Every person has a model of the universe in their head. This model is something they’ve built by perceiving the world through the five senses over years. This model is heavily influenced by the circumstances of their childhood and the society in which they grew up.

This model contains a mapping of intentions to actions. What intentions lead to what actions. When is it ok to speak up. When they should acquiesce. What level of thought is sufficient before sharing an idea. What is construed as politeness. What is construed to be disrespectful.

This model is communicated to others via language. Language itself is fuzzy. Every word has a spectrum of meaning. What you mean by a word may not be what it means to someone else. Language is a down sampling of thought. Thoughts exist in a higher dimensional universe. Language tries it’s best to capture the richness of thought. “I am annoyed” could mean “I am feeling a bit annoyed right now but will probably get over it in another 20 min” to some or “I’m really annoyed and it’s gonna bother me for the next couple of days” to someone else. Each of these longer statements themselves encode fuzziness of meaning into them. How often is the subject correct about their own estimates? What does the subject mean by “really” or “a bit”? This is the information that is lost when thought is downsampled into language.

When someone hears the subject speak, the words pass through the listener’s own model of the world and gain meaning. A careful listener who knows the subject well may develop over time their own perception of the subject’s model of the world. And pass the words through that perceived model instead of their self model. “Oh when John say’s he is annoyed, it’ll last for 20 min before he gets distracted by something else”. Maintaining models for everyone you interact requires a great deal of effort and you default to your own models in many situations.

The root source of conflicts is the mismatch between the model that converts thought into words and the model that receives words and upsamples it back into thoughts. Like in a game of telephone, the thoughts end up distorted. This can be an expensive waste of time especially when one finds oneself in a heated argument only to realize that the folks involved in the argument were arguing about totally different things. Even worse is to not even realize that and end up assuming that you just had the misfortune of interacting with an asshole.

Active listening combined with the ability to ask open-ended, non-leading questions can reduce the amount of time you waste in conflicts. Active listening involves completely focusing your mental faculties on the words that your conversation partner emits and holding off on putting them through your language-thought model till you’ve gained enough information about what the talker means when she uses a specific word. The latter is aided by the ability to ask open-ended questions. Open ended questions typically start with What, How or Why. These questions allow the talker to share information about her model of the world and allow you to better process the words you’ve been holding in your active memory. This is the core skill set that therapists work on building. I suspect that stellar people managers also possess these skills. Really good therapists are able to construct world models of their clients and figure out where the holes in these models lie. The right open-ended question can then help the client fill in these holes and leave therapy with a richer model of the world with better optionality.