What You See Is What You Get
We do not walk through the world perceiving neutral stimuli and then deciding what they mean. The meaning is already built into how we perceive them — shaped by experiences, beliefs, and interpretive habits operating largely below the level of conscious awareness. We see what we are already prepared to see.
Neuroscience has been documenting this for decades. The brain cannot possibly process every piece of information available in any given moment, so it filters — using what it already knows, expects, and values to determine what gets attended to and what doesn’t. The result is that two people in the same room, in the same meeting, in the same conversation, are having genuinely different experiences. Not because one of them is lying. Not because one of them is right and the other wrong. Because their respective filters are different.
A useful illustration of this is the “Invisible Gorilla” experiment, conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in 1999. Participants were tasked with watching a video and counting the number of passes made by one team of players. Midway through the video, someone in a gorilla costume walked directly into the center of the frame, beat its chest, and walked off. When asked afterward, roughly half of the participants had not noticed the gorilla at all. They were focused on counting passes. The gorilla was invisible — not because it wasn’t there, but because they weren’t prepared to see it.
This matters enormously in organizational conflict. When a leadership team fractures, or a cofounder relationship breaks down, or a succession process stalls — the people involved almost always have sincere, internally consistent accounts of what happened and why. Each account is shaped by the narrative structure that person has been operating out of, often for years. The founder who can’t let go isn’t experiencing himself as holding the company back. He is experiencing himself as the only person who fully understands what’s at stake. The successor who seems impatient is not experiencing herself as disrespectful. She is experiencing herself as underutilized and underestimated. Both are sincere. Both are incomplete.
This is why the first step in any engagement is to listen to each person separately — not to collect complaints, but to understand the interpretive frame each person is operating within. The stated problem and the actual problem are rarely the same. What looks like a communication breakdown is usually a collision of incompatible narratives, each of which feels like objective reality to the person holding it.
The insight this demands is a hard one: your version of what happened is not objective truth. Neither is mine. Neither is anyone else’s. Every account of a conflict is a subjective experience filtered through everything the person experiencing it has ever believed, feared, and wanted. That doesn’t make anyone’s experience invalid. It makes resolution a process of expanding awareness rather than determining who is right — which is almost always the wrong frame for the conversation.
Understanding that our perception is formed by the preexisting narrative we operate out of changes what good advisory work looks like. It means the first job is not to adjudicate between competing accounts. It is to help each person see the gorilla they have been walking past.
What you see is shaped entirely by how you have been prepared to see it. The work begins when that becomes real to the people in the room.