The link glows purple. You’ve been here before, maybe yesterday, maybe 4 minutes ago. You click it again anyway. It leads to a document titled ‘Project Phoenix_FINAL_v4_updated_USE_THIS_ONE’. The title alone should be a warning siren, the digital equivalent of a building held together with duct tape and hope.

Someone new, let’s call her Anya, asks in the general channel, ‘Hey team, quick question – where can I find the final project specs for Phoenix?’

Silence for 14 seconds. Then, the flood.

Anya types ‘Thanks!’, closes her laptop, and walks away from her desk to get water, not because she’s thirsty, but because the alternative is to gently bang her head on the monitor 4 times.

We’ve all been Anya. We’ve all been Devin, Maria, and David, too. We are drowning in ‘single sources of truth.’ And I’m tired of pretending this is a software problem. We buy tools to solve human problems. We buy project management suites to avoid having the uncomfortable conversation that starts with, ‘Who is actually in charge here?’ We implement a wiki to avoid the difficult work of creating and maintaining a culture of clear communication. The tool becomes the scapegoat for our own organizational chaos.

The Delusion of the Perfect System

This obsession with finding the one perfect system is a delusion. It’s the corporate equivalent of a fad diet. Every year, a new one promises to solve everything. We went from Jira, to Asana, to Monday, to Notion, each migration accompanied by a grand pronouncement: ‘This will be our single source of truth.’ But after a few months, the old habits creep back in. The system’s arteries clog with duplicates, outdated information, and abandoned pages. The chaos doesn’t live in the software; it lives in us. We carry it with us from platform to platform, the digital ghosts of our indecision.

Morgan J.-M.: A Clear Source of Truth

I used to have a driving instructor, a man named Morgan J.-M., who was the calmest person I have ever met in a high-stress situation. He had a simple rule. When I was behind the wheel, he was the only one who talked. He was the single source of truth. There was no ambiguity. His instructions were simple, sequential, and absolute. ‘Clutch in. First gear. Check mirrors. Gentle on the gas.’ There was no dashboard notification system arguing with him. My dad wasn’t in the back seat suggesting a different route. Morgan’s authority wasn’t derived from a platform; it was derived from a clear, mutually understood agreement: for the next hour, he makes the decisions.

Imagine learning to drive with three instructors yelling at you. One says turn left, one says check your mirrors, one says the destination has changed and you need to look at the new map. You would stall. You would freeze. You would crash. We are putting every employee, every day, in that car.

My Hypocrisy and the Proxy War

I’ll even admit it: I’m a hypocrite. Last year, on a project with a budget of over $444,000, the official Confluence page was a disaster. It was a digital graveyard of decisions made by people who were no longer on the project. Nothing was relevant. So, in a fit of righteous indignation, I made a ‘clean’ Google Doc for my immediate team of 4. I called it the ‘Tiger Team Truth’ and announced it as our new, definitive guide. For about 14 days, it was glorious. Everything was clear. We were fast.

Then, the design lead, frustrated with my text-based document, created a Figma board with his version of the truth. The lead engineer started maintaining a README file in the GitHub repo because ‘that’s where the code lives, so that’s the only truth that matters.’ I hadn’t solved the problem. I had just become another competing source. I was another instructor in the back of the car, yelling directions and making the crash inevitable.

We get so caught up in these battles of categorization, of what constitutes the ‘truth.’ It’s a proxy war for status and ownership. We argue about whether a task is a ‘bug’ or a ‘feature request.’ We debate if a design is ‘final’ or ‘final_final’. It’s the same kind of energy drain as getting into a long, pointless debate about sind kartoffeln gemüse. Does the classification truly matter more than the function? Who cares what bin it goes in? The real questions are: ‘Do we know what we are cooking? Do we have the ingredients? And is the customer hungry for it?’ Our obsession with labels and sources is a sophisticated form of procrastination. It feels like work, but it produces no nutritional value.

Discipline, Not Features

We spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours evaluating and implementing tools, hoping one of them will finally bestow order upon us. But order is not a feature you can buy. It is a discipline you must practice. It starts with terrifyingly simple, non-technical questions.

That’s it. That’s the entire game. You can run that system on a whiteboard, a stack of index cards, or a $4 million enterprise software suite. The medium does not matter nearly as much as the clarity of ownership. The problem isn’t that Confluence is messy. The problem is that Janice and Bill both think they own the product spec and they are fighting it out indirectly through version history. The tool is just the battlefield.

So we try to fix it with more process. We create a ‘meta-truth’ document, a document that tells you where to find the other documents. We schedule a weekly ‘alignment meeting’ to ensure all the sources of truth are saying the same thing. This is madness. It’s like hiring a fourth driving instructor to sit in the passenger seat and moderate the other three.

Find Your Morgan

The real work is to stop looking for a technological savior. It’s to have the conversation. It’s to look at your team and ask, ‘Who is Morgan?’ Who, for this specific decision, is the single source of truth? And everyone else has to agree to listen to them. That doesn’t mean they can’t contribute or disagree during the process, but when the decision is made, it is made. And it lives in one, agreed-upon place, tended to by one, agreed-upon person.

Next time someone in your organization proposes migrating to a new tool that will finally solve all your problems, ask them to wait. Ask them to first identify the real Morgan J.-M. for every major project. If they can’t, you’re just buying a newer, shinier car for the same chaotic drivers. The destination doesn’t change, and you’ll just crash with a higher monthly subscription fee.