One of the things I liked about working with computers was that, broadly speaking, they did what you told them to do.

Not necessarily what you wanted them to do, of course. That was often a completely different matter.

But if you gave a computer an instruction, it would interpret that instruction according to a reasonably well-defined set of rules. And if the result wasn’t what you expected, you could generally work backwards and figure out where things had gone wrong.

People aren’t quite so obliging.

We spend an enormous amount of our lives communicating with other people. Not just in our intimate relationships, but with colleagues, managers, friends, neighbours, shop assistants, and the person who has parked their car across our driveway.

And yet we’re remarkably good at misunderstanding one another.

Consider a fairly ordinary workplace exchange.

Someone asks, “Have you finished that piece of work yet?”

A perfectly reasonable question. They want to know whether the work is finished.

But the person being asked might hear something quite different.

“Why haven’t you finished it?”

“You’re taking too long.”

“I don’t think you’re doing your job properly.”

Or perhaps even, “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

None of those things was necessarily said, or even intended. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t heard.

In computing, we might call this a problem with the interface. The information sent isn’t necessarily the information received.

Except that, with people, the interface comes with a lifetime of experiences, expectations, insecurities, assumptions and feelings.

And everyone has a different one.

Some people prefer direct, explicit communication. They say what they mean, and expect others to do the same. Others rely more heavily on implication, tone, context and the things that aren’t actually said.

Neither approach is inherently better. But when two people have different expectations, misunderstandings can arise remarkably easily.

This is particularly interesting in the world of IT, where people may be very comfortable with precise, technical communication, but find the less explicit conventions of everyday social interaction rather more mysterious.

And, of course, the reverse can be true. Someone who communicates very directly may be perceived as rude or dismissive, even when they have no such intention.

The difficulty isn’t necessarily that either person is doing something wrong. They’re simply operating with different assumptions about how communication works.

And we don’t usually notice our own assumptions. We tend to assume that other people see things much as we do.

Which brings us to relationships.

We often think of relationships as the big ones: partners, family, close friends. But we’re in relationships with people all the time, and every one of those relationships involves a process of interpreting and responding to one another.

Sometimes those interpretations are accurate. Sometimes they’re wildly wrong.

And sometimes we become so convinced that we know what someone else means that we stop being curious about what they actually meant.

There’s another complication, too.

When a computer produces an unexpected result, it doesn’t generally take offence when you investigate.

People sometimes do.

If I say something that upsets you, I might try to explain that I didn’t mean it that way. And that explanation might be entirely truthful.

But it doesn’t necessarily change how you felt.

Equally, if you tell me that something I’ve said has hurt you, I might feel accused, misunderstood or unfairly criticised. I might become defensive, even though you were simply trying to explain your experience.

Before long, we’re no longer talking about the original issue. We’re talking about how we’re talking about it.

And that can get complicated very quickly.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate through counselling is that good communication isn’t simply about transmitting information accurately.

It’s also about being willing to discover how another person experiences the world.

That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, or abandoning our own perspective. It means recognising that their experience may be different from ours, and that this difference is worth understanding rather than correcting.

It also means allowing for the possibility that we haven’t understood them as well as we thought.

For someone who spent thirty years working with logical systems, that can be quite a shift.

With computers, I generally wanted to eliminate ambiguity.

With people, I’ve learned that sometimes the most useful thing is to become a little more comfortable with it.

And perhaps to ask one more question before deciding that I already know the answer.