You will be able to use a set of questions to reconstruct how a situation looks from another person's position.
"Put yourself in their shoes" is advice almost everyone has heard and almost nobody is shown how to follow. When you are annoyed with someone, imagining their side tends to produce a version of them that is just you, in their chair, behaving badly. You end up more convinced you were right.
Lesson 4.1, Understanding someone is different from feeling what they feel, made the case that understanding is what most conflicts need. This lesson gives you a method for getting there on purpose, using three questions and a check. Siew Ling used it to prepare for her conversation with Ravi after the sprint review.
Everyone at work answers to someone and carries things you do not see from your desk. Ask what is pushing on the other person: their own manager, their targets, their team, their deadlines, and their life outside work.
This question works because most of us explain our own behaviour by our circumstances and other people's by their character. When you snap at a colleague, it is because you had a terrible morning. When they snap at you, it is because they are rude. Psychologists have studied this tendency for decades. Asking about pressures deliberately corrects for it.
Siew Ling's answers about Ravi: his team had worked two weekends that month. His director had asked him to cut overtime because of complaints from his engineers. He was also short one developer who had resigned and not been replaced. And he had a performance review coming up, where on-time delivery would count.
She had known about some of this. She had not put it together, or thought about how a promised date she had not checked with him would land on top of it.
Conflicts often come down to two people reasoning well from different information. Ask what the other person knows that you lack, and what you know that they lack.
From Ravi's side, he knew things about the system that Siew Ling did not. One of the client's scope changes, which sounded small to her, meant rebuilding part of the payment flow. He also knew how many hours his team really had left in the quarter.
From her side, she knew things he did not. The client had threatened to move to a competitor if they did not get a date. Her director had told her to commit to something that week. And the second scope change had come straight from the client's CEO, which made it hard to refuse.
Seen that way, both of them had made reasonable decisions from where they sat. Neither had shared enough with the other.
This question forces you to drop the villain version. Assume the other person is reasonable and decent, then ask what they might be trying to achieve. You do not have to believe the assumption completely. The point is to see what explanations appear when you start from there.
For Ravi, Siew Ling wrote: "A reasonable engineering lead in his position would be trying to protect his team from burning out, deliver work that does not break, and stop dates being promised without his input." Every one of those was a goal she could respect. Several were goals she shared.
The question also explains why he said it in the sprint review. A decent person who had raised the problem privately before, and been ignored, might decide that saying it in front of the director was the only way to be heard. When she checked her messages, she found he had flagged the risk in a chat two weeks earlier. She had replied with a thumbs up and moved on.
Everything above is still your guess. You built a better picture than before, but it is your picture. The final step is to test it with the other person, with a real question rather than a statement of what you have decided they think.
Good checking questions are open and specific. "What was going on for your team when the date was set?" "What would have needed to be different for that date to work?" "Is there anything about the scope changes I've missed?" Avoid questions that are really accusations, such as "Why didn't you tell me earlier?", and avoid announcing your conclusions: "I understand you're under pressure from your director" can sound presumptuous if it is wrong.
Siew Ling asked Ravi one question over coffee the next day: "When the client's second change came in, what did it actually mean for your team?" His answer took ten minutes and included two things she had not known. One was that the payment change also needed a security review, which had its own queue. The conversation that followed was calmer than either of them expected, because she was asking and listening rather than defending.
In hybrid and remote teams, the gaps in information are wider, because you miss the corridor conversations that would have filled them in. The three questions matter more when you mostly see a colleague as a name in a chat. A short video call, or a coffee on an office day, is usually a better place for the check than a message, because tone and follow-up questions come through.
In the activity below you answer the three questions for a disagreement you are in now, then ask the other person one question to test your answers.
Answer the three perspective questions for one current disagreement, then ask the other person one question to test your answers.
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