When you and a client remember a different deal, usually neither of you is lying. Words like urgent, soon or reasonable are not facts but agreements, and until someone says out loud what they mean, each side keeps its own version and assumes it is the obvious one.
Urgent is not a fact
The source gives this a short definition: “reality is basically agreement.” Reality, in plain words, is whatever two people see as existing. What both of them agree is real is real between them.
That sounds philosophical, but in a business it is very practical. Good service, a quick turnaround, urgent and reasonable are not things one side can measure alone. They are agreements between two people, and when the agreement was never spelled out, each side is certain its reading goes without saying.
Suppose you tell a customer you will send the file over as soon as possible. To you that means two days. To the customer it means today. By evening they are annoyed and you cannot see why. Nobody lied. There simply was no shared reality about that phrase.
Or take a builder who agrees with a client to clear up at the end of each working day. The builder means sweeping, the client means washing the floor. When the argument comes it sounds like a fight about character, about who is sloppy and who is fussy, and in fact it is a fight about a definition nobody set.
And the other way round: an owner whose price list states that every enquiry is answered within one working day. Nobody argues over that, since the agreement sits in writing from the start and both sides read it the same way.
They don't understand, or they don't agree
Plenty of owners say a client, a supplier or an employee simply does not understand. According to the booklet that is almost always the wrong diagnosis, so it is worth checking first whether the problem is about agreement and not about understanding at all.
The reason is simple. In the booklet, understanding is built from three things together: affinity, meaning how much two people like each other, reality, and communication. Another explanation only adds more communication. If what is missing is the agreement, you can explain ten times and it will not go in.
Suppose a client who does not understand your price. She understands it perfectly well. She just does not agree with it. Those are two different problems, and another explanation solves only one of them.
Or an owner who explained a new procedure to an employee four times without success. The fifth time he asked first what the employee thought of it, found out the employee was against it, and from there the explanation took two minutes.
When agreements wear away, nothing is left to stand on
There is a mechanism here worth knowing. The more points of disagreement pile up between two people, the thinner the reality between them becomes, until there is almost no common ground left.
It does not happen because the people changed. It happens because the agreements were worn away one at a time, and none of them was rebuilt.
Suppose two partners who began with a disagreement about one supplier. From there they moved to a disagreement about prices, and within a year they could not even agree on what their business sells. Each new argument rested on an old one that was never closed.
Or an owner and the bookkeeper who argued about the reporting method until every small technical question became a struggle. The technical question was not the problem. The problem was that nothing agreed was left between them to start from.
The quickest way to break a relationship
The source issues a sharp warning here: denying a person's reality is one of the quickest ways to knock them off balance. Denying someone's reality means telling them that what they saw or went through did not happen.
The example in the source is extreme on purpose. You walk into the office one morning and your desk is gone, and everyone you meet, from the secretary to the managing director, tells you with full confidence that the desk is right where it always was.
In a business this happens in small, everyday versions: I never said that, that is not what we agreed, you are exaggerating. Even when the sentence is true from where you stand, it wipes out what the other person experienced, and it always costs more than it saves.
Suppose a customer tells you that you promised Tuesday, and gets back that you never did. Even if that is accurate, the relationship takes more damage than the delay itself.
And the other way round: the same customer and the same claim, but the answer is that you can see why they read it that way, and that the two of you should look at what was written and settle what happens now. What they experienced was left standing, and the conversation stayed open. You can dispute a fact without erasing what someone else experienced. Those are two separate things.
What the booklet has on this
This chapter of the booklet has two exercises: a spot-it exercise and an analysis exercise. Before it, the booklet explains the three corners every relationship stands on. After it, it shows what a break looks like from the outside and how to tell which corner was cut.
Most arguments about what was agreed are not arguments about facts. They are arguments about a word each side read differently, and that nobody took the trouble to define.
The booklet is general knowledge about communication, not legal advice for a business dispute. The repair also depends on the other side.