How Do I Know What They Really Mean?

27 Jul

Spoiler: “interesting” has never once meant interesting.

A Dutch project lead once asked me, with genuine bewilderment: “I asked my British colleague for feedback. He said my proposal was very brave. So why did they kill it the next morning?”

Because brave, in that particular dialect of English, means: you are about to walk off a cliff and I am too polite to grab your arm.

The Dutchman heard a compliment. The Brit had sent a fire alarm. Both went home convinced the other one was the communication problem.

Nobody lied. Nobody was vague. Nobody was even slightly incompetent. And a proposal still died overnight, along with six weeks of work, while its author went home pleased. That is the ordinary, expensive shape of this problem: it does not feel like a misunderstanding at the time. It feels like a nice conversation.

The short version, if you are between meetings

You cannot fix this by memorising fifty national stereotypes. Stereotypes are a rough indicator at best, and a liability at worst. Three moves do the actual work:

Calibrate the person, not the passport. Meaning lives in how far someone has moved from their own normal — not from yours.
Listen for the modifiers, not the message. The verdict word is stable across borders. The little words around it carry the dynamite.
Check what arrived. Out loud. “Let me check what I’m taking from this …” Ten seconds, slightly clunky, embarrassingly effective.

And when in doubt, ask the question almost nobody dares to ask because it sounds too simple: “When you say interesting — what kind of interesting?”

Three audits below let you run all of this on your own conversations this week. The rest of the article is why it works.

You are not the good listener you think you are

You are a fast translator. That is not the same thing, and the speed is the problem.

Nobody hands you meaning. They hand you packaging. Words are a box. The meaning gets packed in by the sender’s culture — national, corporate, departmental, generational — and unpacked by yours. You never hear what people say. You hear your translation of it. And most of us translate with supreme confidence and the wrong dictionary.

The moment the words land, the dictionary snaps shut. Meaning assigned. Verdict filed. Next topic. Real listening starts exactly where your certainty ends — which is precisely where most of us stop.

Move 1: Calibrate the person, not the passport

This is Erin Meyer’s central point in The Culture Map, and the single most useful idea in intercultural work: cultures sit on scales, not in boxes.

Nobody simply “is direct.” They are only more or less direct than you. So stop asking “what do Germans mean by that?” and start asking “what does this person’s normal sound like?”

If someone who habitually wraps criticism in three layers of gift paper suddenly says “perhaps we might revisit the numbers” — the numbers are on fire. If your resident bulldozer says the exact same sentence, it is small talk.

Meaning lives in the deviation from their baseline. Not from yours.

Audit 1: The baseline map (fifteen minutes, once per person)

Pick the three people whose messages you most often have to guess at. For each one, answer three questions from memory or from your inbox:

How do they sound when they genuinely love something? That is the top of their range.
How do they sound when they disagree with somebody who is not you? That is their real disagreement register, minus the politeness they extend to you.
What does their message look like when everything is fine? Length, warmth, speed of reply. That is the flat line.

Now you have a range. From here on, you are not reading the words. You are reading the distance travelled from that flat line. A one-line reply from someone who writes paragraphs is a siren. The same one-line reply from someone who always writes one line is Tuesday.

Move 2: Listen for the modifiers, not the message

Upgraders and downgraders are the tell.

Some cultures, and some individuals, upgrade to show engagement: totally, absolutely, completely unacceptable. Others downgrade to show respect: a bit, perhaps, you might consider, I wonder whether.

The content word is remarkably stable across borders. It is the little words that carry the dynamite. “A bit disappointing” from a downgrader and “an absolute disaster” from an upgrader can describe the exact same slide deck. Same verdict. Different wrapping.

Read the wrapping wrong and you will fix the wrong problem — or none at all.

Audit 2: The modifier strip (two minutes, on any real message)

Take the last piece of feedback you received that you were not entirely sure about. Then:

Circle every word that is not the verdict. Every hedge, every intensifier, every qualifier: quite, slightly, honestly, obviously, just, perhaps, really, a bit.
Delete the verdict and read only what is left. “Quite … perhaps … a little … at some point” reads very differently from “really … obviously … completely … now.”
Compare that against their baseline from Audit 1. Not against how you would have phrased it. That comparison is the one that has been misleading you.

The modifiers are not decoration around the message. In a great many conversations, the modifiers are the message.

And the mirror version, which is less comfortable

Run the same strip on something you sent last week. Your normal is somebody else’s foreign dialect. The colleague you privately find blunt is, at this exact moment, telling someone that you never say what you actually think. Both of you are right, and both of you are reading a dictionary that was printed somewhere else.

Move 3: Check what arrived. Out loud.

Regular readers know this is the hill I will die on: communication is not transmission, it is translation. So the only reliable move is to compare translations.

“Let me check what I’m taking from this: you’re fine with the direction, but the timeline worries you?”

Ten seconds. It feels slightly clunky. And it is embarrassingly effective, because the gap between what they said and what you repeat back is the misunderstanding — caught live, while it still costs one sentence instead of one quarter.

Audit 3: Three sentences to keep within reach

To test a verdict: “Let me check what I’m taking from this … is that roughly right?”
To test the strength of a concern: “Is this a fix-it-before-Friday problem, or a keep-an-eye-on-it problem?”
To test whether a decision actually exists: “What would you tell your team we agreed just now?”

Notice that none of the three can be answered with yes. That is the entire design. “Does that make sense?” is the most polite method ever invented for guaranteeing a yes you cannot use.

The one question almost nobody dares to ask

“When you say interesting — what kind of interesting?”

You will feel foolish for two seconds. You will feel considerably more foolish presenting version four of a concept that was dead on arrival at version one.

It works on almost everything. When you say soon. When you say we have some concerns. When you say it’s fine. When you say brave.

What to do with all of this on Monday

Map three baselines. The three people you most often have to guess at. Fifteen minutes.
Strip the modifiers on one live message. Preferably one you have been quietly worrying about.
Use one checking sentence per meeting. One is enough. Any more and you sound like a hostage negotiator.
Ask the what-kind-of question once. Note what comes back. It is rarely what you had already filed.
Then run the mirror. Ask one trusted colleague what you sound like when you are unhappy. Brace slightly.

The trade secret behind “intercultural expertise”

It was never really about nations.

Engineering and marketing are further apart than the Netherlands and Britain. So are the person who joined last month and the person who has been here nineteen years. So are the two of you in this conversation, right now, using words you both assume mean the same thing.

Every conversation is a border crossing, and the meaning gets declared at customs.

The best communicators are not the ones who speak the most clearly. They are the ones who check most often what actually arrived.

Questions I get asked about this

How do I know when someone is being polite rather than critical? Compare the sentence with how that same person normally speaks, not with how you would have said it. Politeness is a style. Criticism is a deviation. When a habitual softener suddenly softens even further, that is not politeness — that is the alarm.

What do British colleagues mean by “very brave” or “interesting”? In understated registers, both usually signal serious doubt that is being delivered gently to protect the relationship. But do not learn the phrase — learn the pattern. The same speaker will have twenty other ways of doing exactly the same thing, and no phrasebook contains them all.

Is this not just paying more attention? Attention is not the constraint. Speed is. Most of us assign a meaning within a second of the words landing, and then spend the rest of the conversation defending it. The audits above exist to insert a pause before the dictionary snaps shut.

Does asking for clarification make me look slow? It makes you look expensive to mislead. Ten seconds of checking has never damaged anyone’s reputation as badly as one confidently delivered fourth version of a rejected idea.

Do cultural differences still matter if my whole team speaks English? A shared language conceals the problem rather than solving it. Everyone is fluent, so everyone assumes the meaning arrived intact. Fluency raises the confidence and leaves the dictionaries exactly where they were.

If your team keeps agreeing and then doing different things Most teams do not need more communication. They need a way to check what arrived — and the confidence to ask before it is expensive.

Katja Schleicher speaks and trains on communication, storytelling and intercultural (mis)understanding in English, German and Dutch. Bookings: office@interview-training.eu · interview-training.eu · @MediaCoaching

Kate Mallows