Truthy enough...

I've been involved in a lot of conversation about conversations lately. It kind of intrigues me that I don't freak out and assume someone is a terrible ill-intentioned liar, anymore, when I hear that two different things were (reportedly) said by the same person at different times to different people, or when I get two reports of the same events and they don't quite line up.

I've legitimately had all these thoughts in the last few weeks, each one about something different:

Clearly the two of them remember that conversation differently.

She may have meant two slightly different things in those two conversations.

Intentions could easily have evolved between those times.

I've seen that person forget things before.

She probably felt more comfortable in one of those environments, where the stakes were lower.

Whatever was said then, it's more important that we agree now on what to do next.

It's funny because I've also had a lot of talks about, uh, me not being so easygoing about life and people and events. But what about this? This is a dramatic change from a younger version of me. What looks to me today like a resigned acknowledgement of psychology would have looked like a willful disregard of obvious conspiracy just a few years ago. Which the people in the conversations above don't know, of course, because they didn't know me then.

I think we can legitimately thank corporate life, especially the last 3 years of being a manager, for this particular thing. At work there are a whole lot of reasons to not tell people things (often great reasons, like not exposing them to legal liability), and backchannel communication can save sanity even with message distortion or omissions, and there are high-pressure environments where no way is someone going to say what they're thinking and then low-pressure ones where they vent, and things change. Sometimes during the course of a conversation.

Giving myself credit here, because the world sure isn't about to.