsaid.
External Influences Mapping
The leader names the forces acting on the organization’s decisions that nobody is tracking on purpose: stakeholder expectations, political dynamics, resource limits, and cultural assumptions. Written down, the list shows which pressures are shaping choices from outside the room.
Environmental Scan
What changed in the operating environment? Workforce expectations, communication norms, political dynamics, and technological shifts are four places to look. The conditions that made a leader’s current patterns succeed may have moved while the patterns kept running.
Diagnostic Questions
Five questions a leader asks of their own seat:
- When did I last go looking for the view of someone who sees the organization differently than I do?
- Which of my assumptions about the team or the organization have gone untested this year?
- If the newest employee could speak freely, what would they tell me that longer-tenured staff would not?
- Which signals am I dismissing because they conflict with what I believe to be true?
- How has the operating environment changed in ways the current approach does not account for?
One conversation to try this week: Ask a direct report: “What’s something about how our team operates that you’ve wondered about but haven’t asked?” Then listen without explaining or defending. The pause before the answer says how safe it is to speak. The answer says what the seat has kept out of view.
Quick Self-Assessment
Three questions that show where the gap is widest:
- When did someone on the team last disagree with me openly? If the answer takes a while, that says something about psychological safety.
- Could my direct reports describe my top three priorities? If the answer is a guess, that says something about clarity.
- What has changed in how I lead in the past two years? If the answer is “not much,” that says something about adaptation.
The Shift Mirror takes these three questions further: a private AI conversation on the gap between what a leader intends and what the organization experiences.
The Shift Mirror
Five questions, one observation, and a private way to experience Face the Truth before deciding whether to go further.
The Connection Forward
Face the Truth is the ground the other three practices stand on. Define What Matters needs a clear view before a priority is chosen. Make It Real needs a complete diagnosis before a system is built on it. Reinforce the Change needs the right signals tracked, or drift goes unseen.
The practice repeats. Conditions keep moving, so a leader returns to it on a rhythm, at the start of each budget season or once a quarter, and asks the question again. The next move is one conversation this week, and a date on the calendar for the next one.
Where is the pressure showing up?
The four practices work together. One of these situations may offer a useful place to begin.
- A decision keeps returning to unresolved priorities or tradeoffs. Begin with Define What Matters
- A priority is understood, but follow-through still depends on reminders or workarounds. Begin with Make It Real
- Progress is visible, but older habits or routines are beginning to return. Begin with Reinforce the Change
The work rarely stays inside one practice. Adaptive leaders draw on all four as a system, starting where the pressure is clearest and returning as conditions change.
Related Reading
More on seeing clearly and expanding perspective.
Rob Duncan, who founded Imagine That Performance, drew the four practices from more than 250 sessions with city managers and county administrators.
If one thing keeps surfacing, it is usually worth thinking through out loud.