When Everyone's Right and Nobody Agrees

🌀🧠Complex Explainer

Mental Mosaic transforms ideas into tools for high-agency leaders.

Six people at the same party. Six completely different versions of what happened.

Not fuzzy details—major plot points. Who said what. Who flirted with whom? What the room felt like.

All six were telling the truth.

This wasn’t a mystery thriller. It was Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell. What began as a search for her biological father turned into something more unsettling: proof that multiple honest versions of the same truth can coexist and contradict.

They always joked that Sarah didn’t look like her dad. Her parents weren’t getting along before she was born. Her mother took an acting job and became the belle of the party circuit. Sarah arrived shortly after. Her mother always insisted Sarah was her father’s daughter.

Years later, Sarah made the film tracing her biological father. But what lingered wasn’t the paternity mystery. It was how memory actually works.

We treat memory like a camera roll. It isn’t. It’s a living document—edited by emotion, identity, and repetition.

Conflict doesn’t always come from lies. Sometimes it comes from two people telling the truth—and meaning different things by it.

The Framework

For leaders, the harder question isn’t who’s lying. It’s about deciding when information arrives secondhand, filtered through people with incentives, fear, ego, and reputational risk.

Map the Emotion

We were underwriting a deal where two partners were locked in a bitter dispute over a past project. The numbers worked. Structure was sound.

Then one executive said the quiet part out loud: “The real risk here is the emotion.”

Ego. Revenge. Loss aversion. Two people, each convinced they were wronged. No model captures that.

Truth Triage: Ask what emotion is fueling this version of the truth.

Ask Five Whys: Without Stopping at the Flattering Answer

Taiichi Ohno popularized the practice of asking “why” five times. The insight isn’t persistence but resisting the urge to stop when the answer protects your ego.

“I missed the deadline because the other team dropped the ball.” True. And incomplete.

Truth Triage: Where does the story get too clean? The danger isn’t asking why five times. It’s stopping at the answer that flatters your identity.

Decide What “Enough Truth” Looks Like

A DNA test might get you to 99.9%. Remarkable—and still not absolute.

Most business decisions don’t even get close.

You won’t know if the regulation will shift. If a supplier fails. If a key person quits six months in.

So the job isn’t the perfect truth. It’s decision-grade truth.

The leaders people follow say: “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t. Here’s why we’re moving anyway.”

The Fact-Checking Illusion

The New Yorker rigorously fact-checks names, dates, and quotes—and still receives letters when stories feel wrong. Because truth isn’t just factual. It’s psychological: framing, omission, motive.

We think truth is something you uncover. In reality, it’s something you triangulate.

Facts don’t fail us. Stories do—because stories demand coherence, and life refuses to cooperate.

Truth Triage is how you lead anyway.