Three Sentences Wearing the Same Clothes

She was being blamed for change orders that never went out.

He was certain he had assigned them to her. She was certain the work had never clearly landed on anyone. Both of them sat in the meeting convinced the other one was rewriting history, and every sentence either of them spoke made the room worse.

Here is what was actually happening. They were exchanging three completely different kinds of sentences and treating them all as facts. I call this the ISI Model, and it is the fastest tool I know for a conversation that has already gone sideways.

Every statement in a hard conversation is one of three things:

Indisputable
‍What a camera would have recorded. The change orders were not sent. That is indisputable. Nobody in the room disagrees with it.

Sense-making
The honest attempt to explain how it happened. Instructions moved between email and text and hallway, ownership was never written down anywhere.

Interpretation 
The story about what it means. She doesn't take ownership. He sets people up to fail. The fight is almost never about the indisputable layer. Both of them agreed the orders never went out. The fight lived entirely in the interpretation layer, and the cruel part is that interpretation arrives dressed as fact. "You dropped this" feels, to the person saying it, like a camera recording. To the person hearing it, it is an accusation built on an assignment that never happened.

This is why delayed conversations turn toxic in a way fresh ones don't.

Delay is a factory for interpretation. Every silent week, both sides keep sense-making alone, without correction, and private sense-making always drifts toward story. By the time the conversation happens, each person walks in carrying months of manufactured meaning and mistakes it for evidence.

The move is to sort before you solve. Out loud. Start with the only layer everyone shares: here is what a camera would have seen. The orders were not sent. The client called. Then hold sense-making as a genuinely open question rather than a verdict: how did we each understand who owned this? In that room, the answer dissolved the fight in minutes. He had assigned it verbally in passing. She had heard a discussion, not an assignment. Two reasonable people, one indisputable gap, zero villains.

What never got resolved by staying in interpretation was resolved almost immediately by leaving it. Because the real conversation, the one worth having, was never about her character or his management. It was about the fact that in their company, work was assigned in ways a camera could not have recorded.

Fix that, and there is nothing left to interpret.

Before your next tense conversation, take the sentence you are most ready to say and ask what a camera would have seen.

If the camera would not have seen it, you are not holding a fact. You are holding a story, and the other person has one too.

Watch the video here. And if you want more of these, hit subscribe.

In all that we do, let us seek wisdom, discipline, courage & justice.

Be well,

Keita

‍