Method
"The worst distance between two people is a misunderstanding."
We are built to assume. We fill the gaps in what we see with a story, accept the story as true and act on it. At work that habit quietly manufactures unfairness, erodes trust and starts conflicts that never needed to happen.
Why we assume and what it costs
The Palo Alto school drew a useful line here. A fact is what the senses record, first-order reality. An assumption is the meaning we lay over it, second-order reality (Watzlawick, carried into coaching by Françoise Kourilsky). Teams fight about the second while believing they are fighting about the first.
The confusion creeps in as we make sense of things, across perception, interpretation and evaluation. Blur those levels and you get the familiar traps: vague facts, generalisations, assumptions and judgements, each one a small misreading waiting to harden.
What the Fact Finder does
The Fact Finder is a one-page tool that defuses the trap with a neutral question. It helps you hear the assumption behind a statement and ask for the fact underneath, so the other person can say what they actually mean.
Used well, it shortens exchanges, improves the information a decision rests on and raises psychological safety, because a genuine clarifying question signals interest rather than attack. It works in two moves.
- Hear. Name the trap you are hearing.
- Ask. Use one of the suggested open, neutral questions to bring the conversation back to facts and experience.
What it looks like in practice
Focus on one trap a day. After a week or two, the clarifying question becomes automatic and the conversations that used to escalate start to resolve.
This week. The next time a meeting tenses up, replace your first reaction with one neutral question about the facts. Download the Team Alignment Toolkit, free.
The Fact Finder builds on the systemic-communication tradition, from the NLP meta-model through Alain Cayrol's Language Compass to Françoise Kourilsky's work. Illustrations by Séverine Assous, illustrissimo.fr.