“There’s a lot of truth in fiction.”

I hear this from time to time, mostly, I fear, from people who don’t know the definition of fiction and haven’t thought through the meaning of “truth.”

For example, there I was, stumbling down the mountain. Why, you may fairly ask, was I stumbling down the mountain? And what, you may even more fairly ask, does this have to do with you?

We’ll get there.

First of all, let’s be clear about the nature of truth: None of us have access to it. The best we can manage is to accept the best explanations that account for the most unbiased evidence we can get … and even that isn’t easy.

As for speaking the truth, if we don’t have access to it, we can’t speak it. The best we can be is honest, and even that isn’t easy.

And as for fiction … there I was, hiking up the mountain. The route was harder than a stroll but easier than a climb. My climbing companions included my wife and various family members — all younger than me, but mostly not by all that much.

As we neared the summit, which we were trying to reach by sunset so as to admire it from the summit, I felt the first twinge in the side of my left knee.

But, you see, I’d read a lot of fiction in which the hero pushes through the pain and comes out the other side. Where the difference between winners and losers is will power. Where quitters never win and winners never quit.

And like a schmuck, I believed it. Without even realizing it, I’d accepted the fiction as truth.

From what we know of physiology, a number of different factors, either singly or in combination, reduce or eliminate a muscle’s ability to contract. As a former biologist-in-training, I knew this.

See, “will power” means your brain sends out “keep on contracting!” signals to muscles that are sending “my ability to contract efficiently is diminishing” signals back to it.

This is a good thing when the muscles are just whining over being pushed a bit harder than they’re used to (sorry for the technical jargon). It’s how you strengthen them.

But it’s a bad thing when they’re approaching their limits.

As I found out, because by pushing through the pain instead of taking a short break, my knees pretty much stopped functioning right as we reached the top.

Fortunately, one of my sisters had an elastic bandage in her kit and our guide had another, along with a pair of walking sticks, and everyone involved had a lot of patience. So we all made it down, it only took an extra couple of hours, and two days later I was more or less back to normal.

Why do you care?

Because many in management are creating increasingly harsh work environments. They may be project death marches. They may be understaffed operations. They may be some other type of workload where management started off asking for a short, high-speed sprint, got what it asked for, and decided its employees could run longer and longer distances (metaphorically speaking) at the same pace.

Up to a point they might be asking for a higher level of mental fitness. Most of us are capable of more than we think, after all.

But only up to a point. Beyond that point lies burnout, hypertension, and occasionally heart attacks and strokes.

Where is that point? That’s where it becomes hard, because, the “point” isn’t a point at all. It’s a blurry patch that’s in a different place for different people, and in a different place for different kinds of work for each person.

And that’s the truth.

But of course, it isn’t, just my best explanation of what I’ve seen over the years.

Because in spite of what you may have heard, people don’t really bring the truth with them when they come down the mountain.

Unless, that is, you think “truth” is a synonym for really sore knees.

* * *

Correction: Last week I related my tale of woe regarding Windows 8’s “refresh” feature, which ended up uninstalling all my Desktop applications. It turns out that had I simply re-installed MS Office, everything would have worked … the system apparently kept track of the installation key and automatically applied it to the fresh installation.

My apologies to Microsoft. It still shouldn’t have happened, but the fix was less painful than I’d thought.

Geeze alert! Geeze alert! Hide, hide, hide, hide, hide!

When I was a lad in high school we all took the SATs, and our scores had some bearing on our academic potential.

Now, we have SAT study guides, and SAT scores mostly reveal how hard a student studied for the SATs. As SAT scores have become more important they’ve become less reliable, and it’s cause and effect.

Sound like most professional certifications?

In the world of measurement, gauging someone’s potential is one of the three great unsolved, and very likely unsolvable challenges (the other two are customer loyalty and employee performance). We’ll save customer loyalty and actual employee performance for other days. Today …

So you’re trying to decide which of two applicants to hire for a project management position. One has a PMP. The other one doesn’t. Which one do you hire?

The answer is, whichever one:

  • Has brought more and more difficult projects to a successful conclusion.
  • Speaks intelligently and in enough depth about the projects they list to convince you they really did manage them and they really did reach a successful conclusion.
  • Leads you to conclude, from your conversation, that their “personal culture” will be compatible with your company’s business culture, and their personality will mesh with the people they’ll be working with.
  • Their potential peers think will be the stronger addition to the team after they’ve had a chance to talk with both applicants.

Or, even better, whichever one proves to be the better project manager in your organization after you’ve contracted with each of them to manage an actual project and they’ve either run their project to a successful conclusion or run it into the ground.

Understand, the problem isn’t with the certification itself, and in fact, to its credit, the Project Management Institute includes successful project management experience in its PMP requirements.

The problem is that using the certification … using any certification … to evaluate applicants is an example of the observer effect.

The observer effect, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is the scientific principle that all acts of observation affect whatever is being observed. Sometimes the effect is trivial … for example, the act of looking at a comet through a telescope doesn’t change the comet’s orbit in more than a quantum way.

But here, the more companies that use certifications in hiring decisions, the more the people who seek the certifications just want the piece of paper. Gaining actual competence becomes secondary at best.

This is true for professional certifications. It’s increasingly true for college degrees.

And it isn’t limited to individual certifications either.

Take, for example, ISO 9000 and its associated certifications. What they’re intended to be is evidence that a company has strong quality management practices. What they too-often are is evidence that companies need ISO 9000 credentials on the corporate resume and have learned how to tell a good quality story.

An actual commitment to quality on the part of its executives and managers? That’s optional. The International Standards Organization lacks the resources to actually investigate applicants in enough depth to ensure they truly qualify — just as well, many cures being worse than the diseases they treat.

What’s the solution? Here’s one: Every certifying organization forbids the use of their certifications for hiring or vendor selection.

That’ll happen. Just not here on Earth. Still, there are ways to improve the situation. What they have in common is moving beyond short-haul thinking.

Take medicine. There’s a reason most doctors are fundamentally competent, and it isn’t their getting a degree. To become a doctor you have to go through a residency … you have to practice medicine under the watchful eye of practicing doctors. It’s a long-haul, labor-intensive process, for which we should all be grateful.

With most certifications, both certifiers and those certified want a process for verifying competence that’s quick and cheap. Since you only get what you pay for if you’re lucky, the outcome is predictable.

Awhile back I wrote a column predicting a business failure (““Business failure in progress,” KJR 12/12/2011). The company is, in fact, gone. I mention it because its founders and leaders won an entrepreneurship award right around the time I wrote the column.

Demonstrating, I guess, that business awards are even less reliable than business certifications.