Giff Constable coined the truth curve and Jeff and Jeff call it the Constable curve, like how astronomors name planets after themselves.

It plots the 'believability of information on the Y axis and behaviours on the x axis. The behaviours get progressively closer to Live to curate the curve. It coincidentally also gets more expensive the closer you get to live with live being the most expensive way to find the truth.

The Constable curve doesn't allow for the birthplace of every idea in an organisation, The Meeting.

The meeting is our primary method for developing a shared understanding. There are other methods but by and large organisations tend to employ meetings to develop a shared understanding.

But meetings aren't very efficient; we hate going to them, find ways out of them; have a habit of segwaying all while making no progress. I have worked in organisations that have spent 2 years talking about ideas never actually making them happen.

When you add all this up you quickly realise meetings slow you down and cost you money. Putting all those people in a room after all isn't cheap.

By overlaying the cost as it's own path on the graph we see there's a sweet spot where you want to spend most of your time. That's in the prototyping stage.

Assuming your a lean organisation who want to follow the mantra of prioritising learning over delivery then getting ideas out there as quickly as possible means those meetings can be shorter and more informed.

We can't avoid meetings but so often we come to the table with nothing but ideas, when we really need data to inform them.