Sunday 4th May 2025

Some lies are so big, the participants are left with no choice but to double down on them.

Topics:

• If a person’s entire reputation, their career, or their freedom is based on a lie, then logically they need to continue to believe in it and make themselves feel good about it.
• Just like a bank that is too big to fail, a lie can be too big to fail also.
• If that lie is being used to justify actions or is in any other way foundational to theories of belief systems, its exposure as a lie can have catastrophic consequences.
• Big lies can often form the foundations of many smaller lies, and many careers and vested interests can be tied up in such deceits.
• As leaders, we want to base our decisions on truths not lies.
• Many times, the truth is obscure because of confusion, but less frequently than that, it is hidden behind a lie.
• I often think that being a good leader is dependent on several soft skills: psychiatry, philosophy, body language, and even parenting skills.
• Over time, all these skills combine to enable you to spot a lie more easily.
• In the interim, there are practical things that you can do to expose BS in your daily interactions:
  1. Ask for evidence.
  2. Ask how that evidence was gathered.
  3. Ask how that evidence was verified by others.
• It gets harder to lie when you are challenged to produce evidence.
• The interesting thing about lies is that people can start out genuinely believing them, which comes from a good place.
• The lie comes later when they realize themselves that they have followed a wrong path, but rather than holding up their hand and saying “I was wrong, I’m sorry”, they feel too committed to this path and begin to cover it up.
• It takes guts to admit you were wrong. All leaders should be ready to do this.
• Personally, I am often wrong on details and ask my team to correct me. If they leave me with wrong information in my mind, they are not doing me any favours.
• A culture of reasoning and clarity, and the seeking of truth, leaves little room for lies to grow.
• They get exposed quite quickly, hopefully before they have done any harm.
• Recently in the news, we seen power outages in Spain and Portugal, apparently caused by issues with renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
• That is a great example of what I am talking about: many politicians, power supply companies, and investors are behind that decision, which would have been taken years ago given how long it takes to build power generating infrastructure.
• That lie is too big to fail, so they double-down on the belief that you can power the entire Iberian Peninsula on largely renewable resources.
• In the Financial Crisis in 2009, we seen banks that were “too big to fail” being bailed out by governments around the World, with tax payers like you can I still picking up the bill.
• But do you ever think about what would have happened if we decided to let them fail, and would it have been any worse than what we got?
• Politicians are the biggest liars around, they tell big lies and little lies all of the time.
• I am always amused when they pivot from “It’s not happening!” to “It’s a good thing that it’s happening” in the space of a few days, whenever one of their lies is exposed.
• If they are denying it, chances are it’s happening.
• In a product delivery team, a person with a politician’s mindset is a disaster! Filter them out in hiring, and manage them out if you already have them in your team.
• They contribute nothing but blame, deflection, and deceit.
• The greatest truth of all is to build something that is real.

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techleaderpro-2025-week-18.mp3

File details: 7.6 MB MP3, 5 mins 21 secs duration.

Title music is "Apparent Solution" by Brendon Moeller, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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