The Proximity Principle: How Distance Dilutes the Truth

When you want to solve problems, go direct to the source. Conflict between two people? Get right to them. Customer service issue? Go to the agents. A manufacturing issue? Walk the floor.

The shortest distance between you and the truth is when you’re standing right in front of it.

Any other path delays resolution.

Don’t take the indirect path. Don’t talk to the manager of the supervisor of the employee and hope that you’ll find resolution through this convoluted chain of command. You’ll get a biased and softened “truth” because if those managers sense any personal culpability, you’ll hear the story they want you to hear.

This is why you “walk the floor.” Generate your own evidence.

There’s this idea of the “fog of war,” commonly attributed to the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. The fog of war describes the chaos and uncertainty of knowing what’s going on during battle.  Your organization isn’t a warzone, but the elements are similar. Uncertainty and complexity destroy the information chain. In fact, General George Marshall, in his 1920 letter on leadership, advised going to the front lines to understand what’s happening.

Don’t take reports at face value. Once you rely on secondhand perspective, you’ve entered the messy world of subjectiveness, bias, and opinion.

People rarely lie, but they rarely tell the truth either. The real story gets trimmed off at each management layer, leaving a sterilized version that says, “Nothing to see here.”

At best, you will lose information as it traverses management layers, even at the most forthright organizations. At worst, you’ll encounter layers of department heads and managers who fight to control the narrative.

As taught in Toyota’s training program, “There’s no substitute for direct observation.”

Going direct isn’t just faster, it’s more accurate.

It has to start with the CEO - the only one that can normalize this behavior.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman says it best, “Everybody, and we mean everybody, has permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function. We want the organization to run on influence, not rank and title.”