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Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2006:
1. truthiness (noun)
1 : “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005)
2 : “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006)
The biggest challenge in solving social issues is changing the mindset. In my work, I see on a daily basis the number of people who create new ways of solving social problems on the basis of their gut. The common explanation is that people think they know what is value to their customers because of experience, education or “idealogy”. This is possibly one of the most important change that is needed in people working in this space for creating better outcomes.
As Drucker said many years back,
The danger is acting on what you believe satisfies the customer. You will inevitably make wrong assumptions. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers; it should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers.
My goal is to create, prototype and teach a systematic process for that answer.
(H/T to John Gruber for the word Truthiness)