How to Tell a Truth From a Wish
Truth means observable facts, not desire. The test, and what a bad Truth looks like in tech, services, and consumer goods.
Direct Answer
Merriam-Webster defines truth as the body of real things, events, and facts. It defines a wish as an act of desire. In business, desire gets you nowhere — the market doesn’t care what you want to be true. Causal Cubed™ uses Truth for exactly this reason: a Truth is an observable market reality, something a customer or a competitor could confirm — never an internal task in disguise, and never your own team’s opinion dressed up as fact.
A bad Truth almost always fails one of three ways: it’s a task wearing a Truth’s clothes, it’s the Ambition restated in a different tense, or it’s an internal opinion nobody’s actually checked against the market. Here’s what the difference looks like in practice, across three kinds of businesses.
Bad Truth vs. Good Truth, by Sector
Technology — B2B SaaS
Choice: win mid-market IT buyers away from spreadsheet-based reporting.
Bad Truth — “We ship SSO integration in Q2.” That’s a roadmap line, not a fact about the world.
Good Truth — “Security teams at our target accounts won’t take a second call until we clear SOC 2 in their vendor questionnaire.” Anyone in procurement at those accounts would confirm or deny it today.
Services — Agency / Professional Services
Choice: convert project-based clients into retainers.
Bad Truth — “Consultants complete the new delivery-methodology training this quarter.” Internal activity, not a market fact.
Good Truth — “Clients won’t sign a retainer unless a named partner, not just the account manager, has been in the room by month two.” You could ask any client in your book of business and get a straight answer.
Consumer Goods — CPG
Choice: defend share against private label at the shelf.
Bad Truth — “Launch redesigned packaging in Q4.” A task with a date on it.
Good Truth — “Shoppers decide between us and private label in under three seconds — if the front-of-pack claim isn’t legible from arm’s length, we’ve lost before ingredients ever matter.” That’s testable with a shelf test tomorrow.
The Pattern
A good Truth names a behavior or belief already live in the market that has to be true for the Choice to work — and you could send someone out to verify it this week. A bad Truth is something your own team controls and checks off, which is the Activity Fallacy sneaking back in one layer down, dressed as strategy instead of execution.
Next Step
See how nine Truths and twenty-seven Actions stack under three Strategic Choices in the full cascade example, or test your own strategy against this same standard.
Links onward: “The Causal Cubed™ Explained” (this cluster), and the free Test.
