We look for simple ways to understand others. But the mess might be the answer. #
Posted August 3, 2026 [ Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
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Key points
- Every person's story is messy, including yours. Working together will always be a challenge.
- AI advice about work relationships carries the bias the humans taught: the idea that each story is simple.
- You can learn to accept the messy without understanding the whole story of every colleague.
Ask anyone the plot of Romeo & Juliet, and I'd bet you get a version of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, warring families tear them apart and ultimately both end up dead. Ok, maybe you get: they make terrible decisions, relying on third parties in the pre-digital age to pass vital messages between them, because of their warring families. And end up dead.
But that isn't how we hold stories, so we reduce them to something easier to carry. And so does AI, probably because it reflects an even simpler version than humans can hold. I personally love AI, but all of us have seen it reduce things from complexity to simplicity, sometimes to laughable effect. But we do have to consider its teacher.
As humans, we crave order. We see patterns and predictability, because we want to reduce risk. We learn that from an early age. The safe way home, the faster commute. It's deeply embedded in our survival instincts. Sometimes that requires overriding even rational signals. We trust people that we used to believe in longer than we should. We keep doing something that stopped working, because for so long it was the least risky move.
We're also incredibly self-interested. We suffer from confirmation bias. And as a result, we can be highly irrational. We're creating disorder while seeking it.
And the way humans simplify all that noise is to reduce the story to boy meets girl. No Rosaline (remember her?). No friar. No poor apothecary choices. Just a tale of star-crossed lovers destined to a fate beyond their control. It's a simple story. It's not Shakespeare's.
Working well with others requires accepting their messiness and ours #
At work, that need to simplify the stories is in overdrive. We need to reduce threats as quickly as possible. We size up colleagues and bosses and power structures. The stories not only are simplified; they’re biased. We assume the people who manage us are more capable technically. Or, that they are good at office politics. Either story could be true. Probably both.
Working with others will never be easy because we all suffer from the same conflicting tendencies. Everyone is messy because everyone is looking for order, while sometimes acting irrationally to serve our own interests. If you can accept that, you will likely find it easier, not harder, to work with others. If you stop and assess someone's behavior as "is this the safe move for them?" it starts to make sense. You may not like it – but you'll understand it.
Don't fight the messiness. It's critical to the true story. Next, don't forget people are trying to make sense of you, too. They are simplifying your story as they scan you for risk. Other people don't know everything you are carrying. They don't know how their behavior lands. You don't know how yours does.
That does not indicate a failure as a human. But it's so much noise for a species that uses simplicity as a hard-wired survival tactic. And it works until it doesn't. It is right to be wary of a person who reminds us of someone who has injured us in the past. It is a sign of maturity to begin to tell the difference between who has our best interests at heart and who is merely performing it. We all need colleagues we can rely on, whose judgment we trust, whose commitment matches our own. The stories we tell ourselves are not bad or wrong. They are incomplete and biased. And who has time to learn everyone's life story?
But you don't have to learn everyone's story – all you have to remember is that you don't know all of it. Nor they, yours. And as we all use AI more to help navigate work situations – don't forget your ill-formed understanding of all this messiness is distilled down to however much you tell AI, who further reduces it to a story that serves your self-interest.
CareerEssential Reads What could possibly go wrong?
Work relationships are more fragile by nature. Because work relationships are largely unchosen, and are high stakes, we are even more likely to shorthand the stories. Our experiences with colleagues are more one-dimensional. We "just" work together. We keep personal information more limited and sanitized. Friends and family are stronger relationships because they are forged tighter by sharing times of adversity and vulnerability.
Colleagues exist to help us enrich ourselves. And a negative outcome that we perceive as the fault of someone we have a transactional relationship with lands hard. You mess up, I'm worried about my job security (or bonus, or promotion). This fragile relationship impacts our ability to support ourselves – and our friends and family, which are the stronger relationships to begin with. Put simply, we trust colleagues less, because we care about other relationships more.
Working well with others is an ongoing process, not a to-do list #
We are not problems to be solved but paradoxes to be lived with. You aren't going to change the messiness. The term "organization" isn't accidental – it's a bunch of messiness assembled to be more productive than each of us can produce alone. That doesn't mean work relationships are doomed to fail. Or that they remain transactional: I have amazing, authentic friendships with people that I stopped working with years ago. The point is those relationships that fatigue you at work can't go away. They will likely exist everywhere you work. The skill to learn is to accept the whole messy, unknowable story. The one in your head, and the one in theirs. You don't have to know all of it – any more than you need to recite Shakespeare. You just have to remember the whole thing is a lot messier than the summary.