Clearly something that should never be attempted – BUT – something we do all the time.\u00a0 I don’t expect we are very good at it either, so perhaps it would be better to find alternatives.\u00a0 In every relationship – personal or business or whatever – we often find ourselves in the position of trying to figure out what the other person is thinking.<\/p>\n
I would like to describe a reasonably typical business situation to illustrate the dangers and difficulties.\u00a0 I should stress that this is an entirely fictitious example although I use the real context of an exchange with a colleague in the Italian part of the company to make some sense of the example.<\/p>\n
Luigi has contacted me regarding the possibility of doing a presentation for some Italian colleagues.\u00a0 I know what role Luigi has in the company but we have never actually met, so we have exchanged a few emails to establish some sort of relationship.\u00a0 He had been told by a mutual friend, Paolo, that I would be the ideal person to make this presentation.<\/em><\/p>\n Eventually, Luigi asks me if it would be possible to send him a draft copy of my presentation so that he could have a look at the material before confirming that we would go ahead and this I do almost immediately.<\/em><\/p>\n We had, up until this point, been sending emails every couple of days to each other, but there is no reply from Luigi for a couple of weeks.<\/em><\/p>\n So, what is the reason for no replies from Luigi?\u00a0\u00a0 Well as this is a fictitious example I am able to make up a number of different options, however, lets examine the sort of things that I might be thinking at this point.<\/p>\n Top of the list, almost certainly, is that I have not measured up to his expectations and he has decided to get someone else.\u00a0 Alternatively, I could simply assume that he has been very busy and not had time to read my, somewhat involved, presentation.\u00a0 Should I send another email asking what he thought of the presentation?\u00a0 Would that be seen as a bit ‘pushy’?\u00a0 Should I decide not to bother pursuing it any longer.<\/p>\n Let’s look at a few options as to why there has been no reply – Luigi has gone on leave and has yet to see the email; My email with the presentation was too large and was never delivered; Luigi has asked someone to translate the presentation for him so that he can understand the nuances and that person hasn’t yet managed to complete that task; and so we could go on.<\/p>\n I am in the position of trying to see inside Luigi’s mind to figure out whether or not to send another email – he may well be getting annoyed that he hasn’t yet received the presentation if a scenario that resulted in my original email remaining undelivered has transpired.\u00a0 He might be so disappointed by the standard of my work that he is embarrassed to contact me again!<\/p>\n So it goes on – and this is just one encounter out of many that we experience from day to day – although hopefully in most cases we will have a bit more to go on.\u00a0 I suspect that most people will not consider more than a couple of options and they will be predicated on their own character (and mental models) rather than that of the other person.\u00a0 I think that is often the source of arguments and disagreements.\u00a0 Jumping to conclusions.<\/p>\n We would do well to remember that relationships are complex and must be fully understood before we can make a success of reading each other’s thoughts – even then the task is near impossible to achieve with any consistency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Clearly something that should never be attempted – BUT – something we do all the time.\u00a0 I don’t expect we are very good at it either, so perhaps it would be better to find alternatives.\u00a0 In every relationship – personal or business or whatever – we often find ourselves in the position of trying to … Continue reading “Reading The Thoughts Of Others”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[103,119],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-philosophical","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":509,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions\/509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}