Why Smart People See Different Realities at Work

How to Turn Conflict Into a Better Business

Your product lead walks into the Monday meeting convinced the new AI feature can’t slip. Your COO walks in convinced the company can’t take another quarter of chaos.

The CFO already decided the whole thing will blow the budget.

Same company. Same numbers. Three completely different “realities”.

They argue, get nowhere, and walk out more convinced than ever that the other two “don’t get it”.

From the outside it looks like stubbornness or politics. From the inside it feels like truth.

Science has a more interesting explanation, and it gives you some very practical ways to defuse these clashes without watering down ambition.

Your brain doesn’t show you reality. It shows you a useful story.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman likes a slightly uncomfortable metaphor: your senses behave less like a window and more like the home screen on your phone. Evolution does not reward you for seeing what exists in full detail. It rewards you for seeing just enough to act effectively in your niche.

In other words:

Your brain hides almost everything.
It shows you icons (danger, opportunity, status, reward) that helped your ancestors survive.
Those icons feel like “the way things are”.

Psychologists call some of the side-effects cognitive biases. These patterns push people toward particular judgments, especially under pressure. Decades of research show how overconfidence, confirmation bias, and “biased perception” fuel conflict and misjudgment in negotiations and organisations.

Now add hierarchy, money, personal history, and a calendar full of deadlines. Each executive’s “interface” starts to diverge:

The product lead’s screen lights up around innovation and time-to-market.
The COO’s screen blinks red around operational risk and burnout.
The CFO’s interface highlights cashflow and runway.

None of them lies. None of them sees the whole board either.

Organisations don’t “have” a reality. They make one.

Organisational theorist Karl Weick uses a simple phrase: sensemaking. People inside a company do not passively receive reality. They construct it, together, as they try to answer questions like “What’s going on?”, “What matters here?”, and “Now what?”.

This process:

pulls together fragments of information
fits them into a story
and then uses that story to guide action

Over time, those stories harden into culture:

“We always ship on time.”
“Our market hates change.”
“Legal kills everything interesting.”

Each story acts like a lens. It selectively amplifies some signals and muffles others. That helps people coordinate quickly. It also sets you up for conflict when two lenses clash.

In that Monday meeting, you don’t just have three people with different opinions.
You have three sensemaking systems colliding.

So what do you do about it, beyond telling everyone to “play nice”?

Conflict often starts with how people see, not what they want.

When conflict shows up in business, people often reach straight for interests:

“Product wants this.”
“Finance wants that.”

Useful, but incomplete. The science of biased perception and conflict spirals suggests that fights escalate fastest when each side secretly thinks:

“We see the situation.

They see their ideology / department agenda / ego.”

That belief. “they’re biased, we’re objective”. creates a self-reinforcing loop:

You treat your interpretation as reality.
You treat their interpretation as politics or naïveté.
They feel misread and double down on their story.
Every move they make now looks like more evidence that they “don’t get it”.

Pretty soon, no one argues about the problem. They argue about who counts as rational.

The good news: you can break this loop without turning every disagreement into group therapy.

Let’s look at some concrete moves you can use this quarter.

Move 1: Turn clashing views into data, not drama.

Tool: The Three-Column Reality Map

Next time you feel a conflict brewing between senior people, don’t start with compromise.

Start with interfaces.

On a whiteboard or shared doc, draw three columns:

My Dashboard
Their Dashboard
Shared Reality We Need

Then run this simple script:

“For the next 10 minutes, let’s treat each person’s view as a dashboard, not the truth.
Column 1: What does your dashboard highlight as red, amber, green right now?
Column 2: What do you think their dashboard shows?
Column 3: Given both, what shared picture do we actually need to make a good decision?”

You get three benefits at once:

People feel heard, because they literally see their concerns on the board.
You expose hidden assumptions (“Marketing expects X, Finance assumes Y”).
You anchor the group on a constructed shared model, not on who “wins”.

This move comes straight out of sensemaking research: groups function better when they treat reality as something they co-author, rather than a prize one side gets to own.

Pro tip: Ask one “X-ray” question per person:

“What would have to happen over the next 6–12 months for your dashboard to show red?”
“What does ‘success’ concretely look like from your chair?”

That surfaces non-negotiables early, which reduces last-minute vetoes.

Move 2: Make it safe to disagree about what reality looks like.

You can’t get better maps if people fear punishment for saying, “Our map might mislead us.”

Harvard’s Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety for team climates where people feel able to speak up about problems, concerns, or mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. Her research shows that such teams learn faster and perform better, even though they report more errors — because they actually notice and discuss them.

To reduce destructive conflict and increase useful disagreement, you want psychological safety around perception itself.

Practical steps:

Normalize the idea of multiple realities
Use phrases like:
- “From my angle…”
- “On my dashboard…”
- “What does this look like from Operations’ world?”
This subtly frames each view as a slice, not a verdict.
Reward “map-checking”
When someone points out a blind spot or challenges a shared assumption, praise the move in front of others:
- “Thank you: that challenge helps us update the map before the market does.”
Over time this teaches people that questioning reality counts as part of their job, not a threat to leadership.
Set one clear safety rule for conflict
For example:
“We can attack ideas aggressively.
We never attack people’s competence or motives.”
When tempers rise, you now have a shared standard to point to, rather than a vague appeal to “be respectful”.

None of this softens accountability. You still enforce performance standards. You simply remove the extra tax that fear adds to honest disagreement.

Move 3: Design your organisation as a “reality lab”, rather than a reality court.

Most organisations treat conflicts as courtroom dramas:

Each side presents its version of reality.
Everyone argues over whose evidence carries more weight.
A senior person judges and hands down a verdict.

That structure invites defensive posture and status games.

Weick’s work on sensemaking suggests an alternative: treat the organisation as a lab where you run small experiments to test competing stories.

Instead of asking, “Who has the right view?”, you ask:

“What cheap test could we run this month that would tell us which view serves us better?”

Examples:

Sales thinks the new pricing will kill demand. Product thinks value justifies it.
→ Run the new pricing on one narrow segment for 30 days and watch behaviour, not opinions.
Operations believes stricter processes will save time. Engineers fear they will suffocate innovation.
→ Try the process with one project, with pre-agreed check-in points to adjust or roll back.

Framing conflicts as hypotheses to test shifts the conversation:

from ego to curiosity
from entrenched positions to shared experiments
from “Who loses?” to “What do we learn?”

Underneath, you still exercise hard judgment. You decide which tests to run, how much risk to tolerate, and when to call a direction. The culture around those decisions changes dramatically.

Move 4: Use bias science against the conflict spiral.

Management researchers have spent years studying how cognitive biases hurt decisions and performance, and how to mitigate them through “debiasing” and better choice architecture.

You don’t need a PhD to apply some of that work in conflict situations.

Try these three micro-interventions:

Name confirmation bias explicitly
Before a contentious discussion, say:
“We all tend to seek data that supports our current view and ignore what doesn’t. Let’s do one round where each person states at least one piece of evidence that goes against their preferred solution.”
This simple move interrupts the instinct to cherry-pick.
Separate “fast-brain” reactions from “slow-brain” judgments
Borrowing loosely from Kahneman’s System 1 / System 2 language, ask:
- “What did you feel the instant you heard this proposal?”
- “What do you think about it after five minutes of reflection?”
People often surprise themselves when they make that distinction aloud.
Force at least one alternative
Research into choice architecture shows that default options heavily bias decisions.
In a conflict, that default usually looks like: “My plan vs. your plan”.
Mandate a third option:
- “We cannot leave this room until we have outlined at least one hybrid or left-field alternative neither side initially proposed.”
That requirement pulls minds out of trench warfare and into problem-solving.

Move 5: Redesign the “field” that keeps creating the same fights.

If you keep seeing the same conflicts with slightly different faces, you probably face a structural pattern, not a set of difficult personalities.

Ask yourself:

What do our calendars reward?
Back-to-back status meetings with no deep work time practically guarantee that people come into conflict with half-baked thinking and a hair-trigger.
Where do incentives pull people apart?
If Sales targets volume, Finance targets margin, and Product targets NPS, you generate a three-way tug-of-war by design.
Which stories do we tell newcomers about “how things work here”?
Phrases like “nothing moves without legal” or “we always over-deliver for clients” quietly script people into certain conflicts long before they encounter the actual work.

Then treat these as design problems, not background noise.

Change one incentive so that at least one senior person “wins” by reducing conflict, not just by defending their turf.
Protect one afternoon a week as “no-meeting, think-deeply” time for the top team.
Rewrite one onboarding story to emphasise collaborative sensemaking instead of heroic firefighting.

These small structural tweaks change the field in which conflicts arise. Over time, they reduce the frequency and intensity of blow-ups far more than exhortations to “improve communication."

A quick conflict-navigation checklist for leaders.

You will still face hard trade-offs and people with clashing values. No framework deletes that. What you can do involves changing the way you meet those moments.

Before your next big argument, run through this list:

Have we mapped the dashboards?
- What does this situation look like from each key role’s interface?
Have we stated non-negotiables and success criteria out loud?
- What must not happen?
- What would concrete success look like, for each person?
Have we made it safe to question the map?
- When someone says “I think we’re missing something,” do they get curiosity or punishment?
Can we frame this as a test instead of a verdict?
- What experiment could we run that costs little and teaches a lot?
Which biases might play strongest here?
- How can we slow down just enough to stop them running the show?
What structural pattern might sit underneath this fight?
- Calendar, incentives, stories, reporting lines — what keeps producing this type of clash?

You won’t always have time to do all six. Even one or two can shift the tone of a meeting from “reality war” to “joint exploration”.

The quiet superpower: owning your own interface

The last move looks the simplest and the hardest.

When you feel that strong rush of “Obviously I see this correctly and they don’t”, pause just long enough to think:

“My brain currently shows me one very convincing interface.

What might I have not noticed yet?”

That single moment of humility often opens just enough space for a better question, a less defensive tone, or a genuinely new option.

Leaders who practice that habit consistently do not remove conflict from their organisations. They do something more useful:

They raise the quality of conflict.
They turn clashing realities into better maps, better experiments, and better outcomes.
They model a way of seeing that says, “We create reality here — together, on purpose.”

Busy CEOs rarely have time for long metaphysical debates. They do, however, live inside the science every day: biased perception, constructed reality, and the difference between a culture that fights over the “truth” and a culture that builds working truths together, then updates them as the world changes.

That difference often separates organisations that fracture under pressure from those that grow sharper, kinder, and more effective every time reality disagrees with them.

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