Miguel had spent an entire weekend on the report, and he didn't understand why Aisha looked the way she did when she read it.
Not unhappy exactly. More like someone encountering a word in a language they'd assumed was their own. The report was thorough, methodical, documented. He'd been given considerable autonomy on the project and had exercised it carefully. He'd delivered exactly what had been asked for.
"It's good," she said. "I just — I'd expected something more strategic."
Strategic. He turned the word over. He hadn't been briefed on a strategic angle. The brief had said *quarterly summary* and he'd written a quarterly summary. Now he was learning, retroactively, that the expectation had been something different — something Aisha had apparently known and he was only now discovering he'd needed to know.
He went home that evening and tried to recall a conversation in which *strategic* had been mentioned. He couldn't find one. He looked at the brief again. It wasn't there.
He had the particular feeling of someone who has taken a test without being given the syllabus.
What about you?
Have you ever failed to meet an expectation that was never actually communicated to you — and been held responsible for the gap anyway?
He hadn't failed to meet her standards. He'd failed to meet standards that had never been shared with him. He was only now understanding those weren't the same thing.
He'd thought about it for a long time — the specific mechanics of how it had felt. Not incompetent, but somehow guilty of incompetence. As if the gap between what he'd produced and what she'd expected was evidence of a deficiency in him, rather than a failure of communication between them.
He raised it with her, eventually. Not defensively — as a genuine question. *When you say strategic, what would that have looked like?* She'd answered clearly, helpfully, and then said: *I suppose I assumed you'd know.*
He'd nodded. He'd thought about all the years of professional life in which he'd been navigating invisible rulebooks with the assumption that everyone else could read them and only he couldn't. He'd thought about how much of what he'd called failure was actually just this — the gap between someone's assumed common knowledge and his genuine not-knowing.
The next report, he asked for the brief in writing. He asked what *strategic* meant in this context. He asked what success would look like before he started rather than after he finished.
The report was excellent. She said so, specifically. He noted the difference.
What about you?
Have you ever changed a relationship simply by starting to ask what was expected rather than trying to guess?