This is actually an intriguing business idea. I believe that most of the upvotes the submission is getting here are genuine expressions of interest in a radically different idea. (It's also fun to make snarky comments about this submission.)
I won't be snarky here, but will suggest a news story of related interest. Journalist A. J. Jacobs turned on his full sense of humor as well as his honesty when he wrote a story for Esquire magazine in 2007 about the "radical honesty" movement. The story's title gets him started: "I Think You're Fat."[1] When I read this story the first time, right after it was published, I laughed out loud and immediately shared it with my favorite online group of friends (this was pre-Facebook, for me). I shared it with a new group of friends this summer, and found out that they like the story too. Try it. I think you'll like it.
A guy who could take the business idea proposed in this thread and execute it with as much humor as A. J. Jacobs could become a millionaire.
You would be surprised how often you just... lie. Even if it's something unimportant, or a story that doesn't exist. You can lie about the most meaningless things. If you pay attention to your lying you will be horrified how often you do it, and how pointless the things you lie about are.
I guess I form part of this "radical honesty" movement. Once you learn to trick your mind out of lying it's so refreshing. Lying is extremely stressful, I have no idea why we have a natural tendency to employ it.
Instead of worrying if my wife finds out I've lied about drinking with colleagues ("I'm working late"), I know that I can ask her to fetch me if I go over the limit.
Although, there's a difference between being honest and being a dick.
I think in this case we are dealing with a discrepancy between what people think they want, and what they actually want. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of people try this once, but he might have trouble getting repeat clients and I have concerns about how helpful, outside the most narrow niche cases, this will be.
I'm a counselor, and going into the field I naively thought that straightforward evaluative statements were central to what therapists did. I thought that what people needed was "objective" feedback on their situations, and I thought myself ideally suited to providing it.
You can imagine my shock when I found out that "direct, reality-oriented feedback" is one of the most ineffective forms of intervention, and leads to a significant rise in client dropout. In other words, people don't like to be judged, however politely or compassionately, and it doesn't help them (1). People need love, not honesty - especially when they are going through troubles which are likely already causing them to question themselves.
The one exception is, as jtheory noted above, within the context of an already established attachment relationship, in which mutual respect and affiliation is already firmly in place.
In general, the best interventions are those which, rather than telling the client "what they need to hear", compassionately lead them towards the acceptance of what they more than likely already know. But it must come from the person themselves, and in their own time - that alone is what damns or saves.
Addendum: The research also reflects my experience. My internship was as a career counselor at a university and the most common client I saw were students about to graduate (often with little to no work experience) expecting to immediately get prestigious/lucrative jobs. I remember one philosophy major in particular who stopped by to see me 3 months before she graduated, whose only work experience was as a manager of a strip club and who wanted a 60k + job writing children's books right after she graduated. I told her, as kindly as I possibly could, that her expectations were more than likely unrealistic. Not only did I tell her but I sat with her and searched through the job ads for the position she wanted so she could see for herself what the requirements were for those positions. She left in a huff and I never saw her again. In fact, not a single client with whom I took a "brutally honest" approach did I ever see again. However, when I took a questioning approach, the difference was night and day.
After 3 days of answering questions, I'm starting to come to the conclusion that your premise here is exactly right.
I've definitely been able to help a few people out based on limited feedback I've received. However, I get the sense that most of the people whom I haven't heard back from (around 75%) probably aren't too thrilled with the brutal honesty. I've been very compassionate, but still. This comment definitely hits home.
Although basic and lacking a bit in depth, the book I found most helpful when transitioning from confrontation to questioning was "Demystifying Counseling" by Arlene King. It's short, clearly written and jargon-free.
Most therapy manuals are awful though - and so much of my progress since then has been helped along by reading bios or analysis's of the greats in the field, and adapting their methods to match my personality. It's very much an art and not a science - and my progress has been determined as much by my self-knowledge and the strength of the integration between my conception of life and my practice as my knowledge of specific methods of inquiry.
So all that to say I don't have much - although you've motivated me to look around for it. Feel free to drop me a line so I can share when I find something.
You may want to take a look at Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata. It is basically a coaching technique based on questions, used on learning environments. Lean Education and Toyota Kata are also related, so you may find good info when searching for those keywords as well.
It is not exactly the same situation, but if you treat that person as someone who needs to learn something about herself that she didn't realise (or refused to accept), it might be very similar.
This makes a lot of sense - esp the part about - 'people need love, not honesty'. It takes a lot of effort and work to give good feedback without being brutal, but it is really the only way that has worked for me.
This basic idea was my first startup back in 2007 before the Startup boom. Obviously didn't really go anywhere but if someone wanted to do it, it would be much easier now with smartphones and a consumer group that is more receptive to this kind of thing.
I love these kind of "man behind the curtain" things. I've had a few somewhat similar ideas I've meant to make, though they were more in the spirit of being silly and fun rather than "brutal truth telling."
They don't really make much(/any?) money or involve cool tech, but I think they are fun, and good times. Maybe I'll get working on the one I've been wanting to do most.
There was a pretty entertaining Ricky Gervais movie called The Invention of Lying in which everyone on earth is physically incapable of lying, save one. Before you ask for ubiquitous radical honesty, watch it :).
I was really disappointed in this film for how unimaginative it was. For example, they still had money (actual physical tokens) whereas in a world where everyone was honest you'd just have a number written down on a page that you would update with every transaction, or some other trivial mnemonic device for accounting.
They also didn't deal with the question of people who were honest but mistaken--how would dispute resolution work in a world where everyone in the world was telling the truth, but no one in the world had a very good idea of what the truth actually is? And so on.
It was a one-joke movie that could have been a much deeper look at how lying and our strategies for detecting and dealing with lying are embedded into our every social interaction, including those that apparently have very little to do with it. And it could have been incredibly funny, instead of just kind of meh.
I won't be snarky here, but will suggest a news story of related interest. Journalist A. J. Jacobs turned on his full sense of humor as well as his honesty when he wrote a story for Esquire magazine in 2007 about the "radical honesty" movement. The story's title gets him started: "I Think You're Fat."[1] When I read this story the first time, right after it was published, I laughed out loud and immediately shared it with my favorite online group of friends (this was pre-Facebook, for me). I shared it with a new group of friends this summer, and found out that they like the story too. Try it. I think you'll like it.
A guy who could take the business idea proposed in this thread and execute it with as much humor as A. J. Jacobs could become a millionaire.
[1] http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707