Making Sense of Ambiguous Evidence: A Conversation with Documentary Filmmaker Errol Morris

The information that top managers receive is rarely unfiltered. Unpopular opinions are censored. Partisan views are veiled as objective arguments. Honest mistakes are made. The manager is then left to sort it all out and come to a wise conclusion. Few people know how to get an accurate read on a situation like documentarian Errol Morris. He is the award-winning director of such films as The Thin Blue Line and this year's Standard Operating Procedure, an exploration of the elusive truth behind the infamous photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison. The Guardian has ranked him among the world's top 10 directors, crediting him with "a forensic mind" and "a painter's eye." In this article, Morris talks with HBR's Lisa Burrell about how he sorts through ambiguous evidence and contradictory views to arrive at the real story. "I don't believe in the postmodern notion that there are different kinds of truth," he says. "There is one objective reality, period." Getting to it requires keeping your mind open to all kinds of evidence- not just the parts that fit with your first impressions or developing opinions-and, often, far more investigation than one would think. If finding the truth is a matter of perseverance, convincing people of it is something of an art, one with which Morris has had much experience not only as a documentarian but also as a highly sought-after director of TV ads for companies like Apple, Citibank, Adidas, and Toyota. He holds up John Kerry's 2004 bid for the U.S. presidency as a cautionary tale: Kerry struck voters as inauthentic when he emphasized only his military service and failed to account for his subsequent war protest. Morris would have liked to interview him speaking in his own words-natural, unscripted material-so that his humanity, which seemed to get lost in the campaign, could emerge.

• Decision making