There Are Always Three Sides to a Story

Why Leaders Who Rely on Opinion Compound Their Problems

It is not uncommon to see leaders make decisions that fundamentally affect a business — and the people inside it — based on little more than opinion.

Who spoke first. Who spoke loudest. Who sounded most convincing. Sometimes it is trust. Sometimes politics. Sometimes proximity. And often it is simply confidence mistaken for clarity.

Edward Deming put it bluntly:

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion."

He was not dismissing opinion entirely. He was reminding us that opinion alone is a poor foundation for action. Yet in most organisations, not a single day passes without significant decisions being made on hearsay, assumption, or the bias of whoever was in the room.

Why leaders who rely on opinion compound their problems

The hardest moments arrive when stories clash. Two versions of the same event. Conflicting accounts. Raised voices. Strong feelings. And a leader is expected to decide.

I learned early, as a journalist, that there are always at least three sides to a story. Their side. The other side. And the truth.

It is the truth we are after — not the cleanest story, not the most comfortable explanation, but what actually happened.

This matters more than it might seem. When you move forward from a false premise — from one person's version of events rather than from what actually occurred — you are building the next decision on unstable ground. Problems do not disappear. They compound. Every subsequent action is misaligned with reality in ways that are hard to trace back to the original error in understanding.

Truth is built from evidence — from behaviour, from outcomes, from patterns, from facts that remain when emotion fades. It is the only ground solid enough to build on.

What this looks like in practice

Three situations that arise regularly in organisations:

A conflict erupts in a meeting.

Two people have incompatible accounts of what happened. You hear both sides. Neither is lying, exactly — both are shaped by fear, by role, by history, by what each person needed to be true.

The truth lies in the actual behaviours: what was said, how it was said, what the effect was, what the pattern of interaction has been over time. That is what requires investigation — not adjudication between versions.

A release breaks production.

One team says the process was followed. Another says it was not. The truth is in the evidence: was any stage skipped? Was it human error or a systemic vulnerability that will surface again? How long did it take to detect and roll back?

The answer to "what actually happened" determines whether the response should be training, feedback, process change, or all three. Getting that answer wrong means the same thing happens again.

A campaign misses completely.

Post-mortems often produce competing narratives about whose assumptions were wrong. The truth is in the data: was there solid evidence it would work before it launched? What did the numbers show? What assumptions were made and tested versus made and assumed? Understanding this properly is the only way to improve the next decision.

In each case, the discipline is the same. Listen to all sides — then recognise that none of them is the truth. The truth is what the evidence shows once you have looked past the stories.

Why truth is hard to find in certain cultures

Truth struggles to survive in environments where mistakes are punished. Where reflection is rare. Where blame travels faster than learning.

In those cultures, truth retreats. It hides behind fudged numbers, behind watermelon reports that show green on the surface while running red underneath, behind stories carefully shaped to avoid consequence. And when decisions are made from false foundations, the problems they were meant to address do not get resolved — they go underground and grow.

This means the leader's job is partly architectural. If the culture punishes honesty, honest information will not reach the decision. Everything a leader does to make it safe to surface bad news — modelling their own mistakes, responding to problems with curiosity rather than blame, making learning visible — changes the information quality available to the organisation.

All mistakes that happen under a leader's watch belong, in some sense, to the system that leader shapes. Not as blame. As responsibility. Was the training sufficient? Was the pressure sustainable? Were the signals visible and ignored, or invisible because no one felt safe raising them? Was the environment safe enough for someone to say what they actually knew?

These are leadership questions. They are harder than adjudicating between two people's accounts of an incident. But they are the right questions, because they address the conditions that produced the situation rather than just its surface expression.

Good journalism is the discipline of finding truth inside noise. Good leadership is no different. There are always at least three sides to a story. The responsibility is to uncover the third side carefully, humanely, and without fear — so that learning can happen, decisions can improve, and honesty never becomes a liability.

As the Stoics understood: the truth does not harm us. Only ignoring it does.