Few phrases do more work in an office than “it’s fine.”
Sometimes it is simply true – a small thing happened, it was handled, there is nothing more to say but “it’s fine” can also be doing the work of an entire conversation that hasn’t happened. The feedback that felt risky to give. The disagreement that got smoothed over rather than resolved. The deadline that is technically met but at a cost nobody has mentioned yet.
The difficulty is that “it’s fine” sounds identical in both cases. There is no tone of voice written into a WhatsApp message, no way to tell from the words alone whether “fine” means resolved or merely postponed.
This is not a reason to interrogate every “it’s fine” you hear as that would make trust impossible but it is worth noticing when “it’s fine” follows something that would normally warrant more for example a difficult meeting, a missed deadline, a tense exchange. In those moments, a simple follow-up “fine in what way?” or “anything I should know about?” costs very little and occasionally surfaces something that would otherwise have stayed buried until it was much harder to address.
This is one small example of something much larger. Every sentence we speak is a compressed version of something larger. Our minds can’t transmit every detail of an experience, so we filter and three filters do most of the work: deletion, generalisation, and distortion.
Deletion: What Got Left Out
Deletion is the process where parts of an experience are selectively filtered out in order to handle the present situation. This can be useful in a noisy meeting or deleting background chatter that helps you focus on the person in front of you. However, it can also remove information that someone else needed.
In the office, deletion shows up constantly. A team member returns from a client call and reports, “It went well.” This is technically true and almost entirely unhelpful. What went well? What was discussed? Were there any concerns raised, even minor ones? The deletion isn’t dishonest (the person genuinely experienced the call as going well) but the compressed version strips out everything you might need to know.
Another common example: “I sent you the file.” True. But which file, when, and did it include the revisions discussed in yesterday’s meeting? The sentence is complete grammatically. It is incomplete informationally.
The fix is not to demand more detail from everyone constantly as that would be exhausting. It is to develop a habit of asking specific, open questions when a decision depends on the missing information: “What specifically did the client say about the pricing?” “Which version of the file – the one with Tuesday’s changes to the SOPs?”
Generalisation: One Becomes All
Generalisation is the process by which we create categories or classes from single examples, organising specific experiences into broader patterns. This is, in many ways, how learning works. We generalise from a few experiences to form useful rules about the world but generalisations formed from limited data can become beliefs that shape behaviour long after the original evidence has been forgotten.
In a team setting, this often sounds like: “Marketing never gets back to us on time.” Perhaps this happened twice, six months ago, with a since-departed team member but the generalisation has hardened into “marketing never,” and now every interaction with that the remaining team members is approached with quiet resentment that nobody can quite explain.
Or: “Leadership doesn’t listen to feedback.” One proposal was declined, for reasons that were never properly communicated, and from that single data point an entire belief about how the organisation operates has formed, one that now shapes whether people bother raising ideas at all.
The useful move here is simple but often uncomfortable: when you hear an absolute “never, always, everyone, no one”, it is worth gently asking what specifically happened, and when. Not to dismiss the feeling, but to locate the actual evidence underneath the generalisation, where it can be examined and, if needed, updated.
Distortion: The Story We Tell About What Happened
Distortion occurs when information is twisted in a way that limits choice and creates problems that may not actually exist. One common form is what’s sometimes called mind reading for example claiming to know what someone else is thinking, feeling, or intending, with no direct evidence for it.
This is everywhere in office life. A manager doesn’t respond to an email within a few hours, and the recipient concludes: “They’re annoyed with me.” There may be no evidence for this at all and the manager might simply be in back-to-back meetings but the distortion becomes the operating reality for the rest of the day. The recipient might become more cautious, more guarded, less willing to raise the next issue, all in response to a story that was never confirmed.
Another common distortion in the workplace is the presupposition, an unspoken assumption embedded in a statement. “This project will fail” or “the client won’t understand” both carry assumptions that go unexamined. Spotting the presupposition means asking: what assumption is being made here, and is there any actual basis for it?
A related pattern is what’s called nominalisation eg turning an active, ongoing process into a fixed, static thing. Instead of describing how two people are currently interacting, someone might say “their relationship is broken” and treating something dynamic as though it were a permanent, unchangeable object.
“The team has no trust” sounds like a diagnosis of a fixed condition. In reality, trust is built through specific interactions over time which means it can also be rebuilt through specific interactions over time. The nominalisation obscures that possibility.
Why This Matters for Leaders
None of this means people are communicating badly, or that language should somehow capture everything. That would be impossible, and exhausting. The point is simpler: every sentence you hear in a meeting, every status update, every “it’s fine” or “they’re not happy” or “this always happens” is a compressed version of something larger. The compression is necessary but it is also where misunderstanding lives.
The most effective leaders develop a habit of noticing when a sentence might be hiding more than it’s showing and asking, with genuine curiosity rather than suspicion, what is underneath it. Not every sentence, of course, that would make every conversation an interrogation, but the ones that matter, the ones a decision rests on, the ones that carry an absolute or an assumption, the ones that sound like a fixed verdict rather than a description of something that happened.
The gap between what was said and what actually happened is where most workplace misunderstandings live and most of them are never caused by anyone lying. They are simply the ordinary cost of turning experience into language.