What do you do with inconvenient facts? First off, what is meant by inconvenient facts? Say you’ve got 10 facts that all prove your investigative conclusion and then you’ve got one fact that disproves your investigative conclusion. You need to love and embrace that inconvenient fact with all your heart. But it’s probably taken me a decade and a half to get to a point where I can really honestly say that. But the reason that you love and embrace your inconvenient fact is that investigation are required to be neutral and unbiased, right? So the problem your client has that they hired you to investigate is that they have a workplace complaint and they need to get to a ‘more likely than not conclusion.’ And so, if you have 10 convenient facts pointing in one direction and one fact going the other direction, you talk about it, write about it, and you acknowledge it, and report it. You still have a ‘more likely than not’ conclusion. And the fact that you are reporting about and acknowledging your inconvenient fact only indicates your lack of bias in the investigative process. And so, by saying, there is this one inconsistent thing going on over here, you are bolstering the quality and your own credibility within the reports that you’re making.
