Just The Facts

Perhaps Joe Friday will forgive me if I just say:"Just the Facts, Ma'am." Often we combine our interpretations with the facts. Our interpretations include blame, notions of rightness and wrongness that may or may not be correct, and often incorporate a model of reality that has not been articulated so the listener doesn't understand what's going down.

This communications gap from combining models and facts can be dealt with by making the facts explicit and making the models explicit so that both can become targets of investigation and correction. If the facts don't conform with those desired, what are you going to do? You generally can't change facts by pretending they don't exist, so you have to change something else to change the facts. The models through which we interpret facts are also changeable.

He did that awful thing because he wants to spite me ... He did that thing is a fact (maybe) ... awful (thing) is a judgement about (thing) i.e. it is the wrong thing and not very good, at least ... ...because he wants to spite me -- is a comment about someone else's motivation, which is generally not demonstrable and often simply not true. I have students react sometimes to bad grades by saying that I don't like them ... usually it has nothing to do with whether or not I don't like them. Some of the time I like them better than most. In reality, I didn't like their work. We all tend to get confused between who and what we are and what we do. Just the facts helps to focus on what's really true and then build out from there. --R Schneider

EdwardDeBono developed the SixThinkingHats system for dealing with this kind of thing. -- DaveHarris

CategoryCommunication