The screen glowed, stark against the office hum. Maya’s finger hovered over the Confluence page, then darted to the Figma tab, then, with a sigh, resignedly scrolled through her email. Three different versions, three different updates, all purporting to be the definitive guide to the new user flow. Her stomach twisted, a familiar knot of frustration tightening with the creeping realization that despite the grand corporate pronouncements, her fly was probably open – again – metaphorically speaking, of course. She’d spent a good 45 minutes this morning on the wrong spec, a ridiculous waste of time that echoed the physical embarrassment of an unzipped fly; an obvious, easily fixable oversight that everyone else seemed to notice but her.

This isn’t just Maya’s problem, nor is it merely about a few misaligned documents. It’s a fundamental crisis underpinning nearly every modern enterprise: the myth of the ‘Single Source of Truth’ (SSoT). Companies pour millions – sometimes $575 million over a few years, if you count software licenses, training, and lost productivity – into elaborate systems designed to consolidate information. They promise clarity, consistency, and a singular, undisputed reference point for all things important. Yet, the reality is a messy, multi-headed beast. The developer points to Confluence. The designer insists the Figma file is the living spec. The product manager swears the Jira ticket, with its latest comments, is the true gospel. All three are different. All three are ‘the source of truth.’ It’s like watching three different clocks, all set to different times, each claiming to tell you what time it actually is.

What we’ve built, unintentionally, is an authoritarian fantasy. The SSoT concept assumes truth is static, singular, and can be dictated from the top down, or at least, curated into a pristine digital artifact. It ignores how people actually collaborate, how knowledge evolves, and how rapidly information decays in a dynamic work environment. My initial enthusiasm for a unified knowledge base, back in the early 2005s, felt almost naïve in retrospect. I genuinely believed that if we just had the right platform, the chaos would cease. I chased that vision for years, pushing for stricter document control, single repositories, and iron-clad versioning. I was convinced the problem was one of discipline, not fundamental design.

But the problem isn’t discipline. It’s epistemology, the study of knowledge itself. Knowledge, especially in a collaborative context, isn’t a slab of marble inscribed with eternal truths. It’s a flowing river, a constantly negotiated landscape. It changes as new information comes in, as perspectives shift, as requirements morph. The moment you declare a document the ‘Single Source of Truth,’ you’ve effectively frozen a snapshot of reality that will be outdated by the time the next sprint planning meeting begins. It’s like trying to capture the wind in a jar and then getting upset when it won’t power your windmill. You simply cannot contain the dynamism of collective intelligence within a static container and expect it to remain perpetually current.

Finn R.J., the meme anthropologist I once shared a ridiculously overpriced coffee with, has a fascinating take on this. He argues that memes – those cultural units of information that spread online – thrive precisely because they are fluid, adaptable, and constantly reinterpreted. There’s no ‘Single Source of Truth’ for a meme; its meaning shifts with context, audience, and each subsequent iteration. Trying to pin it down diminishes its power. He likened our corporate SSoT obsession to trying to assign a single, definitive meaning to a constantly evolving inside joke. It’s antithetical to its very nature. He spoke of how a joke’s context changes over 15 minutes, let alone 235 days.

Think about how people actually solve problems: they talk. They ask questions. They share screens. They debate. They come to a shared understanding, which then becomes their current operational truth. This understanding is often fleeting, context-dependent, and embedded within the conversation itself. If you’ve ever tried to reconstruct a critical decision from an old Confluence page versus reviewing the actual chat logs or a recorded meeting, you know the difference. The document tells you what was decided. The conversation tells you why, how, and who influenced it. It reveals the nuances, the unresolved tensions, the very texture of collaboration. It gives you the human element behind the bare facts. That conversation, that negotiation, that emergent understanding – that’s the real source of truth.

This is where the paradigm needs to shift. Instead of seeking a static SSoT, we should be building systems that embrace knowledge as a fluid, conversational entity. We should prioritize the ability to capture, search, and recall the dynamic interactions where truth is actually forged. Imagine being able to instantly search all spoken conversations, meeting notes, and informal chats across your organization. What if the ‘source of truth’ wasn’t a document, but a perfectly indexed, easily accessible history of all relevant dialogue? That’s not a single source; it’s an aggregated, living, breathing tapestry of truth, always evolving. It acknowledges the inherent human messiness, rather than trying to sanitise it into an artificial order.

For example, if a team decides to change a particular design element, the real ‘truth’ isn’t just the updated Figma file. It’s the Slack thread where the suggestion was made, the stand-up where it was briefly discussed, the design review where feedback was given, and the follow-up chat where the final tweak was confirmed. All of these contribute to the contextual understanding of why the change happened and what its implications are. The Figma file is merely the end result, not the complete story. Trying to distill all of that into a single, perfectly written document is not only impossible; it strips away the very richness that enables understanding.

When we record and then convert audio to text, we’re not just creating transcriptions; we’re preserving the raw, unedited genesis of ideas, decisions, and disagreements. We’re turning ephemeral spoken words into searchable, analyzable data. This data, when properly categorized and accessible, becomes a far more accurate and nuanced ‘source of truth’ than any static document could ever be. It’s the difference between looking at a photograph of a river and being able to dive into its current.

My initial conviction that a single platform could solve our information woes was rooted in a desire for control and simplicity, a longing for a world where ambiguity didn’t exist. But ambiguity is inherent in collaboration. The real value isn’t in eliminating it, but in making it transparent and navigable. The solution isn’t to force all knowledge into one rigid container, but to make the interconnected, distributed nature of knowledge itself searchable and retrievable. It means trusting in the collective intelligence that emerges from conversations, rather than relying on an idealized, often outdated, artifact. This shift in mindset, from seeking a singular, authoritarian truth to embracing a fluid, conversational reality, is the difference between perpetually chasing an illusion and building a genuinely informed, agile organization. It’s how we move from feeling constantly exposed by outdated information to confidently navigating the dynamic flow of collective understanding.