One of my goals this year is to reread all of Mary Parker Follett’s writings. I read most of her works when I worked on my thesis. I am especially fond of her first chapter in Creative Experience where she talks about what facts are and how they should be used. I’ve included a quote from the chapter, along with the mining I did to list all of the “facts” she puts forth for “facts.”
We need experts, we need accurate information, but the object is not to do away with difference but to do away with muddle. When for lack of facts you and I are responding to a different situation—you to the situation as you imagine it, I to the situation as I imagine, it—we cannot of course come to agreement. What accurate information does is to clear the ground for genuine difference and therefore make possible, I do not say make sure, agreement. The object of accurate information is not to overcome difference but to give legitimate play to difference.”
Mary Follett’s list to consider when fact finding:
1. Many seem to imagine the expert who is providing facts as completely denatured.
2. Facts do not remain stationary.
3. Names remain the same when what they stand for has changed.
4. Danger in the experts’ labels.
5. That expert or official can choose which fact, of two, he will present to us.
6. Experts can emphasize the one fact that fits into present needs or interests.
7. The interpretation of facts depends on needs/desires.
8. Facts become such for us when we attend to them.
9. Our attending to them is bound up in the situation.
10. We often see the confusing part of the facts with all the facts.
11. We must know what we mean by fact in any given situation.
12. We must not base our action on too narrow an outlook on the field of facts.
13. To view facts in relation to one another is of the utmost importance.
14. The value of every fact depends on its position in the whole world-process, and is bound up in its multitudinous relations.
15. A fact out of relation is not a fact (yet not all experts can see the relation).
16. Have to make facts bear fruit.
17. For things to be facts, they must be facts within the same fields.
18. Many of our problems defy the possibility of precise measurements.
19. Fact-finding is the limited opportunity of the mere observer; different facts are usually elicited by the participant observer. (Experiment rather than mere observation often illumines facts, or is the best way of getting at facts.)
20. Facts must be understood as the whole situation with whatever sentiments, beliefs, ideals enter into it.
21. While you or I may both be responding to fact, we may be responding to quite different kinds of fact.
22. Facts have intimate connection with the whole question of power.
23. There is a time and place for fact-finding.
24. Accurate information will probably always have to be gathered by a number of people (so we can at least be looking at the SAME facts).
25. When the attention of each side is riveted in its facts, discussion becomes rather hopeless.
26. Sometimes there is a deliberate withholding of facts.
27. The findings of experts can often be divided into the facts which are indisputable and those which can be looked at differently by different people.
28. Know the boundary line of ascertainable facts.
The Follett Foundation provides the first three chapters of Creative Experience in pdf form. I’ve attached the chapter that talks about facts.